Infaminix

Though, in reality, my children are of different ages and in different grades, in my dream, they have a single teacher. I am speaking with her and she tells me she has written their homework on the board. I search the classroom but don't find anything written on any of the boards. When I turn around to ask her what she meant, she is gone.

I wander out of the classroom and find the "school" is a gigantic sprawling complex of buildings, too big to be a children's school campus, but more like an office park or a mall. I wander in one of the buildings to find an old colleague (who will remain nameless for reasons that will become obvious) sitting forlorn and sad in a chair in a waiting room. Doctors in white coats are walking around.

I sit down and ask him why he looks so sad. He tells me he's just been informed that he is infected with a deadly blood born illness called infaminix. Now that I'm awake, I realize that infaminix is not an actual disease, but in my dream I nod gravely and my heart sinks, because I know there is no cure for infaminix and that he will be dead within a few months at the most.

He begs me to give him a second opinion. When I point out that I'm not a doctor, he tries to convince me that I have enough expertise to render an opinion. To placate him, I agree. I stroll into a door and find a lab. I put on latex gloves and insert a slide containing a sample of his blood under one of the lab's light microscopes and peer at it for a few moments. Right away, I see the crystaline cage structures that are characteristic of the last stages of infaminix infection. I dispose of the slides, strip off the gloves, and meet my friend again in the waiting room.

I inform him that, as far as I can tell, he is certainly infected with infaminix and that it is in the final stages. From what I know, he will be dead within weeks, maybe even hours.

"That's worse than what the doctors said!" he yells at me.

"Well, I'm not a doctor...whatever they told you is probably more correct."

He says, sarcastically, "MORE CORRECT? It's either correct or it isn't!" He storms off, with a murderous rage.

I shrug my shoulders. I'm sad for him, but what can I do? So I wander out of the waiting room and find myself in a large, grandly decorated interior, like a movie theater lobby. There's a pool table in one corner, and a teacher is sitting on the edge of the table talking to a student. I wander over to him to ask where the parking lot is...I seem to have gotten lost. I see he's chatting with the student about something in his hand, which I soon discover is a revolver. He removes the cylinder from the gun and I see bullets inserted in three of the chambers. With measured anger, I tell him that he shouldn't have firearms around children. Sheepishly, as if he has just realized the impropriety of what he's doing, he agrees with me and puts the gun away. I send the child out of the room.

Then I see that this man has a list. On the list are about twenty names, with mine as the last. He takes out a small pair of scissors and snips off my name. Then he reassembles the revolver and points it at me. I realize that the colleague has hired him to kill me for the crime of confirming his doctors' opinion. I gather that the other names on the list must be his doctors and perhaps some other people he has grudges against.

Like in a 1930s ganster film, I snatch the revolver from his hand and pistol whip him to the ground, unconscious. I turn to run and there is a Robert De Niro look-alike with another gun trained on me. This is a small, almost delicate silver gun with a pointlessly long barrel. I snatch it from his hands. I fire two rounds at him, and he dodges them like a character in The Matrix. Then click...click...click. No more bullets. I feel utterly stupid.

We stand and face each other. He smiles superciliously at me, with triumph, and indicates with his eyes that there is someone standing behind me. I don't react at first, but finally I turn around and see the colleague with the first man's gun in his hands. He is about twenty feet away and, realizing that it's my only chance, I rush him with all my strength, bullets whizzing past my ears, hoping only that I can somehow snatch the gun from him and win the upper hand again.

I realize that I am probably soon to be dead or at the very least seriously injured. With just a few more feet to reach him, I leap...

Then I wake up.