I dreamed I was being stalked by a mass-murderer who could read and control minds. I finally got him trapped in one of the rooms in the basement of the building I worked in. It was a combination office building and hotel. First I lured him into room 14, then locked the door between us, but room 14 had another entrance. I finally got him cornered and locked into room 9. I tried to convince everyone how dangerous he was, and that we needed to call the police. At first they agreed with me, but within an hour, he'd convinced them to forget all that and give him a job helping manage our computer networks. At least my boss agreed he had to stay locked in room 9.
I realized that all of this had made me late for the HCB concert. I made it on stage just after the first movement of Holst's Suite in E flat for Military Band. I finished out the concert okay, but afterwards one of my drummer friends came up and said he needed to talk to me about something. He said that calmly enough, but then he started laying into me about how I needed to stop dimming the lights in that hall we played, because the percussion couldn't see their music. I tried to explain calmly that I'd never touched the light switches, and had no idea how to work them, and hadn't he noticed I'd come in after the concert had started? He yelled at me some more, then stalked off, leaving me in tears.
I say in the Rice student center for a while, watching a news story on television and trying to calm down. A local newscaster was doing an interview with an amateur baseball team that had an unconventional way of dealing with poor sportsmanship. When the opposing pitcher had yelled a curse word at the ump, they'd all charged the mound to give him a group hug. After showing the footage, though, the newscaster started going on and on about how a guy had yelled at him for dimming some lights during a concert, and the baseball players he was talking to started giving each other confused looks.
When the news story was over, I realized I needed to change out of my pajamas, so I went to Meyer Lounge, because that was empty. I tried to hurry while my best friend stood watch and teased me about how tongue-tied I'd gotten around that cute guy we'd seen. That cute guy was actually the mass murdering stalker, who was, honestly, pretty cute. My friend told me I was no longer allowed to get so embarrassed and hot-faced. About that time I realized I'd packed two bras but no underpants, and people started coming into the room. I rushed through a French window into a little walled courtyard, hoping I would be less visible there as I tried to pull on my jeans and shirt, but I was in a panic, because nowhere in the courtyard was hidden from the windows back into the building.
I finally managed to get dressed, and went to sit with friends to watch a news broadcast of an awful murder suicide. Three young men had been building a rig to lift themselves into the air using helium balloons. The broadcast was aired as a projected three dimensional hologram, into the sky above us where we sat in North Lot. We watched as the rig rose into the sky.
Their contraption comprised a seating area for two people connected by a long tether to a canopy of balloons that was also lifting a secondary platoform with an auxilliary set of balloons. As we watched, the perpetrator began to climb up along the canopy tether, tilting his friend sideways. He pulled out a knife and began to saw at the tether above the joint to the secondary rig, so that both would fall.
Suddenly I realized that it was the mass murdering stalker. I closed my eyes, unable to watch as the rigs plummeted to earth from hundreds of feet up. Somehow I knew that in spite of the reports, the stalker had survived and was still out there. Then I woke up.
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