I was at oxy. not for a reunion or anything, but because there was something I had to do. I was going to play in a basketball tournament and compete for a spot on the team. There were many professional players competing, including former pros that had been brought down to the development league like Reggie Miller, Scottie Pippen (who had grown 3 inches since his retierment), Isaiah Thomas, and Patrick Ewing. Coach Goodrich was happy to see me and gave me a tour of the new state-of-the-art facilities they had at oxy which included a high-tech weightroom and a locker room that was a mix between a balneario (spa) and a warm-up facility in which you would run laps to warm up while various showers would spray you as you ran by (kind of like a drive-thru car wash). I was doing well in the tryouts but prior to the final day of pickup I ran into some old classmates while waiting out in front of the gym. They consisted of fraternity members, cross-country runners and soccer players. We all shared some old stories and in fact played some music together with the instruments there for use at the entrance to the gym. I was very excited about playing an amplified bass for the 1st time in a long time. But the nature of the meeting with my old friends was surely athletic, as everyone was wearing running/soccer/work-out clothes. Then a big event that everyone was there to participate in took place which consisted of grinding corn cobs with your legs and ass as we did at least 2 laps around the entire campus. The way this worked was: the corn cobs were in the shape and size of soccer balls and even basketballs. The participants would sit on top of the corn cobs and balance while they rolled forward so that their weight pushing down on the corn into the pavement of the street would grind the corn into cornmeal. This was a well-known tradition and many of the participants took it very seriously, and even though I wasn't of the same ethnicity as the majority of the participants (latino), I was honored to participate even if I only had time to do the final lap around campus. I think that I managed to be included because I insisted on speaking spanish. And everyone was honored all around about participating in this momentous occasion. However, while participating and being aware that I might miss the basketball final tryout, I now became fully aware that I would have to carry out my mission. This mission might be the strangest aspect of the dream. I had come to the philosophical conclusion that I was to kill the neighbor lady and her toddler. Despite my misgivings, I understood that it was my mission and couldn't be avoided. (I know, straight out of Crime & Punishment, which I haven't read or thought about in at least 3 years). So while I was participating in the corn-grinding, I methodically planned out how I was going to carry out the mission. I needed a knife and gloves and then I realized I needed a way to cover myself to keep blood from getting on me which would have to be discarded after the crime. I would simply enter the house through the use of a believable, friendly story and once inside cut their throats. However, I was gradually realizing that there was no way I could get away with it. Leaving behind crucial articles would allow the existence of infallible evidence pointing to me, the culprit. However, I seemed not to be deterred, because I understood that it was my mission and if I had to be convicted of the crime, so be it. I felt regret about this. I also felt a great deal of regret when I first met the neighbor lady and her toddler because they were good people. However, I almost had the mindset of a suicide bomber or something, because despite how much I disliked the mission, I knew it had to be done. The philosophical justification of the mission was that it was necessary "to REALLY feel", in other words, to experience sensations that up until then I hadn't experienced in my life. That life consisted of a great deal of pain which had to be felt. Thus the mission. I came to these philosophical conclusions while doing the lap around campus and doing quite well at the corn-grinding. At one point I slipped and scraped a part of my body on a spare part of a car that was quite sharp (it was some metallic casing or engine part that was very painful to touch). It had been somewhat underneath a parked car and when I landed on it and injured myself and was in very close proximity to the ground, my belief in the mission became more and more concrete. This was exactly the type of sensation that the mission was meant to impart. My resolution to carry out the mission became practically determined. After completing the corn-grinding event, I slipped away unnoticed to carry out the mission. The neighbor lady was away or in another room (not sure about this), and so I commenced on the first part of the mission which consisted of breaking the individual glass panes of the front door with my face (specifically my nose which was quite hard and capable of breaking glass). There were probably around 50 glass panes about the size of 2 inches by 2 inches in a square grid, and I started breaking them in order from the top. I recognized the importance of breaking all the panes, because it allowed me to truly feel what I was supposed to feel. Namely heightened sensations, i.e. pain. And I was proud of actually carrying out my mission. However, I still felt regret about the fact that I would be killing the innocent lady and her child, so part of me (in a deep, far-hidden-away consciousness that wasn't required to be recognized) I believe that I was breaking each of the glass panes with the hope that it would prevent me from bringing the mission to its final conclusion (i.e. by stalling for time). My unwillingness to become (fully) aware of this as a method of stalling was part of me being as responsible as possible at achieving my mission, and having doubts in the mission was something I didn't/couldn't allow. At some point, I was forced to return to the campus gym for what reason I'm not sure. Perhaps to obtain something else necessary for the mission and when I returned to the neighbor's house, the neighbor lady had a close friend who also had a child over to visit which raised the number of potential victims to 4. I refer to her as the "neighbor lady" only because she lived next to the campus, and not because she was a neighbor of mine. It was important for the mission that she was a complete stranger. Although, to the external observer to the dream (e.g. sleeping Nick) the neighbor lady greatly resembled one of several of my very good friends who have recently had a child (possibly Leona, but I'm not sure about this), but to the 1st person of the dream, she was a complete stranger. At around this time, the mission was abandoned with an openly honest sense of relief.
In the second dream or second part of the dream as I did not notice any break between these two parts, I was now traveling to meet Chad in a strange 3rd world country. We were to meet with Castro and Bushey, but had no precise meeting time or place or any means of contacting them. I don't know what language was spoken there, but I was fairly adept at communicating with the locals. I bought food from street vendors (even bargaining in a currency that I wasn't familiar with), and succeeded in investigating the whereabouts of Bushey and Castro via interviews with the locals. I had made a friend at the youth hostel where Chad and I were staying at. I found out that Bushey and Castro had tickets and were planning on attending a bull fight at 7, which was in 10 or 15 minutes. Chad and I had just managed to obtain tickets to another show (at a great bargain), but there were still tickets left for the bull fight and we could get them and find Castro and Bushey there. Chad was hesitant because of what seemed to be a pretty depressed mood that he was in. I only wondered how could this all be true, because I knew that Castro hated bull-fighting, and in my typical fashion of trying to solve problems I thought that we could give the 2 tickets that Chad and I had to Castro and Chad since they weren't down for the bull fight and Bushey and I could attend the bull fight, but it was going to be tricky since we didn't know if they were even going to be there at all, where we could intercept them, and in any case we needed to hurry. Chad had gone back to the hostel. I was informed (in a way that I do not know) that Mar and Lua had died the previous weekend in Madrid during a skiing trip that they had taken with Chad during a couple days after they had stayed the weekend with us in Madrid and we had left them the keys to our apartment when we left for a trip (presumably to America where I had the Oxy home-coming experience). I was very very effected by the news and made my way back to meet Chad and try and console him. The deaths were indeed very real and Chad had been keeping it a secret because he was unable to publicly deal with the loss. In fact, his story had been that Mar and Lua were on their way to meet us there. We mourned deeply. (it really felt like they had died. I went through the feelings I suppose I would have if this had indeed happened.) It turned out that on the skiing trip in which they were teaching Lua to ski for the first time (Chad was snowboarding and Mar was skiing and Lua had tiny skis with a strap connecting the tips of the skis together and would go down immediately in front of Mar), Chad went off a jump in the jump park and landed on the downslope and stopped and turned to wait, but Mar and Lua never made it. What supposedly happened was they too went off the jump, but naturally at the speed necessary for a 2 year-old learning to ski and landed in deep powder and couldn't be found. The bodies hadn't been recovered. I was unsure about delving deeper into the story, because I dearly did not want to show incredulousness or question my grieving friend. But, I did manage to ask if it was possible that they were still alive and just lost. This was a possibility but it had been over 7 days already.
This was the horrifying end of my dream.
Sorry to everyone who was involved (especially me).
