Weird Dream Channel

I'm walking along a plaza, returning from visiting a friend. Coming from the opposite direction I see my cousin Aaron. I shout out to him as we pass, he doesn't recognize me, and keeps walking. Then he turns around, stares for a moment then I tell him my name, and he smiles and comes over and shakes my hand, gives me a hug.

Now we're walking together, he takes me to this place which is all tubes and very futuristic, like we've just walked into a sci-fi city a couple of hundred years in the future. Aaron asks me what I would really like to do and I say "Fly". He guides me to a place where he says "they" will find just the right job for me. The way I understand it is this is a place in the far future. there is no going back home, and somehow Aaron is one of the people who runs this city. He goes away, and suddenly I am flying through this maze of tubes, like being on BART without a car around me.

Soon I am gliding down a pneumatic shaft, gently coming to a stop at the bottom, into what looks something between a classroom and an office. Several men who appear to be in their 20's and 30's are there, and they are discussing what would be the best fit for me. One of them gets this "Eureka!" look on his face, and I know as the monorail pulls up at a station in the background that they are going to train me to be a monorail driver.

This dream is so rooted in the past couple of days.

Saturday, when I went for my doctor's appointment, they had me fill out a questionnaire which had a lot of inane questions cooked up by some junior shrink. One of them was "What would you like to do which you have never been able to do before?". They meant, of course, after I lose 100 lbs, what would I like to do which physically I have not been able to do as a fat slob. They wanted an answer like "go rock climbing" or "win the Tour de France". I wrote "Fly".

On the 4th, at the fireworks show, for the second year in a row I saw my cousin Aaron and his wife sitting about 50 feet away to our left. For reasons I won't go into here, I did not go say hello. I know he did not see me. In fact, the last time he recognized me was in 1997, before I moved to Seattle. He has no idea that I have been back in the Bay Area for 5 years. I've seen him many times, but he hasn't recognized me, and I haven't bothered to re-introduce myself. Some day I'll tell that story here, but not now.

And the monorail is probably from my recent trip to SSF where I took the train and the bus, but now wish I had taken BART.