I had a vivid dream cycle last night, and though I can’t remember it all, one part of it is still with me.

I was in a movie theater waiting for the show to begin. Behind me was a man and a woman. I thought I did not know them but when I turned to look, the man greeted me by name and I remembered that he had been to the law school for the environmental conference. This person was real, not just a dream character; his visage had oddly and inexplicably transfixed me during the conference.

Between two previews there was a sound from the projection booth, and it appeared that something had gone wrong. The movie began but it did not start at the beginning. After the first reel ended the screen went dark. Angered, I stood up and looked into the projection booth to see a curly haired man with thick glasses attempting to repair the projector. I shouted at him loudly, startling the other theater patrons.

When the movie continued, it was very small, filling up only a tiny portion of the screen. Though nobody else seemed to mind, I got up to leave, only to find myself in a hallway between the theater from which I had come and the open door of another. A uniformed usher asked me what was wrong and I screamed, “It looks like Quicktime!”

Rushing down the dark red stairwell it was too late by the time I realized that I had gone down one flight too many and found myself in the basement lair of the broken down film palace. A black woman rushed from a doorway and I asked here where the box office was. She pointed cursorily and hurried on, but I could no longer find my way back.