it's the old civic center circus - i don't know how they fit this dark, bowl-shaped auditorium in the civic center - there's a ringmaster of course, shouting in between snippets of bears, elephants, tigers, rings of fire, showers of popcorn, hordes of children with the odd parent or guardian like a dandelion poking out a field of grass - there's all the expected circus stuff

the circus segues into a coloring book, with trademarked images of looney toon/disney characters, also with a circus theme - the coloring book becomes something like a crossword puzzle, which is superimposed on the circus scene which has become a tall ramshackle wooden building with many rooms that wraps, thematically and structurally, to the contours of the crossword puzzle, it's not a grid but rather, it's got lines crisscrossing a field of dim purple twilight sky - the solving of the clues involves keenly observing the circus scene overlaid on the house/crossword and figuring out what certain events transpired, and what the narrative of the circus is overall - this necessitates skipping around the timeline, forward and back through the events of the circus/cartoon - there are cartoon characters, but the scenes have a live-action look

i'm still trying to solve the last few clues, there's some frustration, but also exhiliration, that i'm almost there, i'll get it with just a bit more strain, and what will i get if i get all the clues? something pretty cool, no doubt - but i'm whisked away from this scene because i need to be in a planetarium - i feel microscopic though, a miniature being next to a giant chair next to an imax dome screen - it's got the same dark/flashy feel as the civic center circus but less crowded - there are massive looney tune characters floating above me in 3d projection, but they're more than projections, they're real somehow, and they're a family of mooninites, like the aqua teen characters, there's a massive Inignot, and several more members of his "family" who look like variations - they're floating with zen austerity, and i wish they would acknowledge me, but they're on some other level - i wonder where Er is? there's a salvia feel to this part too, with all of existence to one side of me being an infinitely regressing taffy-chasm - the mooninite family is constructed of light particles forming a dense laser lattice - i'm awed at the spectacle

then i'm in a room in the crossword puzzle building - i didn't realize the building was so big that it could contain a whole disparate section with its own office-like theme - this room has a "being in a school-room during summer vacation" sort of feel - there's a post-secondary physics teacher here in the room with me and no one else - actually, the physics teacher is in the next room, which is an office next to the classroom that i'm in - there's a flourescent yellow glow and sterile tables and chairs - i'm at a desk - this is my first day on the job, before school starts, and i'd better hurry up and get to it, and prepare some sort of a lesson plan for the students that will be filling this room in a week or two - because i'm not at all prepared to present material i don't even know myself

the physics teacher comes into the classroom, because he knows he needs to actually teach me the math before i can teach it to anyone else - there's a cold and impersonal feel to this - i'm in a vast system and i'm going to get ground by the gears, probably - no, don't take that attitude, pay attention, time is of the essence, i tell myself - the teacher opens a textbook and quickly breezes through several math problems by way of demonstration - i nod, pretending to understand, but i don't have a clue, i don't see a way into this - i can't talk to this guy...

interesting how transcribing a dream destroys my ability to recall it with any fidelity afterward - as soon as i commit words to describing a part of it, that part becomes terminally ensnared by the words, and the memory is compromised - still there, but twisted thereafter, distorted from the purity of the cerebral mockup that i call "pure", because it has a certain integrity, but is also a distortion of the actual dream itself, if such a thing exists