I'm at a peace march in Dallas, outside the Republican Party convention. The march winds through downtown. Cops swarm and slowly start intimidating & at last openly harassing us.

A friend introduces me to "the perfect girl for you." She DOES feel just right! But I can't talk much. Sealed off inside. Even five years after leaving a batterer, apparently, I'm still not ready. Think "what a waste!"

A small alley--part of a sheltered neighborhood where they don't realize how bad it's getting out there. Meet some radical kids whose talk suggests they've never gotten bruises over their protests.

Except one--the pacifist hippie girl Sunshine, from Little Darlings (Cynthia Nixon) who finally had to punch out the camp bully. I'm attracted to her; feel ashamed cuz "she's too young" then realize that part of my attraction isn't just that she's gorgeous, but that she's kept her ideals after facing what they can cost. She won't be bullied out of them.

Compared to the mental & moral children filling the Republican convention halls, and their pet cops, clubbing people in the streets... and the "adult" voters who applaud Reagan's clique... suddenly she looks pretty mature.

I leave the peace march at last. Feel they're not doing enough to stop the police state I see growing.

The cops tail me. A whole squad seems assigned to keep an eye on me. Their leader threatens me repeatedly. Finally he harasses me in an alley and it escalates into a fistfight. I knock him out. I leave him leaned against the alley wall and go find a phone and call it in. Say who I am, warn I'm a reporter, say I won't stand for any more police harassment, and millions will hear about it if they try.

The cops arrive and find him with his throat torn out. There have been a series of such murders in Dallas since well before the Convention. Looks like a werewolf... their only alternate theory has been a cult of human cannibals trying to play on fears of werewolves. They'd love to blame me for this, but I wasn't in town during the earlier attacks.

And yet I learn one witness did spot a gigantic wolf in a Dallas alley. If it's a werewolf, it can shift, pass as human at will. If stuck in wolf shape, they'd have caught him this last time. Clever, patient, and... he's not FEEDING on them. Just killing witnesses. Why stick around? What's he up to?

Well, there's one unpleasant possibility, and as the killings cluster around me, it gets more likely. Dallas cops stalking me keep getting killed because they're in his way, as he stalks his TRUE prey. Their prey, too.

Me.

Maybe I should be grateful for the Dallas pigs. They may biased, vicious, and stupid... but little blue piggies make fine wolf bait.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Dallas, convention, killings: 1: the GOP is holding its convention there. 2: the rival "lone wolf" and "conspiracy" theories on Kennedy's assassination in Dallas.
• Sunshine from Little Darlings:
  1. Sunshine faced a violent bully and found pacifist negotiation didn't work because the bully had no real beef with her; she was just a handy victim the bully used to prove "I can hurt any of you witnesses like this!" Scapegoating builds cliques. Sunshine at last concluded that with a bully like that you have to punish the bully despite personal cost. She did. Just as I do here.
  2. Sunshine's childish body & adult mentality: met her exact opposite today in our food co-op. A flirt in tiny red shorts and red high heels kept bending over, baring her ass, and then talked with me, baring her mind. Or lack of one. I've never MET such a dimwit. So disappointing! An anti-Sunshine.
• Cops: Habit? Repression? Or literal cops? But it's been years since any cops have hassled me.
• Gmork the werewolf: a literal lone-wolf character in Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. Gmork gets hired to stalk the hero, Atreyu. Finds, fights and bites him and won't let go... but his jaw-grip inadvertently keeps Atreyu from falling to his death! Unintentionally saves his prey's life--just as the mysterious wolf probably does in my dream.
• Cops harass me, I fight back: beats me. I rarely dream of cops, or so violently, or with this rough, black humor. Why this, why now?

Dallas, protests, police brutality: the San Francisco Chronicle runs a savage column: "Joe Bob at the Convention". As the GOP renominates Ronald Reagan in Dallas, Joe Bob's in the streets with protestors. He says the state of siege in town is brutal, but nothing new. The cops already ran Dallas. They casually, routinely beat blacks and the poor, and kill protestors... with the full blessing of those on high.

They deserve to be eaten by werewolves.

NEXT MORNING

I'm biking to a meeting at the library where I work. Have to hurry, be on time. A few blocks from my house, I see a wild, beautiful shape in the sky--a feathery complex of cirrus clouds to the south. I coast down the quiet back street staring over the rooftops at it. Then I get an extraordinary feeling of danger. I'm being watched by unfriendly eyes. But the street's empty! Still, I can't stop myself from trying to ward off this invisible malice by radiating innocence and smiling idiotically and tilting my head up and gawking in blatant wonder at the cloud.

A few blocks later, the cops pull me over. They tell me someone called the Neighborhood Watch number to report a suspicious man circling the block, peering into houses.

I'm furious. I was commuting to work. In a straight line. Not looking into houses. As I bike by every day, same time, same route. I'm a neighbor. And on top of it all, my faceless rat-fink neighbor picks TODAY to lie about me, when I have to be at work soon. The cops question me, run my ID, taking half an hour before at LAST letting me go. I'm twenty minutes late for my meeting.

My boss sneers. Lazy Chris. Never on time.

DECADES LATER

When I first built the World Dream Bank I was biased toward epic, exotic dreams--I favored fully developed stories showing dreamwork was more magical, beautiful and fun than people think.

But now I'm going through old journals and finding a lot of apparently predictive & telepathic dreams like this--not very storylike, plots unresolved, but evidence that the waking world is rather more magical than people think. Too.

Just to be fair, I checked my journal for other encounters with cops. After all, if I dreamt of police persecution two days before it happened but I got hassled every week, the dream looks less predictive. So how unusual was this encounter? As I thought, I'd had no interactions at all with cops for five years before this dream and three years after it. It anticipated what really was a rare event.

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