Prompt: Describe a dream that serves as a metaphor for the current concerns/anxieties of the dreamer. Usually when I drink too much I have the loose-teeth dream or the one where I'm being chased by the cops, but tonight's an elaborate exception. It's the geisha-and-sake dream again, but variations seem to be conspiring to eclipse the traditional theme. It starts out normally enough: I'm sitting on the bamboo floor of a simple hut by the beach, white paper walls surround me, in front of me a full moon the size of a manhole cover casts shimmerring silver ripples into the onyx expanse of the warm Pacific Ocean. A lantern set in the sand ouside glows amber and dim, issuing forth faint shadows to duck and run through the ferns and tropical palms bending low to the sultry tide. A coarse clay vessel of milky rice wine attends a saucer near my right knee, and a girl in a subdued silk kimono rubs my shoulders, a sublime amalgamation of Halle Berry, that quiet girl in my humanities class, and "City of Industry"-era Lucy Liu. She leans forward as I pour a little liquor, a strand of jet hair falling seductively into her eyes as she whispers a melifluous tone. "I'm sorry?" "I said you've got a phone call, handsome." "Phone call? Are you sure?" I grapple with this incongruity as I lower my drink. "Sure I'm sure, sweetheart, the guy asked for you by name." With a delicate gesture, she hands off the reciever to a payphone I hadn't previously noticed against the wall. The ear piece is a little busted, rattling through lower registers and buzzing intermittently. "Dad?" To my left, a vacuum tube against the opposite wall deposits a transfer cylinder with a shudderring thump, and the girl shuffles over on her knees to retrieve it. "Just called to chat, huh? I'm kind of in the middle of something now..." I'm eyeing her apprehensively as she removes the canister, twisting off the cap and extracting a reem of what appears to be small black squares of paper litterred with white; frozen terminal shells with petulant blinking cursors. Correspondance from the outside world. "It's for you." She hands me the stack as I cradle the phone on my shoulder and another tube of email drops in the basket behind her with a thud. All contract orders from John. Probably over a hundred of them pepperred liberally with words like "estimate", "glitch", and "additional feature". On the phone, Dad's saying something about not spending enough time with them: Why don't I ever call, drop by more often, it would mean a lot to my mother. I swivel in place to deposit the messages where I'll remember them later and knock over a pile of textbooks that couldn't have been there a second ago. U.S. History and Mandarin; a collection of opposing social viewpoints and analysis; some Platonic dialogs and Dante's Divine Comedy. They spill into the corners and set off a couple dogs somewhere outside that bray obstreperously in brainless panic. A car alarm drones from farther down the beach, keeping time to a sudden and sychopated symphony of frenetic disorder. I look vainly around for the geisha as I attempt to put things back together, sweeping helpless little arcs on my telephonic leash, shovelling books, change orders, and half-finished term-papers into heterogeneous stacks, and ignoring where possible the cylinders lining up in the vacuum tube; the menacing whine the occulusion sets up in the pump. Deep beneath the hastily sorted heap of work, another phone rings. Lunging in it's direction, I knock the sake over and jam my hand on a drive axel that's burried in the pile with assorted tools. I try quickly to remove it before the torn CV boot drools grease over my paper on westward expansion, but I'm a couple seconds too late. As I hurl the linkage vindictively out into the sand, the girl reappears at my elbow. "Phone." "Yeah, I hear you. I'm just not really sure where it--" "Is anyone gonna get that?" "What? I said I don't--" "I'm in the fucking shower, dammit! Somebody else get the phone!" About this time, the scene snaps up like a spring-loaded shade, and a new day greets me like a glove greets a prize-fighter's teeth.