I was driving around my hometown, the little roads winding through the woods. I was on my way home. I thought about how I often have dreams about how to get home, which roads to take and where to cut through the woods. And I thought about how it always seems impossible to cut through the woods in these dreams.

A young filmmaker had created a movie called “Kid K.” The title character was a miniature child, a few inches tall but living in the normal size world. He had a miniature car he drove around to deliver miniature newspapers. Somehow it was recognized as a thing of great beauty and poignancy. I was gathered in a house, a kind of vacation cabin in the woods, with a group of people, maybe high school classmates at a reunion. There was a competition going on. It soon devolved into bitter feuding. The goal was to create something, and to prevent others from doing so. We broke into teams and mine entered a side room. Steel shutters appeared and closed automatically over the door and a large window into the main living space. It seemed like I’d conjured them out of my imagination, which of course I had. It now felt like we were in a horror movie. Creepy, supernatural things were happening, objects flying around, a sense of imminent darkness and danger. My team was preparing a tribute movie to “Kid K.” It seemed like the right thing to do.

We were watching Mark Mothersbaugh play a solo gig at a very small venue upstate, maybe the dining room of a bed and breakfast. His name wasn’t his actual name in the dream, it was Phil I think, but it was that guy from Devo. He and his band played a set of four songs, each one long and distinctive and represented in a row abstract visual panels, maybe projected on the wall or maybe in my mind. When the set was over he declared he’d play them again in reverse order, and the panels were reversed. He did something else to them too, played them slower, or played them country, or something. S., J. and I were in an adjoining room but we could still hear. I went out into the main space to see. The crowd was mostly kids, as at a birthday party, and they were dancing in circles as kids might do. A few parents ringed the space. When the set was over everybody cleared out except the band taking down their gear. I looked for Phil. He approached me. I felt awkward to be prone in bed, in my bathrobe, as I was in real life. But he sat beside me, apparently not noticing. I was proud that here he was, talking to me. He addressed me with some familiarity, as though he’d seen me before and expected me to be there. He spoke sadly of a woman who’d just died, a musician. He assumed I knew who she was but I’d never heard her name, and felt foolish. I nodded solemnly. I wanted to tell Phil I’d seen him do that weird show at the New Music University—it was actually NYU, a few years ago—but I forgot his name was Phil. Was it Phil? It wouldn’t seem right to tell this anecdote without addressing him by name. We walked in silence through the room and I left to rejoin my family.

In my dream it was finally over. Microsoft called me and Jim in for a meeting in which they revealed that the last remaining chatbot was to go offline. It took place on a different floor of the building we worked in, though we were an independent company. Nothing had been said clearly or directly. Jim had to follow the senior person in attendance out into the hallway and mill around with her and others to glean the truth. As we walked away he told me and I said, “So this is it, no more platform, no more protocol,” almost excitedly. There was a thrill in encountering the brutal end of it all. Any trace of our technology evaporated by the man. I lost Jim on the way to the elevator bank. When I got in I went to the wrong floor and it opened to a restaurant. Someone called my name, as though my table was ready, but I knew it was for someone else. I flew into an internal dialog with familiar voices about how weird it is to hear your name and know it isn’t you.

My friend who went to rehab and I just saw for the first time in years in real life was the coach of a major international soccer team. They’d won a place in the Euro finals, but their top two players were injured, or unavailable for some other reason. I sat with him to talk. He asked me if I spoke German. “Nur ein bisschen,” I replied. And we exchanged a few words in German and that was the end.

I was going to the Super Bowl, and it was at the Link. I was late but someone held up three fingers to the crowd coming in. I understood that to mean the Eagles were up by a field goal. When I got to my seat I saw that the score was actually 4-2. I went to get a beer. The vendor was way high up in the stands. A woman was serving and a few fans milled around. I was wearing my Harold Carmichael jersey and a jacket. The jacket was kind of falling off my shoulders. The woman looked at me and said I should put my jacket more on. “Did she just call me a moron?” I asked the people around me. They sort of laughed. When I returned to my seat we were losing 12-4. We had the ball near the goal line but we fumbled. We kept trying to pick it up but player after player let it slip through his hands or out from under his body. M. R. and C. W. were at the game. I saw them in a section below me. I could hear them talking about how they needed to place a bet for their rich friend. I tried to text M. I kept trying to press the correct keys on my phone but it was impossible.

I hung out with Jerry Garcia at some house with people I knew milling around, a kind of communal place of the type we all used to live in. He made a reference to the Kinks at one point and I tried to engage him about them, saying they really were great, weren’t they? He responded distractedly, and I felt foolish. I was afraid I was boring him. I wondered whether he might like to play some tunes on guitars, wondered in fact whether that’s the only thing he might want to do. I never did get around to asking him.