I dreamt that I was hiking with a group of people. They were annoying. Lisa from the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills might have been there (she’s actually my favorite, yes I have a favorite) and of course she was wearing nonsensible shoes and a too-tight skirt, while walking along granite trails you find in the Sierras. Everyone was bitching. There was some indication of a fire, which I said I wanted nothing to do with. I left them behind, hiking up and down rolling hills, back to the trailhead.
I and one friend were far down the path when a roaring fireball, Backdraft style, was coming my way, and I was sure I was going die. I looked left, up a manzanita-covered hill, no escape. I looked right, and there was an abandoned, black, HDPE culvert, sitting askew in a swamp. I ran for it, climbed inside, curled myself into a ball in the musty puddle that remained at the bottle of the plastic pipe. My friend came with me. The fire roared over our heads, which we’d covered as if we were in an earthquake drill. The pulse of heat and smoke left us asthmatically gasping for air. We hiked out, and got to a town where no one cared. I went looking for my dog.













