I think I was Alan Alda and I was in a small dark room, probably 10 feet by 6 feet. In the center of this room was a low bed with an army-green blanket over it. The walls were a dark greyish brown sort of panelling, and only the light from a lamp on the desk at the end of the room kept us from being in total darkness. The green blanket along with the impersonal decoration of the room led me to believe that I was playing the part of Hawkeye from M*A*S*H.

I had walked in on my dad, who was not my dad in real life but a short Jewish man with glasses and a receding hairline, and a hitman of similar stature. They were discussing something unknown to me, but based on what was to come, I can make a good guess as to what it was. I was told (I don't remember if this came from my dad character or from the hitman) that my dad had been a hitman for many years, but failing health was causing him to get out of the business. The original plan was for this other hitman to kill him right there, but since I had walked in on this mischief, the plans were going to change. The hitman decided to let my dad live so long that I take his place as a hitman and fill the void that he would be leaving. If I refused, the hitman would kill us both. So I accepted.

My dad left as the training was to begin. The hitman used a gun that looked a lot like a gatling gun from the 20's (which I believe I have dreamt about before) only instead of shooting bullets, it shot little dartlike projections. These things were a lot like thumb-picks for guitars, where they consisted of a brass cylinder that had a sort of blade on one side so that when they were fired at someone/something, the blad would go in and the cylinder would be left sticking out of the surface. The hitman showed me this by shooting three "bullets" into the wall. He told me to pluck them out quickly though so that he could re-use them. I did something to upset him, I guess, because then he decided he was going to kill me.

The shooting was noisy enough to warrant the attention of some hospital orderlies who, at that moment, burst into the room. I remember that one of them was the drummer from Ocean Colour Scene and the other was the bassist from The Spin Doctors. They immediately mistook the hitman to be my patient (this recognition of me as doctor also leads me to believe that I was Hawkeye, and not civilian Alan Alda) and left. The hitman then raised his weapon but stopped when he told me that he forgot to put on his hood. Apparently he always wears his hood when he shoots people. Standard procedure. It was sitting in a plastic shopping bag on the chair next to me. I reached down to get it when the orderlies burst into the room again.

They asked me if I'd be needing a fume hood for when I gassed the patient but then stopped when they saw the hood that I was holding in my hand. I am quite sure that his execution hood looked nothing like a fume hood but they were content and left. I could hear some talking in the background, and I realized this was the part in Trainspotting (which doesn't really happen) where Begbie and his grandpa come to the bar looking for someone (it was actually more like a scene in Face). I couldn't _see_ anything, but from what I was hearing, I could _visualize_ the action. I was getting kind of nervous because I knew there was going to be a fight. Lucky for me, when I looked back up, the hitman was packing his gun away and muttering about "too much hassle..." As he snatched the hood from me on his way out, he told me to do something about that stereo.

I hadn't noticed it before then, but "The 13th" by The Cure was playing softly in the background but it was cutting out. I started re-wiring the stereo so that it sat on the desk beneath the bunkbed. It became apparent at this time that either the room had changed or I was in a different room altogether. This new room resembled my sister Erica's bedroom. I was having trouble gettnig speaker wires to go through the ladder and around various other things and it was getting pretty frustrating.

I could hear the sounds from Trainspotting picking up again, but this time I knew right away that it was just Brian Hunt (last year's roommate) watching it down the hall with the volume way up. Apparently I was living in the dorms during my sophomore year at UNL, the year that never happened, and Brian lived on my floor. It was _really_ loud, and I had the stereo in my room fixed, so I went to go see if he could turn it down a little.

As it turned out, it wasn't Brian, but it was a bunch of drunk British girls in the tv lounge watching it. Dan, my next-door neighbor, and his girlfriend Michelle were also in there. I stayed for a while and watched it, but then I walked out into this long hallway where my mom was. She told me that I really should give Ewan McGregor a call. She reminded me that he and I used to be such good friends and now we hardly speak to each other, so why couldn't I just call him? I told her that he and I were NOT good friends, we had one class together in second grade, that does NOT make us good friends. She said but his mother says he always talks about you and what good friends you were and finally I just said FINE, I'll call Ewan McGregor and talk about old times. She was content.

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