What no one realized was that I had the cryonic tube on my left index finger. It was very small, the size of a bottle cap, but it weighed as much a car full of people, because that is what it was. Most people wouldn't notice it on my finger because I wore it like a ring, but in fact my finger had been pierced through the bone. That is how the cryonic tube stayed attached to my finger, because as a NASA employee I was bionic and my bones were freakishly strong.

After the television reporters left I went into my apartment, which for some reason was perfectly round and had windows instead of walls, and I took the cryonic tube full of people off my index finger. I had to unscrew it. It was like removing a screw that is secured with a bolt. Or is it a nut? I don't know.

Anyway, I thought to myself "No one knows I'm doing this, interfering with NASA's project, and I'll get caught, but I'm sending these people back to earth." So after I unscrewed the tube from my finger I dropped it onto my desk. There was a huge thud and the desk shattered. The tube tore through the floor, opening up a path back to earth for the people frozen in the tube. I'd had experience in being thrown back to earth from within a cryonic environment, and I knew how the people would feel as they regained consciousness and saw themselves falling into the Pacific Ocean.

In real life I don't know much about cryonics, except that Walt Disney was not actually frozen cryonically, but as the tube of people plunged back to earth I woke up feeling that I'd just screwed these people, who because I threw them back to earth would have lifelong conditions similar to being born with birth defects. And that was if they even survived the fall into the ocean.

I don't know what it means, that dream, and I don't care to analyze since dream analysis never amounts to more than remembering what I'd watched on TV before going to sleep. But it's funny how the state of mind that you wake up in sticks with you the whole day, or until you go back to sleep, which is what I did 2 hours later.

In college I was terrified to hear descriptions of what people do when they sleep. From what I was told sleep was like dying, but the body was defiantly alive and performed all kinds of rigor-esque defenses to prevent itself from breaking its own neck in the throes of a wild dream.

In January, 1987, I experimented with sleep deprivation, going about 78 hours on three separate occasions without sleep. I wanted to see flying automobiles and evaporating buildings, and I wanted to hear what people were really saying in the hidden languages that lie just 1/36^th of a hydrogen atom behind the things we are allowed to hear during so-called normal conscious life. I'd been intrigued by stories that my roommate told about how his mother, a nurse, had gone 89 hours without sleep and panicked when she saw some trees turn into Texaco stations and some bushes turn into Johnny Carson. And I'd also been intrigued by my own experience in high school, after 36 or so hours without sleep. It was during a hurricane evacuation in which we were the only people driving into the storm and thousands upon thousands of other Floridians following evacuation orders were driving the other way. I saw those vehicles on the opposite side of Interstate 4 lift off and in an orderly procession drive into the sky. It was that miraculously transient state between being asleep and being awake, and at times I've wished I could always live like that. Until, as happened this morning, I wake up still connected to that death-like state of self-defense that the body slips into when it just threw several of its cryonically frozen neighbors into the ocean.