Remember: this is only a dream...

Sam and I go to a film screening on campus at UCLA. We go the boxoffice, buy 2 tickets without saying anything, then when we get to the door, just as I'm about to give the guy my ticket, I look down at my ticket and see that it costs $375. Sam's ticket costs $275. I ask the guy at the door about the hundred dollar difference in price between our tickets and why they cost so much to begin with. He just takes our tickets, tears them, and silently ushers us into the theater.

Inside is a giant square screen but no theater seats. People are just congregating on what looks like a dance floor. The theater itself is a giant cube-shaped room.

I hear the doors close behind us and just we join the large group of people in the middle of the room, the lights go off.

Pitch black.

I can feel Sam clenching my hand. Suddenly my feet slowly lift off the ground. Still holding hands in the dark, Sam and I float weightlessly upward. When the lights come back on we're floating in the middle of the room with everyone else. I can feel a faint sensation as if the room is spinning along an invisible axis that extends out the center of the screen down the middle of the room, but the room isn't visibly moving, though it's difficult to tell which direction is up anymore.

Stools pop out of the floor, ceiling and walls, and one by one, people fly off in each direction and take a seat. Somehow I lose Sam in the crowd and I'm the last person floating in the middle by myself. I look at each wall for Sam, but I don't she her anywhere.

The lights dim so scramble downward, or at least in the direction that feels like down in my current orientation, and I take a seat on an empty stool.

The film begins as abstract shapes and colors flash across the square screen. The images are strange and yet totally familiar. The green and red shifting blobs somehow read as people talking and though there is no audio, I can hear and understand their conversation.

I remember that I still haven't found Sam so I turn away from the screen and look around me for her. She's still nowhere in sight so I launch myself off the stool, float to the left adjacent wall, and sit on an empty stool. Sam is not among the people seated on this wall either.

The absract images on the screen are rotated 90 degrees, but they don't seem tilted at all. They still read as recognizable images. In fact, it appears like a different alternate angle of the same dialog.

I watch a bit of the film and then float myself to the next wall to look for Sam. I still can't find her so I continue floating in a clockwise direction, each time taking a stool, scanning the surrounding seats, watching a bit of the film, and then moving on.

After several full unsuccessful rotations, other people in the audience begin to migrate from one wall of stools to another. Some people float clockwise, some counterclockwise, some diagonally across the middle of the theater. I stay seated and watch people float around above me for a while. Then I float into the center of the room, hoping to catch a glimpse of Sam as she passes, but I still can't find her.

Suddenly I realize that red blob is no longer on screen, and the green blog appears to be distraught, as if he's lost something.

Then I woke up.

Even though Sam was laying next to me in bed, I still had a lingering feeling of loniless and abandonment, as if she was still lost in my dream.