As a followup to my having related that the dream follows the real-life narrative, last night I dreamt that I was aswim in the licentiousness of urban Cambodia, with vacant-eyed perspiring young girls wearing red shifts and nothing else entreating me into dark doorways, the erotic foreshadowing the necrotic. Where did that come? For some reason, before bed, I chose to watch “City of Ghosts,” in which Matt Dillon finds himself largely in the situation described above.

But I still have no idea why I would dream I was mistaken for the bassist of Metallica.

This is five minutes long, but it is a shiver-inducing five minutes. The final scene of last week’s episode of “Walking Dead,” in which our hero finds himself trapped beneath a tank while hordes of crawling undead grasp at him, has nothing on this true-life scene of formerly dating young conservatives debating their personal affection for the cruel impacts of “Republican Fight Club” while the moderator chuckles nervously over one affront after another. It would be too much to say that these people represent some large segment of the people now romping into office, but that they represent even themselves, even some small aspect of humanity, is disturbing enough.

Every night, I have vivid dreams and am able to remember them when I awaken. (There’s a term for having that ability:  sleep disorder.) Usually, what I dream is related to what I was thinking about when I fall asleep. But for two nights in a row, I’ve dreamed that I’ve been making music with famous people, even though that hasn’t been on my mind at all.

On Thursday night, I dreamt that Paul McCartney and I were hanging around in my bedroom recording some songs. I should say, I’m not a particular fan of Mr. McCartney’s music. Yes, I like The Beatles. But I haven’t given his solo career much thought. I own two Beatles CDs, and that’s if you count the version of “Let It Be” that McCartney took it upon himself to revise a few years ago. (Theoretically, Ringo was consulted, but what was he going to say? Except for, “Thanks for the call.”) In my dream, Paul is playing guitar and I’m working the studio controls much as I think Brian Eno does:  using his own instrument (the studio) to improve the song while co-writing it. In the alternate universes of my dreams, even when the people are familiar, the logic of the situation falters. So in this case, while I’m making music with Sir Paul, it gradually occurs to me that, hey, this guy was in the Beatles. (Whereas in our world, this would be our very first thought.) And since he was in the Beatles, maybe I might like to have my picture with them. And then I realize that if I can get my picture with Ringo, I’ll have my picture with half the Beatles. But then I realize that I don’t care if I have my picture with Ringo, and actually I don’t care if I have it with Paul, either. If John were still around, that would be good, or if I could get photographed with John and Paul, and all the while I’m thinking this I’m trying to get the song I’m doing with Paul McCartney, the most celebrated and successful songwriter of all time, to sound less… saccharine. Then I wake up.

The next night, I dreamt that my lamp grew taller. I woke up at 3:08 a.m. (yes, I always check the time) to see that my nightstand lamp, which ordinarily peaks at only about 18″ in height, is suddenly far far taller — the lampshade now towers four or five feet over my head. I realize this can’t be so, and that I’m still dreaming. So I sit up and look at it. And look at it. I really stare at it. Because I’m sure that at some point my vision will return to normal and the lamp will scale down to its correct size, because I know it cannot have grown while I’m asleep. But it never shrinks to respectability, no matter how hard I look at it, so I roll over and go back to sleep. This is unfortunately common for me:  being awake, but still seeing what I was seeing in the dream. For 47 years, I saw some very unpleasant things, even while I was still awake.  But hypnosis seems to have solved that; now the night terrors are gone, and while I don’t enjoy seeing things that can’t be there, at least now they’re less ominous.

When I gave up on the lamp returning to scale, and fell back asleep, I dreamt that the band Metallica had confused me for their bassist.

Much as with Mr. McCartney, Metallica is not a favorite of mine. I have no Metallica CDs. And I enjoy no Metallica music. If you like them, that’s fine with me. Enjoy. But I do not. My dislike for their music carries over into the dream, where the other three band members keep insisting I’m their bassist, and would I quit fooling around, because they’re getting ready to go on. I think they’re playing some bizarre practical joke, and I’m wondering why I’m even at their concert, which seems to be playing in a small basement club. No matter how hard I try to convince them that I’m not their bassist, and how could I be since I don’t know their songs and don’t even know the names of the people in the band who are insisting that I play with them, they keep walking me along backstage toward the band platform. Along the way we pass a mirror and they almost have me convinced that I must be their bassist, but I look into the mirror and I can see damn well that I’m him and not me. But when they look they see him, or at least that’s what they say. So finally I give up. I figure:  “You know what? It’s playing bass and it’s Metallica. How hard could it be?” I was in a band once where the bass lines in one of our songs went like this:  C, C, C-C-C. C, C, C-C-C. Even I could play that. And maybe, hey, I’ll get to participate in the hedonistic after party. So I say yeah, sure, hand it over, give me that bass guitar. I get the bass and I go out on stage and I start to try to play — and that’s when I notice that the strings are made out of cloth, like wide flat shoelaces. And now my bandmates are all staring at me because I’m not playing anything, and I’m not playing anything because the guitar won’t play anything. That’s when I woke up.

I’m not a morning person, and I never have been. Would you be, if every morning you woke up from something like this?

This morning I called my 84-year-old mother on the East Coast to say hello. I told her I was calling to ask her what she went as for Halloween. She laughed and said she’d gone as herself. So then I asked her if now she was the old lady who scares all the kids on the block. She laughed at that, too. We talked some more and I made some other crack and she chuckled and said, “You’re too much.” That’s a high compliment. It was a good start to the day. Then I went on to my playwriting workshop, and my next audience experience.

Here’s what I know about leadership from my reading of Sun Tzu and Macchiavelli:  Being nice is easy. Being powerful and feared is better.

One would have thought Barack Obama knew this.  I didn’t expect George W. Bush to have read them (although Dick Cheney could have written sequels), but I assumed that  Obama had read “The Art of War” and “The Prince.” Read them and understood them. But there he was the morning after his electoral “shellacking,” promising to work closely with the very people who that same day were saying that their primary mission is to restrict or undo his achievements thus far, and to deny him a second term. I’m trying to decide whether the appropriate word for Obama’s response is “feckless” or “craven.” Until the final month before the election, he hadn’t stood up for what he believes in, had not propounded his principles in a way that would resonate and draw respect, and now here he was the morning after the mid-terms again folding his tent. What the moment demanded was Churchill. What we got was Neville Chamberlain. Obama is the president of the United States. The Republicans took one chamber of the Congress, not two. What can they pass without the president? Nothing. What can they undo? Nothing. How can he not know this?

Unless, maybe, he is ready to employ a tactic from the masters of intrigue:  deception. If I were Obama, I would put on every outward sign of “cooperation” for the next six months, feeding my foes’ underestimation of me,  while sticking a shiv in them every chance I got. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what he’s going to do. He still hasn’t learned that he was right the first time, when he sized these people up as his enemies.

On Tuesday, California voters rejected Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana.

The next day, federal authorities found a tunnel leading from San Diego into a drug warehouse over the border in Tijuana. And with it, they found, wait for it, 25 tons of marijuana prepped for sale, most of it, no doubt, in California.

If only they’d found it a week or two earlier, perhaps voters here would have passed Prop 19, declaring victory on one battlefront in the “war on drugs,” and then we could have moved on to other problems that are harder to solve.

Just so you know, if you put anything anywhere on the web, I now own it. (And if I use your stuff and it’s crummy, I’m billing you.) Because hey, that’s how it works.

Here’s where to find  your fucking polling place.

Please remember to vote tomorrow in this other, crucial, election!

The election isn’t until Tuesday, but I’d like to thank Meg Whitman for the public service she’s rendered in personally trying to plug California’s deficit  by buying goods and services here. She’s still slightly shy of spending $150 million of her own money as promised, but as I said, there are still two days to go. I thank her, and so do all the printers and caterers and designers and consultants (including one who’s billing $90,000 a month). We never believed you were a fiscal conservative anyway, and we know you don’t care about democracy since you’ve never voted. But when you promised to fix California’s deficit, clearly, you truly meant to do all you could. Personally.