Morning of October 11, 1988. Tuesday.

I am on an old-fashioned passenger train (as if from an episode of "Gunsmoke", though a few people here and there are dressed rather anachronistically relative to more modern dress as well). I seem to be dressed typically as I often am in reality. I have a strange atypical focus, as if I am in a type of ambiguous faux lucidity and am trying to work out how I got where I am and with a vague ominous perspective. A younger version of the "mystery girl" (the female archetype that represented, in almost every accurate way possible - my wife-to-be - something "normal" people would never believe no matter how many hundreds of dreams had already clearly established it for me since birth).

Being on a train may or may not be a good thing, I contemplate "realistically" in-dream. There is some sort of "anniversary" premonitory thought in-dream related to both the scene from "Twilight Zone: The Movie" from June 1983 (where the Jewish people are being taken away on a train), and "Love My Way" (by The Psychedelic Furs) from June 1982, with the line "They'd put us on a railroad, they'd dearly make us pay"...which seems to relate to how I knew things (and proved to be correct) when everyone else was always in denial, which has been mostly the theme of my entire lifetime since early childhood, always giving me a weird advantage in some ways but pure puzzlement in others (yet again remembering that "normal" people, especially the cop-out mentality when facing the unexplainable, always baffled me far more than the unexplained or so-called paranormal, now more than ever).

It dawns on me that the "mystery girl" may be in danger, though I do not feel threatened in any way, as I seem to be "invulnerable" in the setting for some reason I cannot quite focus on. The girl turns around and smiles at me but looks quite puzzled. She is wearing a black veil of sorts and a black dress. Some sort of unknown military character chops off my right hand with a sword, but being curious as to this unexpected affront, I look down and see my hand is floating in the air, attached to the end of my arm with a yellowish silk ribbon. It "spirals" back on, almost as if I was in a gravity-free environment for a very short time. There is no blood and it is slightly transparent. I am strongly reminded of M.C. Escher's "Rind".

This will not do. I feel I must take the girl and myself away from here. I go to get her and hold her to my front without resistance, attempting to lift her, and as I do, I lift both her and myself (with some sort of in-dream telekinesis) from the floor of the train, hovering in a fetal position. As such, I remain in place, passing through each train's wall as it continues on until it is then beyond us on the track (and it keeps going). We then fly to a "familiar" location. It is familiar somehow in that it seems to be the "fictional realm" of an older dream from June 1972 which involved a deer's "ghost" in an abandoned mansion, which was located in a forest fairly close to a truncated section of railroad tracks - therefore creating some sort of odd but "stronger" relationship between two sixteen-year-apart dreams - not that common of an event - though it is possibly loosely based on the old train at Copeland Park in La Crosse (as there have been several other more intense associations along this theme, including synchronicity with the "mystery girl", such as the one where the Mississippi River lowers to reveal an old railroad, which becomes active again). There is a vivid sense of late autumn. Also, these supposed "barriers" between in-dream locations have often occurred before, almost as if each (fictional) dream location was part of a system of "bubbles" where you could go from one to another with some sort of particular focus or "portal".

There is a unique perspective at this time. I figure that I can leave the girl here in this environment (until she "safely wakes" into her "real" location somewhere) because there is some sort of "barrier" between it and other facets from later dreams (oddly, even though I am not lucid as such). I also feel a bit odd about leaving her, though. In the back of my mind is the very early childhood association with seeing her in a tree in a park (on my family's real-life trip from Wisconsin to Florida) and being threatened by wild hogs. Still, she has survived, although she was "older then" (which of course is faux "dream logic").

Of course, there is more as there usually is. My wife had taken a train to get to school, and she had (when we first started writing) sent a photo of herself feeding a deer...