last night: I am attending a solo live show of the comedian David Cross. He is wearing the same yarmulke that he wore and then threw away in frustration on the show "Celebrity Poker Showdown," obviously forming the inspiration for this. I'm with a friend who's acting sulky for some reason. I believe I try various things to cheer them up, but they are unresponsive. Then Cross comes out. It is evident that there will be some kind of audience interaction, and he has cards that each of us filled out on our way in with information about ourselves. He picks mine and starts talking to me. "Let's see, you said you like various guitar players...such as 'the guitar players' [everyone chuckles, apparently this is the name of some hip band in this dream's universe]...and various chord players [everyone chuckles again]." Then the phone wakes me up.

The night before: I had been reading something right before going to sleep that briefly mentioned someone owning a gun purely as protection from bears. This transformed into a dream in which I was in this guy's house, and suddenly he knew there was a bear because some bear droppings came in through a chute next to his door. We ran to get his bear guns, and sure enough the bear came pounding through the front door. The guy shot it with a rifle, and the bear slumped onto the ground. But I was suspicious, it didn't seem like such a weak gun should take it down that quickly. And just as we were starting to relax, the bear leaped back up and started beating us around. It then turned into a very cartoonish fight that kept going back and forth, with the bear beating us senseless, then I throwing a five-pound hand weight at his head, but the guy never managing to get another shot off. It seemed like we should all have been dead or unconscious after a bit of this, but it simply kept going. After a while it began to seem pointless, and that's when the dream ended.

The night before: Vague recollections, but it seems worth mentioning as a rather complex bit of self-reference. In the dream I wrote a blog entry about a dream within the dream that I had had. I don't remember anything about the dream within the dream, or if it even happened in the main dream, but I was very happy with the entry I wrote about it, because having written it right after I woke up, it sounded like the language of a dream, with odd logic and sudden skips. In fact it was close to gibberish, but the fact that I had written it without trying to sound like gibberish was very cool to me.