Brown Paper Dreamscape

I was with nine or ten other people in a field of knee-high, green grass, that waved in the wind. We were all supposed to “join hands and form a crop circle,” so one of them had been saying to the rest of us. But hands were in short supply, as several of them had either one hand or none. So it got really weird. One of the people turned out to have been Albert Einstein, with several assistants in lab coats. The original nine or ten of us stood around and watched as they extracted a large sample of “spacetime” (from where?) and fed it into a 1940's sci-fi looking thing that was basically a big fancy sausage mill. In a few minutes, out came the Circle, the Line, Right Angles, and Paradoxes, (all invisible, abstract concepts, but somehow tangible, several of each, that we could hold and use). It was as if the scientists had known exactly what we needed to make the crop circle—except the hands! The hand-challenged people were disappointed, they kept digging through with their stumps, hoping to find some hands. Einstein stood aside, looking sad, knowing he had failed them. One of them swore as a Circle slipped off his stump onto the ground. Suddenly there was “Shortness” and “Length,” with the space inside the dropped circle (called a “short length”) in between. It floated up into the air, turned inside out, swallowed itself, sucked everything up, and dropped into a deep empty hole in the ground. The hole immediately closed over and turned back to grass, which I hadn't noticed had turned yellow and brittle somewhere along the line. Einstein and all that was gone, sucked up with the rest, and everything was back to how it had been, except for the grass, and the fact that we were no longer under any obligation to make a crop circle. No one said anything as we disbanded—I looked back at the guy who had dropped the circle, noticing he had actually had hands all along, which made me feel inexplicably uneasy and afraid. Suddenly I was in Chicago, in the middle of the same yellow-grass field, but on a sidewalk near an L train, with gritty industrial buildings in the distance. I was trying lots of ways to get home to Oak Park, getting lost, taking the wrong train, not remembering our address, walking up a hill that I didn't have enough all-around energy or sheer strength in my legs to do. I kept dreaming for a long time after that, but this is all I remember. It's haunted me for weeks, but as far as I know I haven't had the dream again since.