I was in an apartment or some kind of shared living situation, where the building was up on a hill.  I’m not sure if it was myself, or if it was experienced vicariously, but suddenly the idea was to go out and down the mountain at night.  I recall being half-asleep, and I went by my dad who gave me a sports-like pat on the butt as I went by, the old “atta boy!”  Then I entered some wooded, forest like area, down a slope, over some trails; it was all dark and dense so it wasn’t very clear or certain where I’d come to rest.  I think it was muddy and I may have been in a thicket; I wondered if I’d be safe there or whether some other animals, such as coyotes, might give me some trouble.

There was a transition, then suddenly I was somewhere else.  I was with a high school ‘friend’ Eldrick.  The greater concept then was that whomever had descended from the hillside apartment could be found by retracing the series of steps, in a type of reenactment from the original starting location.  So then we were suddenly on a mountainside, traversing from left-to-right; I made a comment about the sudden awareness of how pronounced the move from the town on our left had been, so things were beginning to make more sense, orientation-wise, why we were so far from our destination at the outset.  We increased our pace as we traversed, noticed other trails alongside of our own, and there was consideration for the idea of there was some reasonable doubt or skepticism that the trail we were currently on would reach the intended destination. I arrived at a crossing and seemed to know intuitively which trail to take to get where we needed to go, pointing out the trails by their respective numbers.

There was a transition to suddenly being in a car with Eldrick and a new girlfriend he was dating, who seemed to be quite enamored with him.  She was quite pretty in my estimation, so I was a bit confused because I considered her to be a bit out of his league.  But then we arrived in the hillside apartment, and it had a very college-feel, like it was not well kept or clean; it would have been embarrassing for me if it had been my place and I had been expecting a guest, especially if that guest was female.  I think there was a sense of having a better idea at that point, of where the person went from there.

Another transition, to being on the street, maybe in a car; it was a bit confusing, but I seemed to happen upon a briefcase, which had some kind of ‘deal’ associated with it, potentially worth millions of dollars.  I then had some communication with a remote team about the nature of the deal, and the main takeaway was that I would receive about $60k upfront for the service of doing it.  I was looking forward to putting that money in my trading account.  But then I received word that the deal was off, and then the guy from the team I was communicating with said I could just keep the $60k anyway.  I thought everything was hunky-dory but then I realized the team had just done this all as an elaborate setup; they had apparently kidnapped Eldrick’s new girlfriend.  It went on like a typical  ‘B’ movie plot, where one just knew they were going for ransom.  It was never explicit that they wanted anything from me, nor that the amount they’d given me was equal to their demand for the girl.  Seeing through the situation, I figured that they had intentionally gotten her close to Eldrick so that he would get attached to her, and thus be desperate when they went to exert pressure on him.  She/their relationship was just permitted so that it became a subsequent source of vulnerability for him.

I felt like I was now in an awkward position because I saw it from a bit more objective standpoint.  My ‘buddy’– a guy I considered a friend at the time but was not particularly fond of, for reasons beyond the scope of this blog, was now suffering, and I was in a position to potentially help him by meeting the ransom demand, but at the same time I thought the girl was probably ‘in’ on the setup too.  Even though he was definitely heartbroken, I doubted that it would have been worth it to cough up any money.

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