I'm bicycling along the canal, along an exceptionally beautiful section. It's a sinuous stretch. too curvaceous for a canal boat to navigate; so maybe it's a natural waterway instead. The banks are lined with green banana trees. The land is quite contoured, and on the opposite bank it rises up sharply to a rounded, technicolor knoll. The colors are idyllic, dreamy, shimmering in the sunlight - a pastiche of creams, reds and pinks. Writing of it now, the colors from the causse a few days back come to mind.

I'm riding with my friend Dale Urevitch, not with Rachael. Odd, because I haven't encountered Dale for over thirty years now; I'm surprised I can invoke his name, actually. Dale was a go player (the Japanese strategic board game), and a bit better one than I. He and I would meet to play occasionally, and I recall one day bicycling down from Salem to his home in Independence for a few games. He was a somewhat exotic character, to me anyway: there was the name, of course - I'd never known a Russian before, or maybe he was Ukrainian. Very fair haired, pale, slender; wore a studded cowboy hat, if I remember right. Speculated in silver. Had a white rat that ran freely in his home, and would fetch go stones from a pile and return to perch on Dale's shoulder with them as a sort of parlor trick.

That's the whole content of the dream. I wake up, and as with the other dreams it feels so real I start thinking back, trying to place it in the narrative of the tour. Are these the miles that we didn't bike because we got rained out the last day? Or the ones I couldn't ride because of my foot injury? I'm trying to figure out where they belong so that I can include them in the right sequence in this journal.

I get the start of a cramp in my right calf, and spasmodically straighten my leg to ward it off. This works badly because it thrusts my injured toe into the sheets, which hurts. I recoil from the pain, the cramp returns, I kick the sheets again. I'm fully awake now, this is the real world.