I dreamt this morning that I had wandered into a huge auditorium in which all the chairs were arranged in a circle, planetarium style. In the center of the room, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were sitting in a circular pit, which, at the proper time, would be covered by a dome, onto which at the right time they’d project one of their favorite films.

They said they were going to screen Lassiter, a title which in the dream meant nothing to me, but which upon waking I see is a 1984 movie starring Tom Selleck. I’ve never seen it, but based on reading about it, I can’t imagine it being anyone’s favorite film. In the dream, however, that’s exactly what Spielberg and Lucas were going to show us, only they never explained why, and I never questioned their choice.

A handsome man was sitting on the lip of the pit, dangling his feet. As I looked at him, I somehow knew he was an actor, but I couldn’t quite recognize him, perhaps because his features kept morphing.

“You’re George Peppard, aren’t you?” I asked, but as soon as I did, his face changed, and he shook his head.

“Oh, I see, you’re Dirk Benedict,” I said, and for a moment he was, but then that face, too, was gone.

Then I saw that he was really Mark Hamill. This time, when I called him out, the face remained, and he sighed, shrugged with “you got me” body language, and asked me “What do you want to know?” in a suffering tone, as if he was weary of public interactions. When I told him that I didn’t need anything from him, he seemed surprised.

But then, as eerie music welled up in the background, I told him, in a threatening tone of voice, that I wanted him to give me one fact that no one else knew, and as I started walking closer, he screamed and fell to the ground, because it suddenly became apparent that in the dream I was a collector, though not of books or DVDs or autographs, but of information that could be mine alone, and that once I got that one never-before-shared fact from him, he would have to die, so that he could never give it away to anyone else.

And then I woke and scribbled this all down.

I sense a story seed in the concept of such a collector …