I woke at 4:30 in the morning from a dream in which I was attending some convention so large it could have been the San Diego Comic-Con, only it wasn’t exactly the San Diego Comic-Con. I enter an auditorium in which a film is about to be played and find the room half full. I see Neal Adams in the audience, only not the Neal Adams of today, but rather the Neal Adams of the 1970s, even though it was today in the dream. He has a huge bucket of popcorn in his lap, as if he’s about to watch a blockbuster in his local theater instead of the documentary about Harlan Ellison which is about to begin.

I step outside for a moment—to get my own bucket of popcorn perhaps?—and when I return the theater is more populated, and I can no longer sit next to Neal the way I’d planned to. So I sit somewhere else. And then the film begins, but I can remember none of it. Not because I’ve forgotten what was playing out onscreen, but because the dream jump cuts to after the lights come back on.

And guess what? Someone has been murdered. I think. My memory is vague on that now. But I do remember that some horrible crime has been committed, which could have been murder, but it also could have been something else equally heinous, whatever that might be.

I interrogate ’70s Neal Adams, walking back and forth in the front of the theater while he remains seated. I have no idea why I’m suddenly in charge of this … nor why ’70s Jim Steranko is now sitting a few chairs away from Adams. I’m behaving like some strange combination of Simon Baker from The Mentalist and Tim Roth from Lie to Me.

Steranko has this sheepish expression on his face, and I can tell he’s innocent of whatever crime was supposed to have occurred, but Adams, oh, Adams knows something. I let him know I know he knows something by showing him a sheet of paper on which I’ve scrawled down his fluctuating pulse rate throughout our conversation (though how I’d been tracking that I have no idea) and point out to him that when I’d asked him a certain question it went through the roof, indicating he’d been hiding something.

He then suddenly looked guilty, and I knew that I was about to learn why whatever happened happened … only … then I woke.

Now I’ll never find out why he did whatever it was he did!

I fell back asleep, moving on to other dreams, but the answer was not there …