The Pulse embarks on a road trip that, in the end, covers only a fraction of America. Still, it's a good opportunity for some shameless self-promotion.

Somewhere south of Blytheville, Ark., at 4:18 p.m. Saturday ...

I open my eyes to a vacant green landscape. Sparse fields of cotton roll languidly by my window, dotted by the occasional pine tree, and I close my eyes again.

Am I sleeping? Am I waking now? How long have I slept?

My eyes open again. My fellow passengers are waking too, returning to the world from an almost contemplative afternoon sleep, and, for a few moments, I forget who I am and where we're going.

The dream is over. Welcome back to reality.

There's an acrid stench wafting from the front seat, a cloud of smoke that filters into the back of the van. So, this is Spring Break. I see.

I wonder when we'll make it to New Orleans.

I wonder if anyone actually lives in Arkansas.

I wonder if these highway workers would be worth any points if we ran them over "Vice City" style.

I wonder what people might think of us traveling in a green Dodge Caravan with a Deadhead sticker plastered to the back.

Did Maggie Flanagan really show up as we were sprinting to leave? How embarrassing. Half of us aren't registered.

I wonder if I locked my apartment's door. Did I?

And then I wonder about the newspaper headlines I saw at some nameless gas station in Missouri. The weapons inspectors are not happy. Neither is Dubya. We're going to war, and much sooner rather than much later.

I've never really seen a war myself. I wonder what it's like. How many Iraqis could you knock off with one bomb over Baghdad? Would they stay on fire for long? And what about the children? Would you get extra points for them?

I glance back out the window, breathe in a great lungful of green and stare off into the horizon.

The dream is over. Welcome back to reality.

"I guess I just don't care," Tony tells me one afternoon in our New Orleans hotel suite as we lounge on the couch, staring blankly into a TV show about space shuttles.

"That's why I'm partying like this," he says nonchalantly, the hot smell of a few happy hour drinks from a Bourbon Street bar drifting off his breath. "I don't know what's going to happen."

We all make this trip for different reasons, but one remains universal: to have an adventure, to drink like the ocean drinks the rivers, to have a mindlessly hedonistic journey just to see who can make it to the other end.

Tony, a big guy in the "Animal House" tradition and the only non-DE employee on the trip, seems the most likely to survive an epic binge; his roommate, Alex, the journey's unspoken leader, has also shown a past aptitude for survival.

Those are the outspoken ones. In the van's far back seat, nary a word usually comes from the trip's two girls: Heather, tan and short-haired, who spends a lot of time staring reflectively out the back window; and Amanda, a pleasant girl with sharp cool eyes who spends much of her time listening to headphones or, if near a computer, chatting with friends on the Internet.

That brings us around to Steve, also generally soft-spoken but with a sneaky wit that nonetheless puts one at ease. He is a silent voice of reason in a week-long madness that throws us down Interstate 55, through the sweat of Mississippi and Louisiana and into New Orleans, where we halt before tearing down the gulf coast into Texas and possibly Mexico.

But destination matters little; it's the trip that matters, the journey, a chance to awake from one dream and slip comfortably into another. One that doesn't include video games or a hundred channels of television or the constant shadow of a war that, frankly, few of us really understand. It's an escape. A reflection.

In traveling across America, you realize the sheer size and complexity of it all, the breathtaking scope of this giant machine, and it reinforces the dread that this truly is a modern-day Rome, an empire that is slowly waking from a dream of its own. It drifts in the air, an unfocused vision saying something is not quite right; things are on edge; something unimaginable is coming in the future.

Unfortunately, none of us on this trip have the focus to know quite what that is.

When you see the crowds choking the streets of the French Quarter, laughing off the night and watching things get blurry, this all becomes an afterthought. There is a party to be had, damn it, and the night could lead anywhere.

We arrive at our hotel on Gravier Street in the tiny hours of Sunday; there is an immediate exodus through the darkness to Canal Street, a massive stretch of businesses and billboards that guards the French Quarter. The stench of sweat and urine hangs in the air; we look up dumbfounded at the skyscrapers and lights but end up distracted by a constant wash of partiers crawling from the Quarter, women tripping over their own high heels and men seeking dark alleys in which to vomit.

Up ahead, cops gather over a writhing body in the middle of the street. A body's down with a head cracked open. Blood forms dark puddles on the brick. However, patrons of the nearby Bourbon Street Blues Company seem not to notice, instead sipping obliviously on beers and daiquiris and shouting up at balconies for tits. "Don't they see this?" Heather asks, shocked at the apathy of people standing just feet away.

Apparently they don't.

And then you see the dark underbelly, the fact that the Big Easy is a place that has consumed too much in too little time. It has left a sad wake in its tracks, a human fallout that reflects only decay. On the our second night, a middle-aged black woman with crusted hair and half of her teeth approached us; she immediately began her story about having no home and no job and no place to go.

She asks for money. I reach into my pocket but then think better of myself. I can tell Tony and Alex had the same reflex. Amanda, gentle as she is, tosses out a dollar bill; Heather bluntly throws her a five and then turns to look in the street.

The woman continues speaking in a vacant tongue, her great red eyes beading from the holes in her head. We all stare off silently, waiting for her to finish. She is not a part of our world, just a dark diversion of sorts.

She leaves, and we exchange uneasy glances.

Soon enough, though, it's part of the past.

Without flinching, Tony brings me a frothy beer overflowing from the cup from a nearby daiquiri bar, and hours later, all six of us end up kicking a Postal Service box back down the shadows of Gravier Street to our hotel, hollering mindlessly the whole way.

Somewhere on the coastline west of Matagorda Island, Texas, 9:36 p.m. Wednesday

The thick fog drips from the air, trapped in darkness as the ocean pushes the bitter scent of salt onto the mainland. I drift in and out of sleep, but there's no hope for staying there. We're lost, and it's getting late.

If America is big, Texas is even bigger.

We left New Orleans Tuesday morning, determined to make the gulf coast crawl down Interstate 10, to get lost on the eastern sliver of the Lone Star State and have wild adventures.

That night in Galveston, at the Seahorse Motor Inn, we frittered off the night with drinks on the beach, making prank cell phone calls. Wednesday, we were back on the road and getting lost.

And that brings us here, or, more accurately, somewhere. Goose Island is on the map, a tiny peninsula just south of San Antonio Bay, but the roads are leading nowhere and it's getting hotter in the van.

I peer out at the coastline. Oil refineries that look like miniature space stations peer out from in front of the tide, their tiny lights blinking in a haunting, industrial pattern. Texaco stations dot the horizon. A giant sign for a pornography warehouse stalks over the highway, casting neon shadow over the van.

"They're so huge down here," Heather comments, gazing up at the blinking "XXX."

We all just nod and agree. "Everything's bigger in Texas," Steve says matter-of-factly.

An engine roars up alongside us in the other lane, a black SUV the size of a small tank sporting Texas license plates and a big American flag on the back. How appropriate, I think as it passes us. I wonder how much oil it takes to run that thing. How many miles can it get to the gallon? How armed is the driver?

If you hijacked it "Vice City" style, how many police cars could you take out in one pass?

I wonder what they think of us Illinoisans in our Dodge Caravan with a Deadhead sticker on the back and a cow skull that Alex bought at a rest area tied to the top.

A van that we have to half unpack just to get out of.

There are more pressing matters , however. We're driving in circles, and Alex finally makes a decision - we're within an hour and a half of Corpus Christi, and we'll drive there to get a room for the night. Unfortunately, we probably won't make it to Mexico, he says. I feel my heart sink. I've never been outside the United States. I was hoping this would be the opportunity.

But we drive over the sparse land that leads to Corpus Christi, an almost dreamlike landscape where the sea and the land fade in and out of each other. It's late, and we need suppiles.

We stop off at a cheap roadside store, pick up a couple of cases, and check into a third-floor room at the Red Roof Inn, right off the interstate.

We stay for two nights. There are trips to the beach at nearby Port Aransas (where Alex loses his glasses in the ocean), dips in the hotel's hot tub and drunken games of Asshole played on the room's queen-size bed. It's pure, innocent and completely nihilistic fun.

It's too bad it couldn't last longer.

But we all recognize the truth of it.

It's a dream that we will have to wake from soon, and the road home will be a long one.

At a gas station just outside Little Rock, Ark., 3:46 a.m. Friday

My eyes are heavy. Colors are overlapping, arguing, fighting for attention from a mind well past its limit.

We fill up the tank one last time, buy handfuls of sugary slop and drinks to wash them down with.

We're back on the road, but who really knows the difference?

Everyone sleeps. The only thing keeping me awake is the blur of lights passing me by, the hum of other engines making the night crawl, the soft echo of some random classic rock station broadcasting the graveyard shift.

I think of New Orleans and the drive through Texas, the memory of Alex and Tony getting kicked out of the Alamo for trying to film on Tony's digital camcorder, the unimportant smear of a hundred different stops along the road, the crassness of a hundred indistinguishable bathrooms.

And then I think of Waco, Texas, where we stopped for a quick dinner at a Fazoli's. This was our last real stop, the last breath of air before a marathon ride home.

Waco is just nine miles east of the small, hidden town of Crawford, where President George W. Bush and his wife make their home when not in Washington.

I wonder when he last made it here. I wonder if he's ever been to Carbondale. I wonder what he would do if there were bombs over Crawford, setting all the little schoolchildren on fire.

In the parking lot, I pulled out a postcard featuring the Texas flag and the words "Don't Mess With Texas" and propped myself against the car to write an address on it. Sixteen-hundred Pennsylvania Avenue. To President and Mrs. George W. Bush. I took a deep breath of the warm air, and everyone gathered around.

I scrawled so quick words and sentences, the first things that moved the pen, a few generic thoughts on America's size and what moves it forward. It read like a cheap Fourth of July greeting card, but it worked for me.

We all signed it and mailed it off, along with a handful of other cards for parents and friends and girlfriends, at a post office three blocks away.

It's hard to focus on now, though. My eyelids get heavier. Mile markers are rushing by, waiting for a dawn that will come sooner rather than later.

I muster one last thought about those postcards from Waco, those sheets of cardboard sent from a dream to a reality lurking just over the horizon.

Dubya will probably never see the stupid thing anyway. It will slip away in the White House mail, shuffled off by some clueless intern mail assistant, and the message will be lost in some bottomless, antiquated heap of mail.

The headlines are more intense now, and I worry. We're going to war, and it will cost us all something. I close my eyes. Once we wake from this dream, there's no telling what horizon we might be faced with.

But I'm spent now. We're snaking up Route 51 from the south, just breaths from home. In exhaustion, I switched seats with Tony just outside Missouri, and he wakes me from this incoherent daze - not quite sleep, but far from awake.

My apartment is just up the street. I gather my things as the van stops, give my baggy-eyed companions the best farewell I can stammer, and head inside.

I pull out my keys to unlock the door.

Oh.

It was unlocked.

I sigh, head for the bed and fall down however gravity takes me. The dream is over now, and I smile to myself as I drift off into a peaceful sleep.

Welcome back to reality.