I am riding alone in the gondola lift up the Wildcat Mountain ski area, following John (my stepfather) and my wife Darchelle in the gondola car ahead of me. Although the gondola cars are fully enclosed, I feel as though I am in a chairlift high above the ground and in danger of falling out.
When we reach the summit building and the gondola car slows to allow the lift attendants to open my door so I can get out, they do not open my door and instead my car follows the cable track around the cable wheel in preparation for the descent back down the mountain. I squeeze out the door into the narrow space between the car and the wall and go to pick up my skiis (or snowboard?) before following John and Darchelle out of the building but I cannot find my skiis so I go outside without them.

John and Darchelle already have their skiis on and are prepared to start down the mountain but without skiis I cannot join them. I instead walk over to the trail which runs up the ridge to the observation deck and start up it. The steps at the beginning are slippery with hard-packed snow but I manage. I encounter other people before I reach the deck but I do not know them.
Crossing the deck I notice that the surface of the wood is deeply worn and almost polished, as if many people have walked across it over the years. I stand at the railing to look at the view. The trees below me have been clearcut and the uneven ground is bare and brown. Traversing the clearcut below me is a perfectly straight and nearly level ditch a few feet wide filled with rough brown mud, or perhaps ice. As I look at it I realize that the mud is moving, slowly and inexorably, like a conveyor belt or a glacier.

John died almost exactly three years ago. Skiing at Wildcat Mountain was a defining activity in his life for almost 50 years until it ended about 10 years before his death. I also skied there regularly though only into my mid-teens; after that my relationship with the mountain continued until February 2015 when I snowshoed up the back side of the mountain to the observation deck pictured in the dream. At the time that outing felt, and probably was, risky. As in the dream I made it but I have not been there since, nor did I ever do another solo winter hike. That hike up Wildcat was an ending, and in the dream my visit to the observation deck also represents an ending - the end of my life.
Living near the end, living with ALS, feels risky (fear of falling off the lift) and requires adjusting to circumstances (getting myself out of the gondola car) and loss (missing skiis). I am on my own able to join neither the dead (John) nor the living (Darchelle), both of whom go on without me (sking down the mountain). Nonetheless my experience is not unique; many have gone this way before me (the deeply worn surface of the deck).
My gradual but inexorable progress towards my end is represented by the moving mud in the ditch. If I have feelings about that I cannot access them.