In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct: and e'en to tell
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth,
Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews, in bitterness not far from death.

UPDATE: Noticed immediately upon second viewing:

At the very beginning, Tony sees news coverage of raging fires in Costa Mesa. Later, when he's talking to the bartender, it's clear he's in Costa Mesa. A fairly clear allegory of hell.

And what's Costa Mesa like, Tony asks? "Around here," the bartender replies, "it's dead."

Bald guy who may be Tony's father (see below) makes a joke involving how "Kevin Finnerty" sounds like "infinity."

END UPDATE

A Technorati search for Tony Soprano Alzheimer's found almost no one writing about this episode in the blogosphere today. (Got a better idea what to search for?) It may be because everybody hated it. But where do you start? That's another problem.

I'm convinced that each of the situations Tony ran into in his near-death dream sequence(s) represent someone or something in his real life. In the material that follows, don't ever assume I have any confidence that I'm right. This is more a thinking out loud post.

The voice on the phone isn't Carmela's, and we even find out that his "kids" don't sound like Meadow and A.J. when we hear their voices on his answering machine message. The kids sound much younger than his real children, but he's 46 years old in his "dream," just like in real life, so he's not living as a younger Tony. What "family" is he talking to, saying he misses, lamenting his identity loss with? Well, he's only got two, and it isn't Carm and the kids. I submit the "family" he keeps talking to on the phone represents his mob family. It's always there, and Tony is always reaching out to it, but it's not much help. It can't help him recover his lost identity; and Tony is so sure it can't help him face his "death sentence" of Alzheimer's he won't even call as the episode concludes.

The diners at the hotel bar who disconcertingly promise Tony that if "Kevin Finnerty" shows up they'll kick his ass are pretty clearly supposed to strike you as allegorical mob types, the kind of guys who would shoot pool and the shit in the back room of the Bing. But the bald one, who makes the promise and pays the check then disappears while Tony is calling his "wife" could be his father, a member of both families. (Carmela tells the police Uncle Junior has been mistaking Tony for his father Johnny lately.) He provides -- puts food on the table, the prime directive for heads of families throughout the series. Then he isn't there anymore, and the group disperses.

The woman he tries to sleep with is Carmela. They can't be together -- "this isn't happening" -- because she can tell he's too devoted to his (other) family. He offers to try and be someone else for the night, but that doesn't cut it. He is who he is, devoted to his crime family before anything or anyone else, to Carmela's -- and his own -- detriment. This squares with an undercurrent beneath Tony's and Carm's relationship these last five years.

He awakes briefly to ask, who am I? at this point. A man who can't be with his family because of his obligations to his mob family is unrecognizable to him. His panic attacks didn't start six years ago because the duck family that left his pool reminded him of his criminal enterprise. He didn't spend the night outside his estranged wife's house with a gun alert for bears to protect That Thing Of Ours. He's coming closer, I think, to accepting that his mob boss gig prevents him from enjoying, protecting and nourishing what's most important to him.

What to make of the conference he can't get into without his identity? A general is speaking, and he hopes to get past the admission table while he calls the bar so as to be able to see the speech. Tony loves old war movies, and we find out in real time from Christopher that you shouldn't get Tony started about the war on terror, which seems otherwise out of place. Paulie has him airbrushed into a general in that portrait with Pie Oh My, and there are plenty of allusions and parallels to a military command structure within the Soprano crime family.

This is fuzzy, but I think the general's speech represents Tony's ideal man, and he wanted to get in to learn how to be like him. Without being able to prove who he is, though, he's stuck outside.

The next strange situation involves the two Buddhist monks. They are suing him because he and/or his company are responsible for faulty heating equipment. One accosts him physically when he insists he's not "Kevin Finnerty." Quite unlike Tony Soprano, he flails back in self-defense, falls over a luggage cart and meekly shouts, "he hit me!" He can't report the incident because he's staying at the hotel under someone else's credit card (identity).

The fact these are monks -- representing spirituality, religion -- and not just two guys off the street must be significant. Is this finally part of Tony's near-death experience where he encounters difficulty squaring what he does with religion and morality? Other than for Carmela, the tension between what Tony does and the family's Catholicism hasn't been a major theme of the series, so it makes sense, I guess, that it wouldn't be a major part of his near-death dream sequence. Needless to say, if this interpretation is right, Tony's insistence he's not who God thinks he is will be as ineffectual as you'd expect.

The elevator is taking too long, later (and one is out of order, with a bear holding up a "please bear with us" sign -- I've already mentioned the bear from last season, so won't again) so Tony takes the stairs, falls, and winds up in a hospital. "How long have I been here?" he asks the bespectacled doctor, who ignores his question. The doctor saw something he didn't like in Tony's brain, so had additional tests performed. Tony has Alzheimer's, which Tony regards as "a death sentence." The doctor assures him that the outlook isn't as bleak as it would have been some time ago.

Put everything together and I think the doctor is Dr. Melfi, glasses and all. She routinely has to tell Tony that therapy takes time and he shouldn't be impatient; she's also assured him more than once that panic attacks are far more treatable today than they were in his parents' day. She's definitely seen something in him she doesn't like, and after more due diligence is trying to tell Tony that what's wrong with him is caused by his family -- specifically, his mother. The message, or the form of it that Tony least wants to hear, is he's apt to wind up like Uncle June, who does indeed have Alzheimer's (we assume, unless it's a very elaborate act) -- and is friendless and alone, while his family would rather play with model trains than sit with him when he doesn't feel well. This, I think, is what Tony can't accept.

Even the actual condition that threatens Tony's life or long-term well-being in reality, sepsis, is a "corruption of the blood" -- his blood, ancestors, are dooming him to death or an emasculated, invalid state.

He tells the doctor he's not even who the doctor thinks he is. Who are you? the doctor asks. (Everyone wants to know, it seems. Even the clerk at the Omni seems suspicious that he's not "Kevin Finnerty.") Tony says it doesn't matter, since soon he won't even know himself.

I may update this post after I watch the TiVo again, if so I'll make a note in a new post. For now, I think we've seen Tony, near death, trying to figure out who he is (his briefcase, the one he's lost, has his whole life in it), and encountering his father, Carm, God, Dr. Melfi -- who each represent something he needs to work through. His "model" man, the standard he measures himself against, his father (also represented by the general whose speech Tony couldn't get in to see); the (real) family he cares most deeply about; what's objectively right and wrong; the tension among all these things; and the way he's chosen to try and get at how to work through it all, represented by Dr. Melfi.

Who was pretty conspicuously missing from all this? Livia. Maybe he'll meet her next week, in a lower circle of hell.