More Bizarre Reality TV ~ 12/24/2014

I dreamed I was s contestant on another weird reality TV show. I was given ten children to foster, from toddler to high school senior, and I would win certain prizes based on how many I still had at the end of a month. If any of the kids got too sick, got too hurt, got into too much trouble, or became too unhappy, they'd be taken away. There were also other contestants who would be teachers, coaches, lawyers, bosses, who would get prizes for helping me or for making me lose my kids, but no one knew their objectives in advance.

The first kids I lost were two teenaged boys who turned out to be members from rival gangs. They got into a huge fight in my front lawn. Thankfully, neither was badly hurt, but the police came and took them away. This was when I began to suspect the social worker who placed them both with me was working against me.

The next kid I lost was my high school senior, who was a star quarter back. He collapsed on the field during a game, and it turned out that his brain had gotten really dried out. There was this test they showed me, where they opened up the skull and spread a special powder on this circular area in the middle. A normal brain would absorb the powder quickly, and the spot would look just the same in a few seconds. A desiccated brain would stay chalky and gray because the powder wouldn't absorb. My boy's brain stayed gray with powder, and they said this was probably caused by use of performance enhancing drugs. So they took him away, and I thought maybe his coach was behind it.

This was all really difficult and awful, but pretty straightforward. What started to happen next was truly devious and evil. One of my kids was a little girl about five years old. She was very sweet, and had this favorite snack that was apple wedges on buttered toast. She was very close to an older girl of about thirteen, and she had two little pets (sometimes they were dogs, and then they'd become cats). She really loved her little critters.

Well, at some point we noticed something was wrong with one of the cats. It started to show up with small wounds, it became withdrawn, timid, his a lot and had to be coaxed out. The wounds healed quickly at first, but new, more serious ones started to appear. Then it began happening with the other little dog. I promised the little girl I would get to the bottom of this and make her little friends safe again.

This went on for weeks, and I came to realize the cuts and burns and bruises were the results of systematic torture. Then one day I came home from dropping the kids off at school to find the little dogs on my doorstep, one of them badly hurt and disconsolate, nudging the other, who was dead. There was a note this time that said that after the surviving dog was gone, it was the girl's turn.

At this point, I went ballistic. I went into the histories of all the players in this warped game. I found out that one of my older kids had abused a previous foster sibling, and that a lawyer who lived nearby was a sadistic serial killer. I went after him first. I broke one of his fingers after another as I questioned him. He said he was involved in it, but he wasn't alone. He wouldn't tell me who was helping him.

I was debating how to question the girl and planning more research when I woke up.

TBTT#8 Shut Up, I Know I'm Late With This, and Haven't Written Much Lately ~ 4/16/2012

I dreamed I was with some coworkers and we'd pulled off the road in a small canyon to observe some brown bears. We walked up the canyon a ways for a closer look, still far away from the two we could see. About two hundred feet from the car, we realized we were surrounded by brown bears, all standing on their hind legs, who proceeded to attack us with butterfly knives and syringes full of some sort of narcotic sedative.

I tried to look very small and inert against the canyon wall, but they saw me, and started to advance. One of my companions intercepted them, and I saw an opportunity to rush the bear that turned to attack him. I wrenched the syringe out of its hand and plunged it into its neck, then grabbed the butterfly knife and severed an artery.

I looked at the blood on my hands, and back to the bear that was gasping and gurgling on the ground, only to see that it was really an eight-year-old little boy. I fell to my knees by his side, sputtering out my useless apologies and tears as the life left his eyes and he stopped breathing.

Being an English Reality TV Star ~ 12/10/2014

I dreamed I had been assigned the role of Frances, Queen of Clubs, in a reality television adaptation of a historical novel series. I was the betrothed of a Scottish laird in exile, and went to live in his family's manor north of London. It was near the village Olt, on the Olt River.

His mother greeted me when I arrived, and showed me my suite of rooms. My sitting room had shelves and shelves of books, and large picture windows facing west. It was sunset, and the sky I saw through the windows was flooded with amethyst clouds, flaming bright pink at the edges.

There was a door out onto a patio and dock that stretched out over the loch the house was built beside. There was a hatch that opened up over a fish trap. My only job, as the newest member of the household, was to take any fish out of the trap each evening, and behead and gut them and take them to the kitchen. My hostess showed me how to reach into the cold water, grab the three-foot long fish by the gills, and flip them out onto the dock. The hardest part was making sure they didn't slide back into the water after I'd cleaned them, or the loch monster would eat them up. The laird's younger sister, who had had the job before I showed up, promised to help me the first few evenings, until I had it down.

The next day the laird showed me around his lands. He rode a horse, but I walked. The sandy paths were soft and spongy, the land was marshy, and there were dark gray stretches of boggy quicksand. I told him I'd never stepped in quicksand before, and was curious how it felt, so he directed me to a nearby patch, and I stepped into it, then when I was done sinking, up to my knees, he pulled me out.

It started to rain, so we went inside. I took off my shoes in the back kitchen, because they were pretty muddy. He gave me a tour of the manor house then, and every room was carpeted in thick golden sheep skin, from sheep raised on their lands, that was unbelievably silky and warm under my bare feet, and so thick that I sank into it up to my ankles.

I decided I wanted to write a story about a young woman who moves from her flat in Bayswater, London, up to the village of Olt, to research and write about a mysterious woman who moved up to Olt from London to build a manor and become a recluse. I tried to google driving directions from Bayswater to Olt, to add verisimilitude, but my tablet kept thinking I meant "Old" instead of "Olt", and my google maps searches kept thinking I wanted Old Street, which gave dozens of hits about ten minutes from Bayswater, instead of the village, which was at least an hour and a half away.

I mentioned this to the family that evening, and they thought it might have something to do with the powerful matriarch three generations back, who had moved to Olt from London to become a recluse, built the manor, and made its lands and the village unplottable. They began talking about their family history and traditions, and all the strangest bits, like the newest person being in charge of the fish, stemmed from her. Also, they'd put me in her rooms.

I began to suspect there was some deep, adacanthic mystery attached to this woman. Adacanthic meant dark, eerie, maybe a little macabre, and steeped in the exotic romance of a bygone era. Basically it meant the same as gothic, but gothic was applied only to fiction, whereas adacanthic was used to describe only academically verifiable history.

I was pondering the etymology when I woke up, and I was convinced for a while that adacanthic was a real word.

Dune ~ 12/8/2014

I dreamed I was a member of the royal family of Arrakis. Not the ruling branch, though. Sort of an offshoot side branch, but still among the nobility. Frank Herbert's novels chronicled the history of our planet and our family. There were about four books that were newer than the Brian Herbert sequels.

The planet had been completely regenerated in the centuries since its total distruction, and we lived in a bustling, futuristic city, up in high towers with windows all around, up in the blue sky. We walked in private gardens and tended forests. The walkways were golden sandstone, remnants of the original desert.

My branch of the family all had light hair, and we were good and generous and kind. The ruling branch were all dark and stern and suspicious. I dreamed that half my life was spent avoiding assassination attempts, because they were always afraid, since we were more popular, that we would plot to seize control. But I woke up before they could get me.

Another Night of Mish Mash ~ 12/4/2014

I dreamed I was putting together a cool new puzzle. Basically, I had a photograph of an art installation, and a pile of the raw materials that went into it, and I had to rebuild the installation. I was focused on the correct placement of strangely shaped boards that had a lovely silver and amber grain. I needed to stack them in the correct configuration to form a lazyboy recliner.

Then I had to get ready to go to work. I went to eat breakfast, but someone had left the lid off the honeycomb cereal, so it was all stale and full of baby roaches. There was another box, but it had strawberries in it, and I don't like berries in my cereal. So I decided to just head out, after I'd stomped all the baby roaches and cleaned up the mess.

To get to work, I had to cross the lake in a gliding box. It was shaped like an upside down wooden coffee table, with cords strung between the legs that were used to steer it as it glided across the water. I climbed the tower to the launch platform, got into the next box, and set off, terrified of heights the whole way. I was crossing the lake with two friends. One of them was steering, and one of them was escaping human traffickers that wanted to sell her into sexual slavery.

And I dreamed that my mom had wanted to name my younger sister Brooke, but had somehow accidentally named her Leia on her official birth certificate. So we called her Brooke, but she had to answer to Leia as well. But she didn't learn this until she applied for a driver's license. And then I woke up.

Weirdest Board Game Ever ~ 12/2/2014

I dreamed I was up in a balcony of a performance hall with some friends while vocal master classes and dress rehearsals were going on. While people were onstage, we had to stay quiet, of course, and would listen to the music. But in between those times, we played a board game.

The game involved C, D, and E cards that called out different actions, which you drew and followed when you landed on a space marked with the letter. You could also build on blank spaces, and put little tokens on the spaces you built to modify their actions. Like, you could put down animal cards, and if they were the same animal, and if they had a peppermint or a soccer ball token on one of them, they could communicate, and your marker could jump straight from one to the other, getting you across the board faster.

The game also had these big, sausage-shaped rabbit sort of creatures. Every so often you'd land on a square where you had to pay a fee using a certain amount of a certain color fur, which you would have to see if you could find and sheer off of your rabbit.

There were also castle spaces, and my sister played a card combination that let her jump to the next castle space, but since I didn't have any rocket ships built, it made me have to go backward. We had a difference of opinion about how far back I had to go. She thought I had to go back to the first castle after the home castle withe the peacock and the waterfall. I said that didn't make sense, that I should have to go back to either the last castle I'd passed, or the home castle itself.

It turned out, after several minutes of consulting the rule book, that I had to go all the way back home. Then I woke up.

Diplomacy ~ 11/19/2014

I dreamed I was an ambassador to the Korean embassy. I was hosting an important diplomat at my family's home in the Hill Country. I got home to find they had arrived and had been installed in my sister's room. A young Korean woman was just going in, and the diplomat was not to be disturbed.

I went into my own room, and started looking through my closet to decide what old clothes could be given away. My closet backed onto the closet in my sister's room, and through the wall I heard the young woman scream, then sob loudly.

I rushed to the TV room where my dad and sister were to make sure I wasn't imagining things, or overhearing the television show. They confirmed that they had heard the screaming and crying, and what could we do?

I was the ambassador, so this was my job. I went back to the room and pounded on the door, then went in. The young woman was lying on the bed, crying quietly now. Seated next to her wasthe diplomat. Not the old man I expected, but a sharply dressed, middle aged, Korean woman with a smug grin on her face.

I raised the young woman off the bed and showed her into my own room and bed. I told her she didn't have to let anyone hurt her here, and she would be staying in my room. She sobbed that she was afraid of her boss, because she was a South Korean, and everyone knew that the South Koreans were cruel and depraved. I assumed from this that the girl was North Korean, and raised on anti-South propaganda. I went back to question the diplomat, who said I couldn't punish her in any way, and she had every right to treat her aide any way she wanted.

I told her she was only half right. I couldn't punish or charge her for anything, but I was not required to condone or collude with law breaking in my own home, and that physical, emotional, and sexual abuse were all illegal and completely unacceptable under our roof. Her aide would not be required to see her in private during her stay with us.

Apparently she told her aide that I was requiring her to have a hysterectomy, and the young woman got agitated again. I had to sooth that down, and reiterated that no one here could make her do anything she didn't want. The diplomat informed me that I would be in big trouble for interfering, and I in turn informed her that I would be filing for an investigation. Then I woke up.

I Can't Even Begin to Title This ~ 11/17/2014

I was visiting my sister, who lived in my old apartment complex down by the Astrodome. She was having a shoe party. Like, a Tupperware party, but with ladies' shoes. I'm not big on shoes, really, but there was a very cute pair of flats in a sort of navy blue and black houndstooth tweed that were the most comfortable dressy shoes I'd ever worn, so I bought them.

I walked down the parking area, out to a plaza where the cathedral stood. I was doing a rough sketch of the façade, with arched openings along the top where a covered terrace ran inside the walls. I was drawing from both life and a photograph, and I'd roughed in the shapes of my composition. I was ready to start a clean drawing on nice paper, and I was trying to decide if I should keep the aspect ratio I had, or go narrower and use a standard paper size.

The original was about four feet by two feet, but the nice paper only came in 18 inch wide or 30 inch wide. I laid a sheet of 18 inch wide over my rough drawing, but for some reason, when I did that, the drawing perspective shifted, and instead of looking the row of arches straight on, they were shown at a downward slant. So I chose a wider paper that I would just trim in the end. It was a pale gold, and I did my drawing in sepia water colors. I was working in a community studio by then, and hung the finished product with my other work for that weekend's show, just as people started to trickle in.

I left to go to my basketball training in the woods. A friend of mine stood down in a wide pit, about eight feet deep, that got broader and shallower on the other side, until it was just a step down from the forest floor. The ground was sandy and thick with pine needles and newly fallen maple leaves just turning from green to gold. I threw the basketball down to my friend, who batted it directly back up at me, and I smacked it back down at him, until one of us missed.

Whenever I missed, my friend handed me up a few round, black berries, the size of large marbles, with a dull, velvety sheen. I had to eat them. They weren't bad, really, but kind of bland and chalky and creamy at the same time. The ball was a little bit flat and lumpy after a while, so we called it a day.

My friend handed me up the last of the berries and two tiny turtles. One was a rich green with a round, hard shell. The other had a soft leaf-shaped shell of pale yellow with brown speckles. I held the turtles in my hands, but suddenly they started to squirm. The turtle witch was coming, and they felt her call. But I couldn't let them go to her, or she'd put them in her soup, so I held on tight. The witch passed by within yards of me. She wore a tattered golden gown, brown and green and scarlet along the edges like the autumn leaves. She wore a tall, bony headdress draped in the same leafy silk. She sang a strange song, but she didn't seem to care that I was keeping my turtles from going to her. They were very small, and she'd have plenty of larger ones soon.

When it was safe for them again, I dropped down into the pit. There was a few inches of dark water at the deepest end, and I placed my turtles gently beside the pool. I walked out of the forest back to Rice campus. There was a Phils concert going on at Will Rice College, so I stopped to listen to that. When it was over, the audience and singers all sat down and pulled out copies of Anna Karenina, because there was going to be a lecture and reading workshop. I stayed for that, because I've never finished reading that book, and wanted to find out if other translations might be easier to read and enjoy than the one I have.

After a while, the lecture/workshop gave way to a jewelry market. I began to show my rings and bracelets to one of the vendors. I suddenly had about four rings on each finger of my right hand, some in enamel, some set with gems, in red and green and blue. I also had a bracelet that was a woven string of tiny chili peppers carved out of carnelian. But as I showed the woman all of this, the rings started to fall off of my fingers. A friend of mine who was passing by noticed I was upset about this, and he came and put an arm around me to comfort me. But all my rings fell off, and my bracelet fell to bits, and he held me while I cried.

He was working as an assistant band director at the University of Texas, so after I'd cried myself out and gathered up all my little carnelian peppers and rings that would not stay on, he invited me to come watch the band rehearse. I got as far as the bleachers, and then I woke up.

An Odd Hike ~ 11/16/2014

I dreamed I was hiking in Big Bend. The trail went past a farm with a black cow and a white horse, who followed me with friendly curiosity until it became clear I was going to feed them. Another hiker came in off a side trail at the foot of a steep, rocky slope, and asked where the trail went. I said that it went up to the main lodge area in the Chisos basin, but first it went by an older, more historic building that used to be the main lodge, but was now more of a retreat center.

Sure enough, after hiking up the slope, we could see the old lodge, looking like a Swiss chalet, across a glen. It had three steep roofs in a row and was painted pale yellow. There was a sort of lower arcade with shops and cafes, and a lot of young people were hanging around. The stairway down to the lower level was a wide, funnel shaped spiral, so that people going down started in slow circles, that tightened and sped up until they dropped down the last few feet spinning.

I went down the stair myself, and was dropped into a boat out on a mirror smooth bay of jade green water. There was another boat nearby, and we were all taking turns being catapulted out into the water. When it was my turn, I fell deep into the bay, surrounded by a green, hazy light. The water was warm, and felt thick and heavy against my skin. I rose slowly to the surface.

When my head broke into the air again, I was back at the retreat center in the mountains. I was in an upper arcade, open to the blue sky all around, beneath dark hardwood timber a-frame rafters the color of cherry amber. A white adobe Spanish mission perched nearby, its small black church bell tolling in a white arch. I walked across a narrow stone bridge to an octagonal viewing platform, under a red tile roof. There was a lovely view of mountains all around, and the sun setting golden in a rose and amethyst sky. I continued hiking up the mountains through thin patches of snow. The I woke up.

Reunion ~ 11/6/2014

I dreamed I was trapped in an old house and grounds, and was trying to get to my high school reunion. I planned my escape carefully, building a makeshift hot air balloon to float me out of the garret window and over the walls. It worked perfectly, and soon I was bobbing high up in the crystal and gold air of a gorgeous early autumn day, about an hour before sunset.

I got to the hotel convention complex where the reunion was being held, but I had an assignment beyond just reconnecting with old classmates.  See, I'd been in a rock band, and one of my former band mates, the only one who had gone on to become a famous musician, was also suspected of being a murderer. I was to keep an eye on him if I could, and report anything suspicious to my team.

It was hard to even recognize any of my former fellow musicians, since I hadn't had any contact in years. I'd left the band to go to college, and they'd been angry with me, because they wanted to keep it going. I decided the best place to hang out to watch for them was the cafeteria, because everyone loves free food, right? I saw two of the guys come in, and they noticed and recognized me, and were cordial, so that was nice. I had a hard time remembering which was which. They'd worn their hair different in high school, but now they were the same height and build, and had the same short, dark, springy hair, peppered with gray.

Then the person of interest came in, and since he was still a semi-famous rocker, he made quite a stir. He had long curly strawberry blond hair, blue eyes, a narrow, pointed face, and an intense, almost manic gaze. He saw us, but completely ignored us, and went right through the cafeteria and on to the hall where the opening ceremonies were about to begin.

After that, we all went to our hotel rooms, and I spent some time snooping around the hallways, trying to figure out where he might be, and how I could make some sort of contact or establish any sort of surveillance. But suddenly it was morning, so I had to go get ready for the day's activities.

At some point, I was sitting with some other friends, when I heard our old music, coming from a stage nearby.  They'd gotten the band back together, but had someone else singing my back ups. This made me really sad, but when I looked over, I noticed a funnel cloud developing in the darkening sky. I pointed and called out, and everyone started scrambling for safety.

I couldn't get into any of the shelters, and now a second funnel cloud was appearing. I began climbing the walls and stairwells of the hotel, scrambling like a monkey to get to a safe place I knew of.  I dropped down into a hidden courtyard, and dashed through the thick metal door of a windowless room.  My mom and sister were in there already, safe, and I slammed the door shut behind me.

It turned out, the only way to solve the mystery and get out of this room was to work a crossword puzzle.  My sister had started, in pen, and had gotten five of the six clues she'd worked wrong, so I got mad at her and took it away.  I was halfway through when I woke up.

Intrigue on the High Seas ~ 11/4/2014

I dreamed I was in a muppet movie. I was a detective trying to figure out who was trying to sink the pirate ship we were sailing around the Caribbean. Miss Piggy and Janice were mermaids so I sent them out on underwater reconnaissance, and to interrogate any sailors they might come across.

I went below decks to talk with our passengers, Drs. Gregory House and Lisa Cuddy. House was in the theater, ensconced in one of the plush red velvet chairs. He supposed to be writing his regular editorial column for the New York Times, and Cuddy was trying to get him to be more persuasive and less insulting. The editor came out of his office to put in his two cents. House launched into a compelling, if vitriolic, rant, and the editor said THAT was why he hired him, to write like that, not just to castigate people who agreed with the opposing view without offering any supporting points for his own. I decided that, while we didn't know WHO was trying to sink us, House might be the reason WHY.

The mermaids were back by then, and I reviewed video footage from their hidden cameras. I could see the satiny white sand of the seafood, and the turquoise water all around, and, scattered here and there, bits of explosive devices and shipwreck debris. This gave me the clues I needed to determine, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the culprit was...

A pair of black, knee-high, trouser socks. And then I woke up.

Abuse ~ 10/29/2014

I dreamed there was this college football star, dark haired, green eyed, tall, handsome, talented, a kid with everything ahead of him. Only he'd been growing increasingly unstable, and was now prone to violent outbursts.

At some points I was Dr. House, and I suspected neurological issues. I was working on gaining his trust, giving him football related gifts. But I was getting them from a shadow box his mother had made of mementoes from his high school football days. I considered it a symptom that he didn't recognize them.

At other points, I was his mother. I was deep in denial that my son would ever do or say the awful things reported of him. I tried to rationalize it as stress and irritability because of the pressure of college, and exaggeration by people that wanted to sabotage his career. But I also lived in fear of what would happen if he realized Dr. House was tricking him, giving as gifts things that were already his own.

And I was also the girlfriend he had started abusing. I was afraid to be alone with him. I wanted to leave, but felt guilty because maybe he was just sick. I felt weak for staying when he bullied and insulted me for the smallest things, so I was starting to think the abuse was something I deserved, for my inadequacy and disloyalty. His mother never believed me, and was upset that I'd called in the doctor. I was still in love with the man I'd met and started dating, but I was terrified of what he had become, and I wasn't sure at all which person he really was.

And somewhere in there I woke up.

Restroom and Campground Inspector ~ 10/21/2014

I dreamed I was hiking across Texas, inspecting public campgrounds, and especially their bathrooms.  I had a spreadsheet I was marking things off on and everything.  Most facilities were unisex, but my dad was with me to help out when there was a men's room to be inspected.

The Texas Renaissance Festival had three different campgrounds, each with their own bathroom.We finished those, and set off into the woods.  We got to a large rocky ridge, and I started climbing up with the help of one of my exes. We got to the top, and the view was spectacular. To the left you could see all the way to the canyon where the Mississippi cut through, and far off ahead, past the woods and grasslands, you could see the ocean.

There were lots of tourists admiring the scenery, but I was pretty much terrified.  The ridge was only about six feet wide, slightly domed, and the ground felt spongy under my feet.  I couldn't keep my balance and kept finding myself leaning toward the sheer drop on the other side. My ex had to keep hauling me back, and when I tried to just sit down, I found myself stumbling to the very brink, and staring down into a three hundred foot drop before he hauled me back. After that I climbed back down.

Next, we hiked to La Grange, where Momo's house had become the center of a campground and picnic area the family would rent out.  The bathrooms of her house had each been expanded into large locker rooms. It was too late when I got there to inspect, and all the bedrooms were full, so I slept on a pallet in the biggest bathroom.

The next day I checked out all the bathrooms, and they were each very nice and clean. I went out to look at the campground, and found a large concrete and tin-roofed picnic shelter FULL of a Cajun family reunion.  Each branch of the family had a different thing that they'd yell when you called their name or said "Cajun". Like, "Who dat!" or "SOOIE!" or "Yeah, you right!" It was a boisterous and pretty entertaining sight.

They all seemed happy with the facilities, so I went back inside, where a bunch of little girls were just waking up from a princess sleep over. A gymnastics instructor from Jamaica was giving them morning yoga lessons. They were all super little, and each wearing Disney princess pajamas. Dad stayed there to help out with cleaning up after the Cajuns, and I set off to continue my task.

I hiked west and eventually found myself in a combination hipster coffee bar and pet shop. The pet shop part was only open during the week, so at the moment it was a coffee bar, and there were a couple of guys with guitars and one with a banjo jamming as people sat around everywhere on cushions and low chairs. There were tiny rose and green canaries and aquariums of lizards and turtles, a big cage of guinea pigs, and a television showing puppies from the local shelter, available for adoption.

I had run into the Jamaican gymnastics instructor again, and we were singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," which fit perfectly with what the guys were playing. And then I woke up.

Hotel Stay ~ 10/18/2014

I dreamed I was a world class ballerina gymnast. I was in New Orleans for a huge competition. I was the only girl there who wasn't part of a big, famous school. It was just me and my coach/manager/body guard. I finished my performance and won first place, and my coach brought me news that someone who was stalking me was in town and threatened to kill me. Coach got me a suite on one of the highest floors of a big, fancy hotel on Canal Street.

Every time I went out, I felt like someone was following me, and I'd rush to lock myself in the room. Then one day when I was out, a woman sort of fell down in front of me. She had what looked like a Kennedy half dollar buried between two of her cervical vertebrae. There it was, a half circle of silver metal sticking out of her neck, surrounded by a thin line of blood. It seemed like someone must have fired it at her with some weird sort of disk gun.

The woman was tall and thin, with short blond hair. She reminded me of Missy Crider, a television actor I've seen in a few shows. She got up and started feeling at her neck, but I insisted she leave the coin in and let a doctor extract it. I helped her to my hotel while dialing 911, and, when I got her there, shouted for the front desk to take whatever other emergency action they needed to.

Half an hour later, help still hadn't arrived. I found out that the front desk had never done anything, and my coach had remanded my 911 call. I was livid. I was yelling at everyone that this woman needed help. My coach tried to take me away to a side room, but then the woman's injury just sort of fell away from her neck. It was stage make up. She was actually an actress my coach had hired to somehow distract me, so he could get me into a room where my stalker was waiting.

I bolted up to my own suite, got there just ahead of my murderous stalker, and locked everyone out.  I fired my coach through the door, called the police on everyone, and went to bed. I stayed holed up in my room for another day, eating cookies and reading novels.  Somewhere along the way, I changed from being an athlete back to being a technical writer working for Shell.

On my way back from work the next evening, I realized I was supposed to have checked out of the hotel that morning, but had forgotten. I checked with the front desk. I had to wait in line, and the marble and gilt wood front desk was too tall for me to see the clerk. I climbed up the front to talk to the guy, and he said it was okay, they'd just charge me for the extra night. I decided since I was paying for it, I may as well spend one more night there. Then I woke up.

Weirdest First Date Ever ~ 10/17/2014

I dreamed I lived in an apartment that was in a part of the Death Star being rebuilt in the Forest of Endor. I was reading Discover magazine, trying to see if the error I'd written in about in the last issue had been mentioned and corrected in the latest one. It was New Years Eve, and I only barely remembered to get ready begore my blind date showed up.

He turned out to be much much younger than me, but he was good looking, spoke Latin, was interested in Discover, and didn't seem to mind the age difference, or that I'd decided to wear a black velvet cloak with red satin lining, so I figured I'd see how things went.

It was almost midnight when my mom showed up to drop off a stray dog she'd found and decided to give me. He was a big, shaggy white dog with a brown patch on his left shoulder. I could t think of a name for him. I couldn't even remember the name of my date. Then my mom said my baby sister was very sick, so dog, guy, and I all got in her truck to go back and be with the baby.

My family lived in an old stone keep with dank passages and torches on the walls. Late late at night I was keeping watch when the baby started crying. I raised her up, and she was burning with fever. I rushed with her down the hall to our parents' room.

Mom leaped up, took her from me, and we all rushed back to the truck to go to the hospital. We were about to turn off the highway when Mom slowed almost to a stop, grabbed the baby, and jumped out of the truck, continuing on foot.  I grabbed the steering wheel, and managed to keep us straight as we coasted to a stop, just past the turning.  I moved over into the driver's seat, backed us up a little, and turned off onto the road Mom had run down.

Unfortunately, there was a Megabus stop right at the turning, and dozens of people were milling around in the road, waiting for the bus.  I drove very slowly, honking at them to move. But they only yelled mean things back at me. I just kept driving, gently nudging them out of my way. By the time we got through the crowd, I couldn't see where my mom had gone.

After driving around for a bit in a panic, I finally found a place to park, and we started looking on foot. This was a good idea, because the dog set off at once in the right direction, and we followed him down a cut in the river bank to a wide meadow by the river, where an outdoor army hospital had been set up.  We found my mom and sister there, but Mom sent us away. She insisted I go swim in the river for a bit, so I did.  But when we got back, the hospital had been taken down, and even the indoor rooms, set up in an old warehouse nearby, were empty.

Then I could hear Mom calling from the truck.  The guy, the dog, and I went to find her, but my baby sister wasn't with her.  They had taken her into Castroville, so we were going there.  I was all dripping wet from the river. I had a change of clothes, but the guy was right there in the truck, and it was broad daylight, so I couldn't change.  Mom finally dropped me off at a La Madeleine just on the edge of town, and said to just go in and use their restroom. She was going on to the hospital.

Now, I hate just using a restroom at a business without buying something, but this La Madeleine was also a small inn, and had a few rooms upstairs. I went to see how much one would be for that night, because maybe it would come in handy, anyhow, if we needed to stay. But I was too dripping wet to feel acceptable in the lobby, so I finally did just rush to the back to find a restroom to change in.

This La Madeleine was actually a Mexican restaurant. The floors were terracotta tile, and the restroom stalls were free standing in the back seating area, wood frames painted turquoise blue.  No one was sitting in the back room, so I figured I'd be okay, even though the stall walls were short. I could look over them standing.  There were televisions mounted up in the corners of the ceiling.

As I was changing, I noticed they were showing some sort of gaucho games, taking place down in Guadalajara, where Mexican cowboys did all sorts of riding and roping tricks, along with more stylized things like the blanket toss. They each had 8 foot square, heavy, elaborately decorated blankets. They'd get them spinning over their heads like a pizza crust, then do high tosses in the air, and perform some sort of gymnastic move on the ground, leaping up just in time to catch the blanket and keep it spinning.

A man dressed in a matador outfit of black and silver was just getting his blanket, embroidered and jeweled in the pattern of the Mexican flag, up and spinning and in the air in his first toss, when I woke up.

TBTT#7 Perfect for Halloween ~ 3/19/2012

This one requires a bit of background.  My journal entry for March 19, 2012, recounts my night spent at the Myrtles Plantation, often described as the most haunted plantations in the country. I was there with several friends for my friend Jayna's bachelorette weekend. We stayed in a little cottage on the grounds. One of the most famous apparitions is of Chloe, a slave woman who worked in the house and allegedly poisoned the family's children with a birthday cake.

I dreamed all night that I was lying awake in bed, afraid that the haunts were coming.  At one point in my dream, a small, ghostly white puppy came over and wanted to play, and I reached to touch it.  It felt so real, and when I looked over at Nathalie, she said she could see it, too, but I knew it must be a ghost puppy, because it was playing tug'o'rope while hovering a foot off the ground.  Then I dreamed that I was lying stock still under the covers, knowing Chloe was in the room, but if I stayed still, she'd let me alone.  In all of these dreams, the details of the room itself and my sleeping arrangement, on my back or on my side, and Nathalie on the other bed, to the left of mine, were exactly true to reality.

Weird Hauntings ~ 10/15/2014

I dreamed my friend had this beautiful white tomcat with an orange patch on his left shoulder and enormous amber eyes. This cat did not like me at all. He hissed at me all the time. But my friend had a death in the family, and had to leave the cat with me, and suddenly we were best friends.

The cat went with me to look at the house I wanted to buy uptown. It was a modest but adorable double shotgun, painted bright royal blue with sky blue accents, on a huge lot. The only reason I could afford it was that most of the lot was taken up by a crumbling storage barn, also bright blue.

The cat and I were in the barn, trying to decide how much it would cost to demolish vs. renovate the thing when a hawk swooped down through the gaping, collapsed roof, landed at out feet, and started screeching and making little hopping runs to peck our legs. I stomped at it, ang it fluttered back, but then a large old hawk as big as an eagle, with pale, ragged feathers around his head and down his wings, swooped in and was even more aggressive. The cat had had enough of this, and darted forward, yowling. He ran the hawks off, and I bought the house.

Just in time, too. I went back to my grandmother's house, where I'd set up an office in the back room so I could work remotely. I was logged on to work when my mouse cursor started moving on its own. I just figured an IT person had taken control of my desktop by mistake while helping someone else on a call. But then the wireless mouse started to jerk in my hand, and one of the IT women came in to say that it wasn't coming from them. Then the mouse flew out of my hand and sailed around the room, pelting itself at our heads. It smacked me in the right temple as I jumped up, and we decided the room was haunted, and ran out.

I went back to my new blue house and met up with my dad in the old barn. He was doing some sort of sales work, and had agreed to set up shop out front, and start tearing down the barn when business got light.  When I got there, he was talking to a young naval officer that had stopped by. My dad was talking about his time in the Navy, and how he'd enlisted in 1927 and got out in 1934. That the reason he left, and the thing that still sticks with him, was the day he'd watched an officer take sacks of letters home, and just dump them in a refuse pit, instead of mailing them home.

I went into the house to say hello to my friends who were there to visit.  This included Cordelia Chase, from Buffy/Angel, Greg Sanders from CSI, my school friend Emily, and, over Facetime, our mutual school friend Lisa. We were going to do some work out in the yard, but suddenly we were getting pelted by these little barbed yew leaves that pierced our skin and made us feel bad. The weird thing is, there weren't any yew trees in my yard. Cordelia and some other blond girl, a friend of hers, started acting very oddly, because of the toxin, and went inside to drink water and sleep it off.

Greg tracked down and captured a talking rat that lived in the root ball of a a huge old tree in the middle of the yard. The tree was six feet across at the base, and the root ball rose out of the ground six feet high and at least ten across, all gnarly roots and packed in dirt. The rat was the leader of a colony that lived inside of it, and told us a story, handed down by the leaders from father to son, of a yew tree that had been planted when the house was built, centuries ago. It no longer stood in the yard, but a young woman had been murdered beneath it, and legend was that the spirit of evil had entered the tree, and lingered above the ground where its roots still rotted. That when new owners came, especially women, the yew tree's ghost, or the young woman's, would hurl these poisonous darts for a while, but that it would calm down eventually.

And then I woke up.

I Don't Think We're at Hogwarts Anymore ~ 10/7/2014

I dreamed I was at wizard college with Ron, Harry, and Hermione. I was there to solve a mystery and catch a killer. Everyone thought it was Harry, of course, until an attack put Ron in a wheelchair, possibly for life. I figured out who it was. The problem was going to be proving it.

See, the killer was a hugely popular young man, a few years ahead of most of his victims, good at his studies, no apparent motive... and he was using a time turner to establish his alibis. Most of the attacks happened while he was in full view, playing guitar out in the main quad.

So I spent a lot of time reading some subjects and pretending to be a college student, compulsively brushing my teeth because I had to use a regular brush and not my sonicare, and dealing with Ron's angst that I hadn't come sooner and solved the mystery before his attack. Then I woke up.

I Make a Lousy British Spy ~ 10/6/2014

I dreamed I was in Napoleanic France as some sort of spy. I had the powdered wig and big skirts and beauty patch and everything. (Yes, I know I was a bit out of date on that.) I was being shown around by some sort of count. We were buying a dessert sold in corner shops that was a kind of cake ball with a gelato center. I dug around in my reticule for the coins I needed, but all I could find was American and British paper notes. The count paid for me and rushed me back to my rooms until we could get my money sorted out.

I decided I needed a shower. My bathroom was nice enough, but it was hung with all these curtains, and I couldn't find a light switch. I pulled enough curtains aside to get some light from the window, and was brushing my teeth, when a bunch of my friends came in and sat down on some bleachers. I decided I didn't need a shower badly enough to take one in public.

Instead my friends asked me to show them around Houston, so we all went out. I drove them around the Rice and West U areas, then pointed out our super colorful downtown. We were going to get TexMex for dinner, so I left them at an Astros game down at Reliant, an went to run some errands. But I kept finding myself driving on the wrong side of the road, and then I woke up.

Wealth, Weddings, and Jumping out of Airplanes ~ 10/3/2014

I dreamed I was super rich and lived in an enormous house with a butler and a sort of cook/personal assistant. The butler lived in a two bedroom suite with a huge, luxurious bathroom. My PA and I had selected smaller but just as luxurious suites. Everything was done in white and cream and gray and black with pewter fixtures.

We had just moved in, so I went down to check out the kitchen. There was a huge pantry stocked with a dozen types of cereal, two or three boxes of each. Just then, with a loud, bell tower-like knell, the doorbell rang. I paused to examine the sounder, mounted high on the kitchen wall. It was a convex disk of bronze, about a foot across, with a deep green and black patina of age, carved with a bull in the center, and raised Greek characters around the edges.

I went up to the entrance hall, then, to greet my guests. Two of my friends had come to be married from my huge house and grounds. I was in the wedding party. The wedding was the next day. My jobs were to polish the gold and silver cutlery and hang up these clear plastic file trays near the doors and fill them with programs.

I got to work on the silver. I had this polish full of gold flecks that would adhere only to gold, but would abrade and polish silver, so this was perfect, since the cutlery had gold accents on it. This would brighten those up, too.  Then I found a bunch of religious statuettes in soft colors, with gold trim, so I ran the polish along the gold, and they brightened up, too.  But after I finished that, it had taken all night, and I still hadn't hung the program holders, and the guests were going to be coming soon, so we decided to just stack the programs on a table near the door.

Then the wedding party all went to get dressed.  The bride was wearing a very pale pink with white lace, and the bridesmaids were wearing black dresses with bright pink and purple accents, in a 1970s retro style, up around the neck line. I, for some reason, was supposed to wear white, but my shoes were black and shiny, and decorated with foot-long strings of blindingly bright pink feathery puffballs. Every color and detail meant something, but I kinda didn't get it.

But then there was an emergency. One of the musicians was stuck across town. So I pulled some of my super-wealthy strings, and went over in a small plane to get him.  But on the way back, he fell out of the open door, and wasn't wearing his safety vest with parachute.  I had mine on, so I dove out of the door after him, grabbed hold of him, and pulled my chute.  I knew we'd be to heavy for it, but it would hopefully still slow and control our fall.  I angled us out away from town, and we landed in the ocean, not too far out.

We swam back into town, got back to my house, put on dry clothes, and the wedding went off without another hitch.  We were all curling up to go to sleep that night, camped out in the big ball room like a church lock-in, but instead of falling asleep, I woke up.

Welsh Independence ~ 9/29/2014

I dreamed Wales was fighting to remain independent from Britain. I was a double agent, pretending to be on the side of unification, but really working for the Welsh. The English had occupied a castle near the border, a massive pile of grey slate in a golden field. I entered the castle just before the gates closed at sunset, in a rain shower that turned the stone slick and black in the torchlight.

After midnight, I let in some of the regiment that was waiting outside, and we succeeded in rescuing some of our men imprisoned in the castle, and stealing armaments, but then we had to get out. As the main body of our troop was retreating across the plain, I rode up a small rise, and saw that the British were coming, I called out to warn them, then dashed into a dense grove on the back side of the hill, and worked my way, from copse to copse, into the craggy, forested terrain, away from the troop, because, above all, I could not be caught, and I was a spy, not a warrior.

I made my way back into the towns and cities, and found myself outside of the big Kroger's on Buffalo Speedway in Houston.  The store clerk from the British Isles shop was there, and she greeted me with a hard kiss on the mouth, which utterly confused me.  Then she shape-shifted into one of my ex-boyfriends, and he laid his head on my shoulder, and I patted his hair, trying to figure out which, if either, persona was real.

He went on his way, and I went into the store. I needed to buy a small oven, but I was also interested in some tiny, counter-top clothes washers that could only handle, like, one sheet at a time, but could sit on the counter and drain into the sink. In the end, I think I only bought a big box of cereal and a soda.

I left the store, and tried to go home, but then I turned into Sansa Stark, and I was kidnapped by Little Finger's men, and taken to another castle.  They insisted that I had to marry Little Finger, and if I tried to run or protested in public, they'd kill me.  I was very scared, but when it came to the point, I both protested in public, right at the altar, and then tried to run. I got away, and was trying to find a good place to hide when I woke up.

On the Run, Asked to Prom, etc. ~ 9/27/2014

I dreamed I was visiting a flat at the top of a tall building, full of beautiful art, and as I left, I witnessed two men trying to break into the building to burgle the flat. They saw me, and I had to go on the run because they planned to come after me. I was driving away down a slick gray road through a parched field of golden grass, speckled with silver gray puddles from a fresh rain, under a sky of clear watery blue streaked with low, damp clouds.

But I was going to be too easy to follow on the road, so I set off down the river on a raft with a nice canvas canopy. I had a big box I was fillin with presents for my mom and sister as I went, including some decorative flags to hang from trees that had Winnie the Pooh characters and forest creatures on them. I got those from a colorful little shop perched along the riverside. There was also some jewelry in the box, and a memory card with pictures of the robbers. I also bought my mom a pet duck.

After I got home, one of my guy friends asked me out to prom. So I was trying to get ready for that, but people kept coming in and out of the room where I was trying to take a bath and change, and the bath water kept going cold. Then I had to go to the hospital instead, and I had a baby girl who had long red hair, and I named her Ivy.  Then I woke up.

Social Work, Floods, and Other Disasters ~ 9/25/2014

I dreamed I'd been given the care of two children. They'd been abused and neglected. They were undernourished, mentally underdeveloped, and would randomly hit each other with sticks and belts. They would never look me in the eye when I tried to talk to them. Somehow someone from the future showed me their skulls. There were all sorts of healed fractures, some sort of discolored pitting caused by severe malnutrition, and one of them had a hole from an untreated cyst. On the one hand, the skulls were adult-sized, but the damage was still awful. It was my job to try to prevent their lives from being this bad.

I was trying to help ease them into a branch of their family who loved and wanted them, but was very poor, and didn't know how to cope with their behavior. Their aunt and grandmother and older brother had all cut off their poor excuse for a mother, but they all worked long hours to make ends meet. I guess I was some sort of super nanny, social worker and child psychologist all in one. I moved in with them to see to the kids. I had a breakthrough when I got them to look me in the eye and really listen when I explained that hitting each other was wrong.

But then a huge storm struck, and the lake began to rise. I looked out the back door and saw the gray, choppy water coming up the backyard. There was a huge wave far out on the lake, an I knew it would swamp the house. We had to evacuate. I put the children into an old shopping cart and started pushing them uphill, up the road, and we got separated from the rest of the family.

One of the places I ended up looking for them was a Rice baseball game being held at the New Orleans horse racing track. The family wasn't there, but a newly-single old crush of mine was, with his father an brother. They were all a bit sauced, and wanted me to stay and had a drink. When my crush tried to kiss me, I told him we could discuss this some other time when he was sober, if he wanted, but right now, he was drunk and I was in a hurry.

We finally met back up with the kids' family at a Mexican restaurant, and my boss was there. The family gave me a glowing recommendation, and showed us three numbered grocery bags that had won them a huge sweepstakes that the grocery chain had put on. They had millions of dollars now, and were going to be able to hire full time care to help with the kids, a nice new house, good food, and everything, so I was to move on to another job. Then I woke up.

A Guardian Angel Who's Always Lost and Late ~ 9/23/2014

I dreamed that everywhere I was going, I was running late and getting lost. Also, I was a sort of guardian angel, so this was a particularly bad thing. I was supposed to be watching over Sookie Stackhouse, who was dating my friend Chip. I went to a wake Chip was at. Everyone was discussing a set of multimedia shelves the departed had left to Chip, because they always reminded them of him. I wanted to ask if this was because they knew Chip liked music and movies, or if it was because the shelves were five feet six inches wide, and Chip was five feet six inches tall. But that seemed impolite, and Sookie had already left, so I needed to find her.

I drove off, after her car, but I just couldn't catch up and it was getting dark, so I decided to park the car and fly. First I flew west into the last of a golden sunset, out over a wooded countryside. But it was so easy to fly west, and flying felt so good that I stopped paying attention and flew miles too far. I turned back, but it was much harder to fly east, and I sank to the ground.

I kept running and jumping, trying to take off again, but I knew it would be easier if I could find something high to jump from. So I followed rutted dirt farm roads through the trees until I found an enormous old gray mansion. I snuck in and crept through ballrooms and billiard rooms and dark upper corridors, until I found my way to a long rooftop terrace. I ran the length of it, jumped into the air, and managed to fly back into the city.

I landed in a shopping plaza area, paved in red brick, with dark iron stairs and walkways from building to building, on the ground and across the upper stories. The sun was rising, and I'd overshot again. I wasn't supposed to be seen feathered and flying, and every time a sunbeam hit my wings, there was this choral major chord plus second sound, so I had to get out of there fast.

I flew back out to the country. I'd completely lost track of Sookie by now. I crashed into a barn, and found Elvis living in there. He'd gone kinda crazy, and didn't make any sense. Then some other guy came in, raving about something he called "the blush" that he was looking for. There were stacks of what looked like potatoes all over the barn. hiding large bits of farm machinery. There was also a bright turquoise vintage Cadillac with white roof and fins. Apparently the potato stacks kept everything warm.

The new guy started rummaging in a potato stack, and all the potatoes fell down, and behind them were piles and piles of big pink apples. THESE, apparently, were "the blush." Blush apples were bright pink on the outside, and pale pink on the inside, and super delicious. Fascinating as all this was, I had places to be, so I left him and Elvis discussing apples, and went out to figure out my next move.

I decided to just go to my grandmother's house, since it was nearby.  I found my mom and Momo there, getting ready for Saturday night mass.  They told me to hurry up, and I could come with them.  So I went down the hall to put on church clothes, and then I woke up.

Moving On, Going Back, Making Changes ~ 9/21/2014

I dreamed I had taken a summer internship somewhere, and was living in a furnished apartment that was completely bland and beige. I took vacation to visit friends in Seattle.  While I was there, we went to a bunch of parades. I learned about an engineering program that gave classes on a streetcar as it wended its way through the city. I decided to go back to school and get my Masters in electrical engineering from this program.  I started worrying about how to move my couch from New Orleans.  Then, during one of the parades, I was handed a two year old boy with blond hair and green eyes.  He was now my responsibility to care for and raise, and he immediately put his arms around my neck, with tears in his eyes, and said his tummy hurt.

So we sat and watched the parade, with clowns and floats and balloons, but it was very strange because the parades were all at night, you watched them all with your assigned group, and all the colors were very drab.  I rubbed my little boy's tummy for him and asked him questions about what he had eaten and how much it hurt, trying to decide if he needed to go to the doctor, or just needed to eat something that wasn't cotton candy. And I pondered the school books I'd have to buy and how much rent I could afford to get the bigger place we'd now need. And then I woke up.

Scotland, the Marigny, Jacobites, and Time Traveling Spaceships ~ 9/18/2014

I dreamed I was Clair from The Outlander books, preparing for the Jacobite uprising. I went to hide out for a while in an artists and musicians hostel in the Marigny.  There was a large spiderweb down the middle of the room that had trapped hundreds of gleaming red ladybugs. The walls were a terra cotta orange, and the woodwork was white. My bed was against one wall, beneath a window that faced a rocky, green hillside. The front window looked across a small yard out onto the street. There was a fountain that was part art installation. Several times a day, human mannequins would change out shifts, each posing in a foam costume depicting grossly overweight water deities, in shades of flesh and purple and sea green. All of them, male and female, had too many arms and torsos, stuck in odd places, with wispy fins interspersed, and much jiggly flab throughout. And little gray barnacles.

I was sharing the room with three of the statue standers, and they got really rowdy and beery, so I went for a walk.  I sat with my friend Jayna for a while, and talked to her about the multimedia project a bunch of the traditional jazz singers, swing dancers, and local artists were working on.  There were fourteen people involved, but they still each had to raise $20,000 to produce the show, so they were trying to get more people. Chance, a swing instructor, came by to talk with her about which songs she'd be singing, so he could start thinking about choreography, so I went out walking some more.  I noticed through the window of my room that my roommates were all dead. I was going to call 911, but then a spaceship showed up to take me back to 1745.

It wasn't quite time for the uprising to start, though, so Jamie was introducing me to more of his family, and I practiced signing my letters, "Lady Broch Tuarach." Some of the men wanted to go hunting in the future, and needed a place to stay, so I told them I'd show them my orange room.  But I warned them that it had been a few weeks, so it was going to smell really bad if the bodies hadn't been removed.

It turns out the bodies had been removed, and the room was now out in the country, great for hunting.  I noticed that there were some parcels left for me in a big potted cactus out in the little yard, but there were two snakes curled up around them.  I got a long glass rod and started poking around to get the snakes to move.  One of them I identified as harmless, so I lifted it out with the rod, and it slithered grumpily away.  The other turned out to be an albino copperhead, but while I was trying to figure out what to do with this more dangerous snake, some little dogs came up and started harassing it.

The snake curled itself up into a strange sort of crab, and scuttled sideways out of the pot. The little dogs chased it off down the yard, and I was able to collect my parcels. But before I could open them, I woke up.

Turtles and Graves ~ 9/10/2014

I dreamed I was driving through Texas, and stopped to stay at a friend's parents' house overnight. I couldn't sleep very well, though, because his mom's two turtles kept coming in and knocking things over. I got up to put them out, but they had climbed up on a shelf where I couldn't reach them. Then one fell off the shelf into the bed and messed on the sheets, and the other (the bigger one) walked off the shelf and landed on my left foot, which HURT. So I got fed up and went for a walk.

It was very dark outside, and I found what looked like a half-exhumed grave. There was a white shape swooping down from sky to ground just on the edge of vision. I decided it was a hunting owl, and I was worried that it would snatch up the turtles, so I hoped they hadn't followed me out. I was getting uneasy at the eerie atmospherics, so I turned to go back to the house. Sure enough, I saw the smaller turtle slip into the grave to hide from the owl, so I scooped him up and took him home.

After putting the turtle back, I went outside again. The sun had come up, and around the side of the house, in the shade, I found a dying dog. I called for help, and the people who came told me there'd been an accident, and they'd taken his little boy away to the hospital, but they'd forgotten about the dog. He wasn't hurt much at all, but he'd been lying there where his boy left him, and he hadn't eaten anything for days. I gave him some water and told him his boy was soon much better, and missed him, and he needed to get well so he could visit, so he ate some food and they took him home to his family.

My mom and sister picked me up, then, and we started our road trip. We didn't get very far before Mom realized she needed to stop for gas. While Mom pumped gas, I walked over to where some friends of  mine were digging up old graves. It was part archaeological dig, part relocating them to expand the gas station parking lot. One of my friends was coming off shift, so we offered to give him a ride home. I guess he thought there was too much stuff in the back where my sister was sitting with some of our luggage, so he apologized, then twisted his six foot plus frame into a strange, square paperclip sort of shape to fit between me and the car door. Mom made a three point turn down a row of graves, and we got back on the road, and then I woke up.

White Whale ~ 9/5/2014

I dreamed I was visiting my friend Katy up in Michigan. We went to this big warehouse club sort of place, painted dark purple with fluorescent accents inside. It wasn't a music and dancing sort of night club. It was more an arcade games and laser tag afternoon club. A bunch if us were there, and we ran into Adam, the lab tech from CSI: New York. Apparently some older kids had been bullying a little boy, and Adam was telling them off. Some of the bigger boys were already bigger than Adam, and they were starting to close in around him while he scolded, but when we showed up, they took off. The little boy's family came up then, and the rest of us, including Adam, went back to Katy's house.

That evening I got to talking to one of the guys in the group about Pantone color numbers. He claimed to be able to describe any color, given the Pantone number. I said that I could do that with HTML hex color codes, which is not really that hard, but he was impressed. I went to Google Pantone to learn more, but when I hit enter on the search, instead of a results page, some sort of automatic ad opened up, for a band called Kentonix, full of swirling, psychedelic colors and techno music. That happened every time, and I couldn't make it stop, so I gave up.

I went up to the room I was going to sleep in. Katy's house was laid out exactly like my godparents' house, only instead of being on the ground floor, it was on the second story, up above a garage and storage area, and a big balcony off the side, along the bedrooms. I stopped at the bookshelves in the hall to talk to Katy. She was putting away some books she'd ordered. She handed me a copy of Moby Dick that she'd accidentally ordered along with the book she'd really wanted, which was a retelling of Moby Dick, by David Sedaris, involving a white trout.

I took Moby Dick, since I'd been wanting to read it again, but instead of going to bed, I realized I was kind of worried about Adam, who had been really moody and quiet since the incident at the club. I went looking for him, and found him propped up against the arm of a love seat in the living room, wrapped up in a bunch of white blankets.  All the lights were off, so I sat down on the floor beside the love seat and whispered as quietly as I could to ask if he was awake. He said he was, and I asked if he'd like to talk, or if he'd like me to read aloud to him, since I was about to start reading Moby Dick.  He said the latter would be great, so I reached up to turn on the light.

When the light came on and I opened my eyes after letting them adjust a bit, he was gone.  So I took his place on the love seat and began to read.  My phone rang, then, and the caller ID said it was Adam, so I answered.  The connection was bad, so I went out on the porch. It was covered with slush, and the yard was white with snow. It turned out it wasn't the Adam I'd expected, but some other guy named Adam, who claimed to be the roommate of one of the sing dance instructors/musicians that I've taken lessons from here in New Orleans.  He claimed they were up in Canada, but they'd gotten into an accident, and were stuck, and had lost all their papers and money.  He asked me if I could wire them ten thousand dollars.

Now, I remembered this was a scam someone had tried to pull on my grandmother once, using my name, so I told him that I barely knew the dancer/musician, didn't know him at all, so it was crazy of him to ask me for so much money, even if I could help him out.  But that I couldn't, because I didn't have that much money to send him, so I was sorry, good bye.  After I hung up, I also woke up.

Back to School ~ 9/1/2014

I dreamed there were a bunch of swing dancers from all over the country staying in New Orleans for a dance festival.  I had just been with a friend to meet some of them where they were staying in the Marigny. I expressed a wish that there was such a thing as a sideways elevator that I could just ride home.  Someone asked if they hadn't just built such a thing down Burgundy, so we went to go check it out.

Sure enough, there was a sort of series of trams at about between second and third story height that ran up and down the street. You had to get off now and then, and catch another tram, because they didn't want to remove obstructions like balconies. So you'd exit one tram onto someone's balcony, go to the other side, and catch another tram there.

At one point, around Governor Nichols St., we had to get off on the third level of an empty parking garage.  While we were waiting, we noticed a woman and a little girl surrounded by people. They weren't hurting her or holding onto her in any visible way, but you got the distinct feeling they had her immobilized there somehow, waiting for something. You also got the distinct impression that she and the little girl were bad news. Not quite right. Since I was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this was, of course, totally my business, so I went over to see what was up.

The woman was wearing a brilliant magenta sheath dress with long detached  sleeves, made from some sort of super stretchy clingy fabric. She had honey blond hair and bright green eyes. The little girl had a super poofy ruffly little dress on, and a lacy bow in her blond ringlets. She looked like she had to be the woman's daughter, but she didn't seem... real, somehow. I decided the woman was probably a witch who had cast a spell to disguise her familiar as a little girl instead of a crow or goblin or whatever it was.

I noticed that the people surrounding them were keeping their distance, and would only touch the woman, when they had to, through the fabric, never directly on her skin. Just about then, she saw us, probably because the "little girl" had noticed us and communicated our presence to her.  I was going to tell the people I was with to stay back, but one of the guys jumped forward, convinced she really was an innocent woman in distress.  As he ran to her, she pulled off one of the long sleeves, so that when he took her arm to lead her to safety, he touched her skin. He began to struggle, then, but couldn't pull his hand away. The woman threw her arms around him, and he began to smoke and sizzle as her form, and that of the little girl, began to bubble and distort and fade. They all melted into mist, seeping off down through the concrete.

The people who had been guarding her all sort of shrugged, glared at us, and dispersed, each going their own way, along with the other swing dancers.  But I noticed some of my fellow high school students creeping around the shadows in one corner of the parking garage, which was, of course, attached to our high school. I followed them down, across the faculty lot and over a grassy bank with a few trees, into the gymnasium.

When I got there, the students were nowhere to be seen, but there were boxes and boxes and boxes filling the gym floor.  I went to find my boyfriend and a couple of his friends to help me investigate. We opened a few of the boxes carefully, and found rolls and rolls of duct tape and stacks and stacks of business cards. I noticed, then, that the sides of the rolls and stacks all had series of hieroglyphics written on them. We ducked down behind the stacks of boxes when we heard the doors opened, and stealthily watched Mr. Flutey, the principal, carrying in another stack of boxes, with no help of any kind, even though they must be heavy.

The guys I was with were busy shuffling up the business cards and ruining the sequence of characters, since they decided that would foil whatever plot or spell casting was about to happen using the hieroglyphs. There wasn't much we could do with the tape. I wanted to leave, then, maybe taking a box or two with us for further examination by Giles, but people kept coming in, bringing more boxes.  They were all students and faculty, but their eyes were empty and they walked stiffly, like something other than their own wills was controlling them.

Finally the coast seemed clear, and the guys had all picked up boxes to carry away. That's when I noticed that they all had fangs, and had been turned into vampires.  They proceeded to completely ignore me, and began to cart out box after box as I hunted around looking for some sort of weapon. The air grew dim and I started to smell smoke. Flames licked around the edge of the gym, so I grabbed a box myself and ran to get out, but by then there was a steady line of people coming in and out, carting the boxes away, and they kept pushing me back into the gymnasium. And then I woke up.

Housewarming ~ 8/25/2014

I dreamed I moved into a two bedroom apartment with my best friend and two strangers. The apartment was in a complex full of college kids moving back for school in a quaint seaside town with a booming oil economy.

Things were going okay, until one of the roommates left the door open and the stereo on, and everyone decided we were having an open house party. Soon there were people everywhere. One guy started handing out recruiting flyers for Shell. I told him that, one, I was also a contractor with Shell, so I didn't need one, and two, I did not at all appreciate him handing out flyers in my home without asking our permission.

He left, but then I noticed a guy I'd been involved with years ago was lounging in one corner flirting with everyone and totally charming my best friend and roommates. I made a mental note to point out his wedding ring to them at some point, in case they'd missed it. Also, there was some sort of reality television dating game in town, as well as a pirate gathering. Real pirates, not just people in costumes. So the guys trooping into our place got steadily more difficult to deal with politely.

Then one of the new roommates whom I didn't know well came and said her dad needed to stay with us for a while. I said that was no problem. Then she said she'd gone ahead and cleared some space in my closet for his clothes. This in spite of the fact that my closet was not in the room that he'd be staying in, and that there were almost-empty closets all over the house.

I went to see what she'd moved and the answer was... Everything. All of my clothes we're gone. I asked her where she'd put them, and she kept saying, well, over there, of course, rolling her eyes and acting like I was making a big deal out of nothing. But when I'd look where she said, I'd find someone else's things, instead, or I'd find, like, three of my long sleeves shirts that I couldn't wear because it was summer, and she'd be like, see, there are your clothes, what's your problem?

I yelled at her that I'd have been happy to help find room for her father's things, even if it had to be my closet instead of one of the empty ones, but that she'd been completely in the wrong to go move all of my clothes and not tell me where they were. I heard her talking on the phone with her mom, having locked herself in the bathroom to get away from me, and telling her mom what a nightmare roommate she had.

I continued to search every closet, trying to find my clothes, threatening to either cut her face or kick her out if she didn't just put all my things back right now, and my friend kept waffling about whether she and I should have chosen the other bedroom instead of the one we were settled in, and pirates and hopeful bachelors continued to traipse in and out, and the ex continued to flirt with everyone in sight, until I woke up.

Dating Game ~ 8/22/2014

I dreamed I was trying to start dating again. The first guy I went out with was quite attractive, and he drove and fixed up these really slick and gorgeously fast cars. Our dates were going well enough until our nightmarishly (literally!) bad first kiss. His mouth tasted like vomit, there was entirely too much of his tongue for that early in the game, and I really wasn't into him enough yet to enjoy kissing him anyway. Stupid me and my needing an emotional connection to enjoy physical intimacy, even in my dreams.

The second guy was worse, though. He took me out to a wonderful Argentinian steakhouse, and ordered a perfect red wine. But when I cut myself off after one glass, he said, "You're coming home with me either way. Just get drunk if that will make it easier." Check, please!

The third guy I never actually went out with.  He wanted the location of our first date to be a surprise, but I explained that I needed to be able to drive myself there, meet him in public, and all. He got super offended that I didn't trust him, after meeting him through such a highly reputed dating website. So no first date there, and then I woke up.

TBTT#6 Geography Schmeography ~ 3/13/2012

I dreamed that on the far eastern coast of Texas, a rocky jut of land surrounded by turbulent ocean was foreign soil, both Canadian and Mexican. The limestone of its cliffs was honeycombed with shrines to la Virgen de Guadalupe, and the national anthem was O Canada, or, actually, the tune of Hail Poetry with the words to O Canada, except Hail Poetry was the melody, and the tune to O Canada was the alto line. My Dad came back and moved us all there, and we all lived happily ever after, speaking Spanish and singing Hail Canada.

Epic Fantasy Time ~ 8/19/2014

I dreamed that my sister, a cousin, and a couple of my friends were trying to find hiding places in a house in the woods. There was someone outside who was playing a game. If she found us within five minutes after coming in, she would prod us with a weapon that would shock us or hurt us somehow, but not kill us, and would also take a large amount of money away from us.

I came up with a plan to trick her. Four of us hid in a small bathroom that had a window up near the ceiling. You could see into it from farther up the slope behind the house, where she was, and we made sure parts of ourselves were visible, though we were mostly hidden. It worked. We saw that she saw us, then when she went around to come in the door, we all scattered to better hiding spots.

It actually took a few hours for a couple of my friends to come out of hiding. I think they'd fallen asleep. One of them came in from the garage eventually, and started being super huggy and snuggly, which I didn't mind because I found him quite attractive. But then another friend brought in evidence that two women, twin half-elves, had been killed in one of the sheds.  They left some sort of sweet smelling blue-green residue in the vent of the window unit air conditioner as they perished.

The only person who could have been out in the sheds was my newly snuggly friend. It turned out that he, to, was part elvish, and knew that the sisters had hidden a magic ring in my house. He had tried to get them to tell him where it was, but they wouldn't, so he killed them. Then he tried to get closer to me so he'd have the opportunity to search the house. He showed absolutely zero remorse or fear now that he'd been caught, and clearly planned to stay put and find that ring, no matter how many of us he needed to kill. I didn't give a shit about magic rings, and was completely devastated by his betrayal, so I just told him to have a blast and left.

My sister and cousin and I met up with some more cousins, and went on a helicopter tour of Scotland. It was a big, fancy helicopter that had suites and bathrooms and was basically a very posh house on rotors.  We stopped at a Walgreen's because I needed shampoo, but it took me a long time to find my brand, and while I was waiting to ask, I made friends with some folks there buying school supplies. A fifteen year old boy was talking about how his friends made fun of him because he still like to color with crayons, but he showed me some of his work, and he was an amazing artist. I told him he had a gift, and confided that I, too, loved to buy myself big boxes of crayons to color with, and how the very first thing I ever did upon opening them was put them all in rainbow order.

We left the Walgreen's and continued up into the highlands.  But we went through a sort of door into the past somewhere along the way, and found ourselves in the early 18th century, with kilted clansmen battling red-coated Englishmen here and there.  And here we were terrifying all of them with our gigantic helicopter.  We wanted to save a man and a woman named Jaime and Clair who seemed to be in trouble, and were perched atop a pillar of rock with sheer sides that only we could really get to. We landed, and there was just barely enough room for that, but we couldn't figure out how to get their horse in and out of our helicopter. Especially since it kept turning into a unicorn, then a huge bear, then back to a horse.  Then I woke up.

Life is a Cabaret ~ 8/16/2014

I dreamed I was commissioned to write a play about a bunch of cabaret girls, their catty, gossipy, back stabbing ways, and their solidarity when one of them is threatened. The story was all worked out, I just had to put it into words. Then I was going to have to coach the cast on how I imagined the lines would be delivered. This made me nervous to start with, and then I ran late. I finally delivered my manuscript, then told the director that any actresses worth their salt should be able to figure it out and bring it to life, and I quit.

I went to find my mom, and discovered that my whole family had been invited to an ex's wedding. I insisted at least me and my immediate family should go, so we made our way to North Carolina. They were having the wedding in the house they'd built, and somehow it looked just like our house in the Hill Country, except it was built of gray stone, and was sort of an open air garden, instead of a house.

The wedding was lovely, I guess. I don't really remember it. Maybe we were late. I do remember collecting mycollecting my glass of champagne for the toast, then watching the photo montage the groom's brother had put together. He'd picked the song "The Rose" for the background music, which my family had always loved to hear me sing. In fact, he'd accidentally found and used a recording of me singing it at some recital. I kept having to scold my mom for giggling about this.

We left the wedding and went to stay at my godparents' house nearby. My godparents weren't there, and some other folks we didn't know we're staying there along with us. Everything was fine until I heard a strange, ringing, scraping sound coming from the back room. I peeked around the door to see a man standing by the bed sharpening an axe. Suddenly he began to swing it around, into the walls and furniture. When his girlfriend rushed in to see what was going on, he swung it towards her. I ran from the door, and didn't see the blow land, but I heard her scream, then fall silent.

I ran and locked some doors to isolate the back of the house, but I knew that wouldn't stop him for long, because of the axe. He seemed content to trash the back of the house, though, at least for the time being. I ran out and got my car turned around, pointed toward the street for a quick getaway. One of the strangers ran from the house and begged to go with us, so I let him in the back seat, the. Went to find Mom.

She wast anywhere, not even in the locked off rooms (I checked through the windows. The. She came walking up the street from the park, and I told her to just get in the car. She kept arguing about going back inside for stuff, but I wouldn't let her, and finally we were all in the car, pulling out of the drive, just as the axe man burst out the front door.

We had to stop immediately at the stop sign just beside their driveway, and te intersection had become a huge roundabout. There were cars and pedestrians everywhere, and no matter how well I checked, I kept cutting off cars that appeared out of nowhere. Then I ran the car off the road into another yard, and couldn't get it to steer back onto the road. When I did finally get us back on track, and drove to the highway, I didn't know which way to go. We tried to get a GPS map with directions, but it kept directing us to Canada instead of Texas. Then I woke up.

Three Snippets of Dream ~ 8/6/2014

A couple of weeks ago I dreamed I lived in a snug little apartment down many dark, winding corridors, in an old, old building. I discovered that management had decided to renovate while I was out for the day, because I started finding new toilets installed in weird places. Like the middle of the dining nook. Also, the kitchen started turning bright yellow, a wall of paint or wallpaper, half a floor of tile, or a bank of cabinets a day. And I mean BRIGHT yellow. And not even the same yellow.  The wallpaper was a dandelion sort of yellow with a pale bright green and gold bamboo pattern.  The tile was a buttery golden yellow with a florescent chartreuse design. The cabinets were dark goldenrod, and the painted walls were done in sunflowers. Then a brightly polished gold tuba showed up in one corner, standing on its bell, for decoration.

A couple of nights ago I dreamed that my friends and I went out to see a show. It was Phantom of the Opera, but instead of being a musical by Andrew Lloyd Weber, it was a Wagnerian opera and Russian ballet, all in one. With full scale pirate ships.

Last night I dreamed I had a baby. When he was about six months old, the strangest thing started to happen. When he got stressed or upset, he'd jump in time and place. He'd disappear from where he was and appear somewhere else. Or he'd change from a six month old to a newborn or a fetus, or even an embryo. Or, worse, both, so that I'd be running all over the house trying to find a squirming, bloody, almost microscopic thing that I'd have to keep moist and sheltered and calm enough so that he'd return to normal. I had a dog that helped me find him when this happened. The worst was, sometimes I didn't have to find him. Sometimes I could feel that he'd relocated back inside me, which was painful, but not so bad as long as he was tiny. But I was always afraid he'd either grow back while still in me, or pop inside me at normal size, and then we'd probably both die. But I woke up before that happened.

Magic in Texas ~ 8/3/2014

I dreamed I went to an American version of Hogwarts, and in addition to being magical, I had sort of a super power. I could see spells hovering around the objects or people they were cast at. Late one night, I was out in the grounds by an old graveyard, and I could see a friend of mine trapped and hurting from a spell cast by the school bully. The spell looked like two tiny, gray Conestoga wagons ramming him in the chest. I cast spells like pillows that flew down to shield him, then engulf and disperse the wagon spells.

The school was in Texas, out in the Alpine, Marfa, Ft. Davis area, near Big Bend. I was coming home for the holidays, and stopped at a gas station for fuel and a snack and the restroom. There was a Starbucks selling some sort of wrap. I wanted a beef and rice one, but without the bell peppers, but they wouldn't special make one for me unless I bought six of them. When I got back on the road, I had to think hard about whether I needed to go east or west to get to San Antonio. The right answer was east, but I'm not used to that!

Apparently I had a summer job with CSI. We were called out to investigate a house with a bunch of people lying around non-responsive. Nick Stokes was taking their pulses, and they were waking up when he touched them. As each one stirred, he announced, "Not an angel."

After that job. I joined some friends at a Rice baseball game. Joanna told me about how Bill was her favorite True Blood vampire because he was always so quiet, and how she was using that to motivate the MOB saxophones to play softer. Then my little buddies started a contest to see who could hug me longest and hardest. So that was pretty awesome.

Then we went to explore an old abandoned warehouse, and found a space rocket. The rocket had a sort of cabinet on oys side, and I put in some of my cherished childhood toys, all shaped like birds and whales and planes. There was a model of the Southwest plane painted like Shamu, a stuffed killer whale, and a beautiful glass cockatiel. I lined them up carefully and secured them so they would fly around and break, then we launched the rocket into space. Like a child, I began to want my toys back when it was too late, but before I could really start to regret and cry, I woke up.

This Old House ~ 7/24/2014

Mom was renovating a beautiful Victorian style house up on the hill above our place in the Hill Country, and either she or my aunt were going to live there, but it seemed to be haunted. The FBI agent from Without a Trace came to investigate. He and the intern Zach from Bones were trying to think of ways someone could be faking a ghost just to scare us. He kept playing tricks on Zach, putting him into a proposed ghost rig, then pretending he couldn't see or hear him anymore. Zach kept getting freaked out.

I had all my bedroom stuff set up in a corner of our property near some train tracks. I had a huge four poster bed with a canopy hung with gold curtains, a large oval standing mirror, a few heavy dressers, and a gold brocade sofa, all in dark wood. I had everything arranged so it demarcated a little room of my own, with the sofa at the foot of my bed. People kept trying to move it, though, and I kept having to move it back and tell people why I wanted it that way.

I finally decided that the ghost in the old house would feel better if some old photos taken by my grandfather were hung up there, so I needed to travel to a big library hundreds of miles away to go get some. To raise some money for the trip, I went on Amazon, where they had some crowd sourced editing projects. You could get money for proof reading paragraphs or recipes, $1 for one, $4 for three, $10 flat plus $1 each for more than ten. I started out with a chocolate chip cookie recipe, but I felt like, to really know if it was right, I'd have to rest it out, so that took a while.

I finally started my trip to the library. I took this special taxi that moved by tunneling through the ground. I watched episodes of Bones for a while, but the guy who played Booth was the guy from Without a Trace, and Bones herself didn't show up for most of the pilot, so that was weird. Also, the first investigation was of a planet where the moons orbited so close, they left tracks in the grass. An anomaly in one of the moon paths indicated the presence of some very special purple crystal. I decided this was too weird and turned the show off.

My tunneling vehicle surfaced for a bit to let me know that we were almost there. I had to dress old timey for some reason, so I put on a cotton shift, a light wool Victorian walking dress, and a Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock style overcoat. I went into the library and located old photos by my grandfather. I selected two in sepia tones that showed gentle yet strong looking old women. They seemed right for the house. The librarian was printing them out for me when I woke up.

My Subconscious Has Decided ~ 7/23/2014

I dreamed that I was explaining to my mother why, in the upcoming elections, the only thing I'd be basing my vote on was environmental policy. I told her that, if we didn't become vastly more environmentally responsible very quickly, we might not need to worry about any other issues in thirty to fifty years.

I explained to her about they hydrates in the arctic, trapping vast amounts of methane gas as long as the oceanic temperatures were cold enough, but poised to release them as the average temperature rise neared 6°C.  That this carbon released into the atmosphere would create a positive feedback loop of warming that we wouldn't be able to stop once we started it.  That we were solidly at 3°C above historic norms now, and climbing. That a temperature trend like this hadn't been seen since just before the great Permian extinctions, also do to released methane, and that we were basically all going to die if we didn't all make a change, both at the grass-roots personal level, and at the institutional, legislative level.

This started out in my grandmother's living room, but eventually, while I was explaining, I was breaking a path through white stuff that might have been hydrate, might have been ice, or might have been styrofoam.  There was just lots of white everywhere. And somewhere in the midst of this diatribe, I woke up.

NB - I can make not claims to scientific accuracy on the part of my subconscious.  I remember watching various explanatory videos on this subject, and these numbers apparently stuck in my head, but might not be right.

Just Awful ~ 7/21/2014

I dreamed that I learned on the same day that I was pregnant by the man I last slept with, and that he was now engaged to marry someone else. I was completely blindsided, because I'm not even supposed to be able to get pregnant. I went out to a forest retreat to take some time to think and decide what to do.

The retreat center was affiliated with a very reputable women's clinic, and I went in to consult the doctor. She examined me and discussed her findings and my options and what to expect calmly and comfortingly. She told me if I thought I might want an abortion, I should make an appointment now because there was a six week waiting list.

I was just completely overwhelmed, and I made the appointment because I didn't want to end up figuring out that's what I needed to do, and have it not be an option.

I called my mom to come visit me, and she helped me realize how happy I actually was, under all of the confusion, because this pregnancy was a miracle, and would probably be my only chance to have the baby I want so much. She promised my family would help me however I needed, whatever I decided. I decided I was keeping my baby.

That evening I ran into the father. He said the relationship hadn't worked out, they'd mutually broken off the engagement, and he really wanted to give it a try between the two of us. I told him about the baby, and he was happy and excited, though we agreed to sign something for now where I did not expect support from him, and he would have no custody rights if it didn't work out.

I cancelled my appointment for the abortion with a joyful heart. That night I began to bleed. I lost the baby and he left me.

A psycho ex boyfriend showed up, and when I pushed him away, he got angry and violent. I locked him out of my room, but that trapped me inside. I found a way out and ran for help, sobbing and bleeding. I had just seen my dad, and was looking around and shouting for him, but I couldn't find him. The ex turned into a red-eyed demon. He appeared in front of me and grabbed me and I screamed once more for Daddy, and then I woke up.

TBTT#5 Test Drive ~ 3/8/2012

Last night I dreamed that I was part of a group road testing a new ambulance in the desert. It was sleek and sporty in black and reached speeds of 300 mph. We stopped for lunch at McDonalds, which had gone bankrupt and was closing worldwide the next day. Someone had a giant diamond. And I taught a cyborg the Litany Against Fear.

Best Evacuation Plan Ever ~ 7/16/2014

I dreamed a hurricane was headed towards New Orleans.  So to evacuate, we were all put on a cruise ship that would head out into the gulf. I drove to the port with a friend, who also had put a few other friends' motorcycles in his car, so I got to squeeze in with motorbikes.

We got on the boat, and I walked up and down and up and down and up and down a bunch of stairs. They didn't feed us, so we wouldn't get seasick. They were also going to give us something so we'd sleep through any rough seas. But the next thing I knew, they were feeding us and I wasn't sleepy, so I guess they decided they could sail around the storm.

At one point I found this blond dude in my stateroom, going through my jewelry box. I scolded him and chased him out, but I thought he looked kind of familiar.

After the storm, we came back to port, and everything was just fine, except I found a room in the customs area where a whole bunch of earrings had been poured into a big pile.  I was picking through them because they were shiny, when I found one that my mom had given me.  Then I had to look until I found the other. They were little flowers made out of pearl clusters.  I also saw pearls with rectangle cut garnets and some loose stones that had come out of settings.

I got through customs, having claimed those earrings, and outside was the guy who'd been in my room. It turned out he had stolen all of those earrings.  I was really angry.  Suddenly he asked didn't I recognize him, and reminded me that we had met on a dating website called rendezvous.com. I told him now I remembered, and obviously we weren't going to work out.

Then I woke up.

Need a Restaurant Idea? ~ 7/15/2014

One day I walked from the French Quarter down to Flushing, Queens, which had somehow replaced the Bywater. I wanted to eat at a cafe I'd heard of, called the Aeolian.

After a while I saw it up ahead. The building was huge, and looked like St. Basil's cathedral in Moscow, only designed by Salvadore Dali using mushrooms in shades of earthy red. The sign was in a cool font, sort of designed to look Persian.

The cafe only took up a tiny bit of the middle of the structure. I couldn't figure out what the rest was used for. As you walked in, the gourmet deli was on the right and the bakery was on the left. The deli was what you'd expect, ham, salami, turkey, roast beef, but all really good, and also prosciutto and pancetta and stuff. The bakery had all sorts of amazing things, but their specialty were these tall stuffed doughnuts that ended up looking like muffins, with the hole crammed with filling and glaze drizzled all over. They also had any sort of bread you could think of, and some you couldn't.

So I ordered a small roast beef sandwich on ciabatta, and a small turkey on pumpkin seed mint whole wheat. I also got a plain glazed vanilla tall doughnut, and one full of honey pecans, with burnt maple sugar glaze.

Then I woke up.

Vampire Island ~ 7/10/2014

I was with some friends going on a vampire tour of Eastern Europe. It was organized by my friend Jon while he was visiting his folks in Arkansas (which was, of course, the gateway to Eastern Europe). We were also sort of a diplomatic mission to recruit vampires for our military.

Jon's mother was upset the morning we arrived to pick him up, because he'd only been home a couple of days, and she was leaving on a cruise the next morning, and she had thought she'd have all of today to spend with him, but we had to leave in two hours. So they went out to breakfast while I went over some maps with the team.

When Jon got back from breakfast we set off. The first stage was over water, so we went down to our boats and sailed into a sea of darkness. We had to navigate carefully to avoid islands we could barely see until we were right up on them, even with a strong searchlight in the bow. All at once there was a flicker of white, up above us, just caught by the light. We pointed the light up into the air, and hundreds of white robed shapes were hovering in the air in a state of deep sleep. These were vampires held in suspended animation by the power of their king, until it was their turn to walk the earth for a decade or two, or until he needed an army.

We sailed on to the biggest island, which held a vast complex that was both very expensive shopping mall and famous European football stadium, all owned by the vampires. I was engaged to the leader of the expedition, so to do some reconnaissance and make a friendly first impression, we decided the other women on the team and I would shop for clothing for the wedding.

I tried on a corset that fit, but had padding and cutouts in... unnecessary places. I tried on another, but it had a sort of flare below the waist that the sales girl and I agreed would not work with the lines of  my dress. Then there was one in brown leather I was going to try, but we were suddenly called to the king's presence. Our group was rushed from wherever we'd been into a huge room that was a simulated beach, with sand and a wave pool and fake sunlight glimmering around in the dimness like reflections from a disco ball.

And everywhere around the hall, the same vampire, copied a hundred times, was enjoying the seaside. He was surfing, swimming, walking down a boardwalk with a pretty girl, or "sunning" on the beach with several others. His vampire king powers allowed him to project corporeal but secondary instances of himself so he could be many places at once. Suddenly the vampire sitting by the pool with a cocktail stood up, and all the other copies snapped back into him, and we stood before the vampire king.

It was, of course, Lestat. But he was played by James Marsters, not Tom Cruise. He caught sight of me, still in jeans and a corset, and laughed. He assured me the brown leather one would work much better, and sent me back with the sales girl to try it on. She led me to a different changing area, which was a framework of steel bars hung with black linen curtains for privacy, and said she was going to get the corset. Through the curtains I saw the store manager, a vampire who had been our ambassador to the king, start towards thick glass doors that would close me off alone in this area with him and two other vampires I could see coming out of the dark corners.

I scrambled into my own clothes, and tried to think of how to beat them to the glass doors, when we all were startled by a strange, deafening sound. A man was attending a game at the football stadium next door with his mentally impaired teenage son.  He'd gotten separated from the boy, and texted him telling him to make his special sound, so his father could locate him. The special sound was a sort of ear-splitting "BAROOOOO" that echoed through the entire complex. When the vampires froze, I broke for the doors, and then I woke up.