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.