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.
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