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.
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