Kittens, Kids, World Travel, and Vampires ~ 1/29/2015

I dreamed that I was walking home from college classes, and I passed through a particular subdivision every day. Today, outside the first house on the right, there was a mother cat and a bunch of newly weaned kittens playing. Across the street was a somewhat older kitten, bony and thin. He was mostly white, but had a black and brown tabby pattern in blotches across his face and back. He came up to me and I picked him up and went up to the door of the house and knocked.

A woman opened the door, and I could see that the house was humming with the activity of at least a dozen children and just as many kittens, all of them white with either black and brown tabby, gray tabby, or blue Siamese point markings over it. I asked if the starving kitten was hers, and she said it was one that had been missing, but if I wanted it, I could have it, because the cats and kids were getting to be too much. I asked if I could have one of the younger kittens, too, and she said I could, so I picked out one that was about half white and half silver tabby, with a cap of soft gray stripes between its ears, but a mostly white face.

I set off to carry them the mile between there and home, but about three blocks away, I remembered I had left my backpack. I went back and got it, and set off again, but then the smaller kitten was missing. I went back and found it and the woman gave me a paper sack to carry the kittens in. We poked some holes to better aerate it, folded down the top, and I set off carrying it carefully in my arms. I decided to call the bigger one Bexar and the little one Medina. Bexar was very calm, and never presented a problem, but Medina kept slipping away.

On about the second trip back to the woman's house to see if Medina had made it back there, it was night already, but the yard was ominously bright. When I got close, I saw that an outdoor fireplace that had been lit to keep the chill away for the outdoor cats had caught the lower branches of the small, spindly trees on fire. I shouted to the people in the house as I began to fling water from the bird bath and the cats' water dishes onto the flames.

The woman came out and we put out the fire, I sorted through the kittens to find Medina, and set off for home again. Then I realized that I'd picked the wrong kitten, and went back, and the woman asked me if I could also take two of her children and raise them with me, because she just couldn't manage. I felt so awful for the two kids she was willing to give away to a stranger, so I took them, but I made her sign a paper saying that she agreed I should, and gave me permission and guardianship and all that.

So I handed the sack of kittens to the boy, who was about seven, for him to carry, and I picked up the girl, who wasn't yet two, and we set off. We stopped off in the Ammansville church hall to use the bathroom and get a drink of water. There was a big meeting of some sort going on. Somehow kids and kittens got shuffled away, and I was asked to accompany a young woman on her trip to Russia.

I figured, hey, paid trip to Europe, and she was the daughter of someone pretty important, so I didn't feel like I could refuse, so off we went. We landed in Brussels, and took the crossing there. I'd rented a little red car, and was pretty confident I could drive just fine, since at least it would be on the same side of the road. We passed through customs, changed our money, bought some cheap designer knock off shoes, and set out.

In the next town we met up with some of my friends, which was good, because they were much more organized about where they were going, and knew which roads to take, so we agreed to follow them. The elevated roads were really rickety constructions of steel supports and wooden boards, and it really looked like we were driving on old train trestles. It was pretty terrifying, but apparently one of the roads we thought we'd take was basically a roller coaster track, so it was a good thing we'd met up with people who knew I'd never be able to handle it.

We stopped for the night in a tiny town, and had ham and potato tacos at the pub. We started talking about our route, and there was one road I was interested in taking, but it turned out it was basically a horse track that circumnavigated the entire country, and that wasn't really feasible. So we decided to go to Moscow, then cross into Turkey and go see Hagia Sophia.

Then a woman came into the pub, and she had a baby head hanging around her neck and was screaming about vampires. It turned out that Angelus knew that Buffy was part of our group, and had turned the woman's baby into a vampire. The woman had cut off its head, because she had to, but instead of turning to ash, both parts of the body were simply incorruptible, and, if reunited, could reassemble, so she had carried the head into the village to find out what she should do, but she was also half-crazy. She was very clear that the child was a message to someone, and we all knew it was Buffy, and that Angelus would kill again and again if we couldn't get to him.

Some folks in the group kept telling Buffy she needed to take a step back and think about who was doing this, and why. I got frustrated and started shouting that it was more important to figure out when and where if we were going to stop him. I stormed off down a hallway, and then I woke up.

Homecoming ~ 1/28/2015

I dreamed I was FBI Agent Dana Scully, and Mulder and I were working on a drug raid in New Orleans. We put the operation into action, various levels of chaos ensued. Mulder and I were both stabbed in the gut. Time rolled back a la Groundhog Day, and the sting operation got repeated until the suspects were apprehended with neither of us hurt. We finished just in time, too, because a hurricane was coming, so it was time to evacuate.

I drove west on I-10, the green and gold summer grasses bright against the leaden gray sky. In the evening I stopped at a driving range where my high school band director was holding a rehearsal and seminar. When the lecture and sight reading were finished, I was supposed to complete a test by hitting a golf ball as far as I could. I put my trumpet away and got teed up, but I never did get to take my shot, because people kept coming to stand right next to me, and didn't seem to understand why I thought this was too dangerous.

The next day I arrived in Castroville just in time to rehearse with the Medina Valley Panther Band, along with the other alumni in town for homecoming. At nightfall we headed to the stadium for the football game. I didn't think we alumns had anything to do with halftime, but then I looked up from my music and the stands around me were empty. I started to get up and find the band when I noticed the screw on my first valve slide trigger was loose, and if that came off on the field, it would be a disaster.

I sat in the bleachers trying and trying to fix it. Halftime ended and the band came back. People kept asking me what was wrong, and I kept answering that I had a screw loose. Everyone quite agreed. I finally got it fixed, and went to get something to eat. While I waited at the concession stand, I noticed that everything was bright with a fresh coat of paint. This included a bunch of pecan and peanut fragments that had been painted over and were now stuck to the edge of the concessions counter. The little girl selling concessions and I discussed this at length.

I went to an after party at one alumn's house, and it turned out that the owner was friends with a woman I knew from Shell. My friend was there, too, and we all caught up on MVHS gossip for a while, then my friend started talking about getting a Dyson vacuum cleaner. I said that I had one. In fact, for some reason, I had it with me, so at their request, I pulled it out and gave a demonstration to all and sundry. I was vacuuming straw up from a dark green area rug with strips of red and blue and orange woven in when I woke up.

Secret Agent Man ~ 1/26/2015

I dreamed that I was friends with a movie-star good looking guy who also worked at Shell. He knew I had witnessed a shooting and the police considered me to be in danger, so when I got on my bus to work, he was there, and invited me to sit in the seat next to him. He revealed that he was some sort of CIA FBI MI6 Navy Seal super secret agent with a perfect kill record, trained in the first Gulf War. I already knew he had the charisma needed to either charm or intimidate anyone at will, so I was happy to accept his offer of personal protection. I agreed to stick with him for the next few weeks, and fell asleep on the bus with my head on his shoulder.

When I woke up, he was flying us to a Spanish island in the Mediterranean in his own personal plane. I could see the ruins of a medieval abbey and cathedral, sunken into turquoise and sapphire waters at the edge of the rocky coast. He said there were snorkeling tours I could take to explore the ruins.  We'd be staying in the "new" abbey, built during the Renaissance, where the monks ran a bed and breakfast.

The abbot was a craggy-faced, black-haired man in a brown robe who carved his own devotional statues. He was charmed that I knew who Junipero Serra was, and that I could recognize all of the saints and explorers he'd carved. He showed me the chapel where I could attend mass, and then showed us to our suite. It had large casement windows hung in deep crimson and blue and green velvet, tapestries on the walls, the whole pseudo-medieval nine yards, but the west-facing windows filled the room with golden sunlight off the sandstone cliffs, overlooking the sea.

We were posing as a couple on holiday, and somewhere along the line we became a real couple. My now-boyfriend hiked up into the mountains to gather intelligence from an indigenous tribe, and I went too.  Our cover was that we were exploring some famous fossil beds up in a canyon, so I actually did that while his contacts came, one by one, to talk to him.

The most famous fossil was a skeleton of a giant prehistoric crocodile.  The natives had perched human skulls near it's jaws for effect, but it was also surrounded by fossilized flounder-like fish, and one of these was in its mouth.  I actually found some new specimens, uncovered by a recent heavy rain, and was sketching these as his contacts crept out of the tree line to speak with him, then disappeared back into the forest. A tiny leopard-spotted kitten came to play in the fossils, and I caught it up just before it leaped at a dry leaf that was skittering over the edge of a cliff. We were just making friends when I woke up.

Vampires ~ 1/20/2015

I dreamed that vampires were real. I dreamed that they were invading Rice University. I was at a Halloween party when all the lights went out. I was trying to find the ladies' room. I was all alone... until suddenly I wasn't. I backed into a narrow alcove with my back to a classroom door. I turned on my flashlight and saw a flash of fangs and death-pale skin before it disappeared, in fear of the light.

I dreamed we were scrabbling around campus as night began to fall, gathering beneath whatever lights we could find, but the lights were all going out. A friend and I worked our way across campus, from light to light, until we made it to my car, parked in the neighborhood to the north. We began to drive east, but were pursued. I climbed into the back seat to shine my flashlight out the rear windshield to fend them off.

We stopped at a gas station to buy batteries for my flashlight. We decided to also buy a bigger flashlight and even more batteries. We found a motel room and holed up there for the night. We stayed by the doors and windows with our flashlights and didn't sleep.

Then we were back on campus somehow and it was nightfall again. I sat down on a blanket outside the old band hall to pull up my socks. I had these awesome rainbow striped socks. The next thing I knew, it was dawn and I was waking up. I had fallen asleep on that blanket and my socks were balled up at my side. The sun was rising over the trees, and I felt a rush of fear that I'd been turned in the night and would burn to ash in the sunlight.

But I didn't. So I got up and put my socks back on and went down into the basement. The MOB was assembling to evacuate in a charter bus, and I was going with them. Then I met the slayer, then the slayer became a vampire. Then I was the slayer. Then I might have become a vampire. Then I woke up. For real this time.

Visiting London ~ 1/17/2015

I dreamed my friend Summer was driving me home. We were traveling in a sort of amphibious car across large stretches of water west of Lake Ponchartrain. We saw a high bridge to the south that turned out to be Interstate 10.

We pulled out of the water and onto an on ramp that climbed up, up, up into the blue sky like the slender track of a roller coaster. I became too scared to look at it, it went so high and seemed so tenuous, so finally I closed my eyes until I could feel that we'd turned into the freeway lanes and were no longer climbing or falling.

When I opened my eyes, we were back on water, moving across a large bay, weaving amid traffic in the shipping channel headed for the Port of London. My friend Rob was now driving, and I asked him if we'd be putting in at the Thames wharf or the Trafalgar wharf. He said we were headed for Trafalgar, and I asked if that was the one with the great reflections of the Cathedral. He said no, that was St. James wharf, farther east.

We put in at the dock and walked across Trafalgar Square. There was only one lion. We were headed to a long row of shops that spanned several city blocks. They were all lined up along the front of adjacent, connected, brightly painted double shotgun houses. Doors opened onto porches at the front, or in the side walls of each house shop that led, enfilade, into the next, until they broke off at the cross streets, then continued on the other side.

The shops were just as brightly painted on the insides, deep peach, sunny yellow, rose pink, sky blue, jade green, the color changing from one shop to the next. There were some antiquy, vintage knickknack sorts of shops, a LOT of candy and snack shops, and a big pet shop. My friends Will and Julie, from New Orleans, went on ahead, but Joanna and I explored the pet shop.

There was a discount room filled with dozens of big, tawny, fluffy dogs that the shop had totally thought would be last year's trendy new breed, but they hadn't sold, so they were all still hanging around. There were some cages set high up into the walls. These held bunnies, bedded down in wood chips and hay. Joanna was appalled that they were being kept like that, because it really wasn't good for them. She called over a clerk and showed him how the rabbits' coats and bodies had gone all matted and lumpy from poor care. I was explaining that he should listen to her, because she was an expert, and encouraging the rabbits to mutiny and fight back if they weren't kept better in the future, when I woke up.

Home Is Where the Weird Is ~ 1/16/2015

I dreamed I lived in my childhood home, but instead of being in the Hill Country, it floated around New Orleans. Sometimes it was at the foot of the Causeway, sometimes the Quarter, sometimes Midcity. I lived there with a few friends, my family, and some other people, and my family didn't own it. We worked for the people who did. Sometimes the house was parked next to the hotel the family owned and ran, and we'd all go help clean the hotel rooms or mow the lawn. The hotel was on a sloping, grassy bank along a stream, beside the Causeway bridge.  There was a stretch of the bridge that was elevated, just before the lake, where access roads ran beneath. The stop light situation was very confusing.

My boss was a sort of governess who taught children in the household.  I was in my room, puzzling over a word game my mom had been working on, but hadn't finished. The first word was "marpee" and the second word was "sharpee". There were blanks for a third word, and there were clues. The clue for the first word was that it was the name of a famous Indian nursemaid from some novel. Mom said Momo had told her what that was.  Each successive word was supposed to be no more than three letters different from the one before. The second clue was a picture of a magic marker. The third clue was "Where baby comes from."

The governess saw me pondering this, and decided I must not know how to read.  She very kindly offered to teach me to read and write. There was a housemaid who actually didn't know how to read and write, but was ashamed to admit it, so I agreed to take lessons, because I thought then I would know how to teach her. But when I found my first lesson was to memorize the shapes and sounds of the first five letters of the alphabet, I realized I couldn't keep up that sort of act, and came clean. I reminded my boss that she'd hired me as a writer, and that I had been reading and writing at the college level since middle school. I explained why I hadn't said so sooner, and she agreed to teach the other girl.

Every day I went to work downtown, and walked home to wherever our house was. Routinely, one of my friends' five children would just appear by my side, and I'd take care of him until I met up with the family, which would always happen an hour or so later. Sometimes it would be one child, but then that one would wink out and another would show up. They were all blond-haired, blue-eyed little boys. The oldest was about ten, the youngest two. I was minding the two-year-old and he wet my bed, then ran off down the street mid-diaper change. Fortunately, he turned into the five-year-old before he got too far, and came trotting back.

While I was chasing him down the street, I figured out the word game.  The second word was supposed to be "marker", not "sharpee", and the last word was "mother". I found my mom and told her about it, and she asked me if I was going with her and my sister on their trip to Ohio. I explained that I had agreed to spend Mardi Gras with a friend of mine, so I couldn't.

We were watching a football game, and one of the teams was Ammansville University. Their colors were orange and white, and their helmets were white with an orange stripe along the top from front to back, and an orange leopard on the sides. I asked where Ammansville was, because the only one I knew was in Texas, and THAT one did NOT have a university anywhere near it. Mom reminded me that it was Ammansville, Ohio, and that's why they were visiting Ohio, because my sister was thinking of transferring to the university there.

I agreed to drive with them on the first leg, which was just up through Texas.  We stopped at the Halloween fair in Ammansville, TX, to get something to eat and say hello to friends and family in the area. My sister wanted Mom to buy her a tea cup that had a blue gingham pattern, with Peter Rabbit on it, and started crying when Mom said no. I asked her if she was or wasn't a college-aged young woman, throwing a tantrum because our mother wouldn't buy her a tea cup. And then I woke up.

Not My Usual Big Bend Trip ~ 1/13/2015

I dreamed I was traveling to Big Bend with a friend of mine who had an assignment to spy on a wealthy landowner who lived on the east side of the park. His contact in the household was the rich man's mistress, who had once been his own mistress. She was a beautiful woman with long black hair. She had ostensibly been on a trip and was traveling back with us.

She directed us to turn down the long gravel road that led to the landholder's house. We had to stop to let my companion, the spy, out of the car, because if the rich man found out we were with him, he'd have us killed, since they were apparently enemies from way back.

At the end of the road we found a gas station and a motel, owned and operated by the rich guy. The woman I was with got me one of the special rooms that opened out front like any other room, but had a back entrance that opened into the large hacienda mansion the owner lived in.

She warned me that if I locked any of the doors, her lover would get suspicious, but I locked them anyway, because who doesn't lock their motel room doors. But I kept waking up in the middle of the night to find the man's guards passing through my room. I tried to sit up and scream, but I couldn't make any sound. So I just sat there and cried in fear and helpless frustration.

The next morning I decided to leave and go stay in a regular hotel. I went to pack my things, and found that the woman had put all sorts of clues about my friend the spy among my belongings. For some reason these included copies of Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy. I kept fishing them out, saying these things must be hers, because they weren't mine. They were among my favorite books, but my copy had all three novels in a single hard cover. She kept insisting they had to be mine, and kept trying to bring them to the owner's attention.

I finished packing in a rush and hurried everything out to my car. I was just about to drive off when I woke up.

Touring a Dairy Farm ~ 1/8/2015

I dreamed that I was part of a group of high school kids visiting a big commercial dairy farm outside of College Station, TX. As we crossed a wide, flat bridge over the Brazos River, I looked down and commented to my friend Emily on how beautiful and clear the water was, and how pretty the aqua water looked over the white-gold limestone. Emily asked me if I'd ever been to this farm. She had, as part of going to an A&M school, because the farm was affiliated with the University.  I told her that of course I'd been to the farm, and eaten the ice cream at the creamery. After all, I was born in Bryan.

We got to the dairy farm, which was set up like a cross between a livestock show in a big warehouse and a museum.  We were guided down an enclosed pathway throughout the giant barn, carpeted, with big glass windows on either side, looking out onto broad, concrete floored spaces where the livestock were fed, moved, milked, etc. We had two tour guides that explained things and answered questions. After going through all the exhibits, I went back to the first room.

In this room, they talked about managing the input and output, as it were, of having any type of livestock. The feed comes in, the manure goes out, and various processing and separating is required. They'd done something rather ingenious at this farm. They'd trained the goats to use little shovels with handles that fit specially into goat mouths to flip different things onto conveyor belts that then took matter to a sorter. So they had goats working in the feed storage area and the manure processing area, and I watched them for a while, and took a lot of photos of these adorable trained goats at work.

I finally met up with the rest of my group in the gift shop and creamery.  We all ate ice cream, and then I said I needed to buy some special goats milk bubble bath before we left. I found it and paid for it and we all got back in the vans to go home, and then I woke up.

This Old House ~ 1/6/2015

I dreamed I was with Mom and Brooke at SeaWorld in Hong Kong. We were looking for someone, but I can't remember who. It was around Christmas time, so only part of the park was open for a special holiday celebration. I said I'd go look at Shamu stadium, but Mom said she thought that was closed. I insisted that the whole park was built to showcase the orcas, so if anything was open, Shamu would be.

It turned out I was right, but I didn't find the person when I looked there. I left the stadium by a back way and found myself in a stairwell where the stairs had no railings and would just stop in mid flight. I had to jump the gaps, and almost fell off of a segment of straight pathway suspended about halfway down. I left the stairwell at that level, and found myself in an office area. I had to get across a row of cubicles where the desks and chairs were all made of foam and floated atop a deep pool of salt water. I stepped gingerly from chair to chair, but lost my balance when I was almost across and plunged into the water. There was a guy sitting at a nearby dry desk cube, but he just looked at me in confusion, and didn't offer any help.

Eventually I hauled myself out onto solid ground, and went to rejoin my family. But then I got a call from work asking me to go to a colleague's home and tell him to call in. I took a boat to a peaceful little man-made lake with luxury houseboats moored all along its shores. I found the one my colleague had retired to, and pointed a little TV remote type thing at his door. This rang the doorbell and left a message at his doorstep. I took the boat back to meet Mom and Brooke.

We ran a few errands around town, which involved taking taxi boats to various hillsides, climbing up to the shops, then hiking back down to the taxis. Eventually we decided to visit the hot springs at the top of the mountain, and check on the old family home along the way. We were surprised at how overgrown the paths were. What had been a busy Walgreens just a year before was now an overgrown ruin. We had planned to stop there for a refreshing soda, but ended up visiting a remote little cantina instead. There we paid 20 pesos for a two liter bottle of Coke.

I agreed to run down ahead and check on the house. I dropped down a side path into a wide field where the old home stood, ringed in a little fence, with cattle guards on the driveway to keep the cows out of the yard. One of my uncles was driving a tractor out in the pasture. I was surprised to see the front and back doors all open, and some large dogs lying on the porch.

I went inside and saw signs of habitation. I crept up the stairs to a wide landing, and saw a man asleep in a sleeping bag. Two big dogs at his side raised their heads and began to bark a little. The man moved and I saw that he was fairly young, but mostly bald, except for one small patch on the left side, that he'd grown out long and wound into a lank, dark braid. He had a sparse dark beard in a scraggly fringe around his jaw.

I crept back downstairs before he woke up enough to see me. The dogs followed me out. One was a tawny gold and looked like a Labrador and mastiff mix. The other was reddish brown and looked to be part German shepherd, part bloodhound. They weren't friendly, but they weren't aggressive, and seemed well trained, which gave me some level of comfort about the man in the house.

I went back and told Mom about the apparent squatter. We all needed to use the bathroom, and it was our house, and there were three of us and my uncle at hand, so we decided to go ask him if we could stop in for a minute. For all we knew, someone in the family was letting him stay. Like the dogs, he was polite but not friendly. We didn't question his right to be there, but resolved to ask around the family for more information.

We continued on our way, discussing ways to politely dislodge him when I woke up.

Thanksgiving Marching Band Party with Wine and Stray Cats ~ 1/3/2015

I dreamed that, just over on Dumaine and St. Peter, there was a patch of Chihuahuan desert scrub, with a little wine shop. I went there to buy some bottles of wine for Thanksgiving at Momo's house. The family that owned the vinyard and winery were very judgmental wine snobs, and I started to get the feeling that if I didn't choose the right wines, I might not make it out of the shop.

Apparently I passed the test, so they let me leave. I walked several blocks south and east to another patch of desert scrub, to get to Momo's house. The family was gathered to eat Thanksgiving dinner, and the wine was much appreciated. As the afternoon went on, college marching bands started showing up. There was a marching competition in town, and they had been invited out to have a kick off party at Momo's.

I was standing in the garage, beneath a balcony. A shower of red liquid began to rain down, because someone up on the balcony had shaken up a two-liter bottle of Big Red soda, and was spraying it everywhere. I hid under the balcony until the drizzle stopped, then went out on the porch to look for some rags to clean up the mess.

An orange tabby cat was creeping across the yard. Brightly colored string was woven into its fur, giving it a Tron-like striped pattern in white and red and green and yellow. I coaxed it over, and it was wary at first, but allowed me to pet its head, and then became my friend.

I went into town to get cat food, and got kind of lost. So I rose up above the city to look down, and the Intel Bank was testing a new lighted pathway that it had built as a promotional stunt. Routes from all around the city, into town and to the nearest bank were lit up in teal. I followed the one that went out to Momo's house, and followed it, flying home.

The next day, Yelp reviews and online editorials discussing the party began to show up on the internet. One guy wrote about the Big Red incident, and seemed confused about why the party had been organized at some random house in the country, instead of a convention center in town. I was going through these and thinking about responding to the ones that were negative about the venue (i.e. my grandmother's house) when I woke up.