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.
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