I dreamed I was working on shipping docks on a point of land jutting out into darkness. My dad, my godfather Bud, and his son-in-law Tom all worked there too. The bosses wanted to give my dad an award, but he wouldn't accept it unless they also recognized Bud.
I had to leave the point, along with a group of friends and acquaintances, including Neil Degrasse Tyson, because we all had magical abilities, and evil wizards were trying to recruit us. If we didn't agree to join them, they'd kill us. We had to leave everything behind, including our names. They had put a hex on our true names, so if we spoke them aloud, the evil wizards would find us.
We'd been away from our rooms for a while, to find a safe place for our golden retriever Rustler. I stumbled upon a message about how the evil ones had found the rooms while we were out, and they'd jinxed all the thermostat levels so that if the heating or cooling went above level 2, they'd be signaled that we'd returned. I hurried back to find my companions had indeed turned up the air conditioning, but the level hadn't gone to 3 yet, so I turned it back down and explained.
I went to visit a friend of mine who was working on an educational cartoon. He was telling all sorts of useful parables using xkcd-style stick figure drawings. He was hiding out, to, so he couldn't distribute his work. I agreed to help, and took a pile of pamphlets with me to hand out.
I snuck home real quick to check on my mom and dad. I wasn't going to go in, but my mom caught sight of me and insisted I help her with dinner. We were going to have meatloaf muffins. Dad was preparing the muffin trays. He had a stick figure cartoon of Darth Vader and a storm trooper pinned up for inspiration. He was using a mixture of black pepper and gun powder to form letters in the pan so that, when turned out, the muffins would spell, "I find your lack of faith disturbing!" Then he could run a wick from muffin to muffin, and when he lit it, the letters would look like sparklers.
My mom handed me a bowl and said to mix all the hamburger meat and eggs I could find, and to Aldo mix in chunks of cake that she had lying around, instead of bread crumbs. I told her I'd use the chocolate and vanilla chunks, but I was NOT putting strawberry cake in, because that was just disgusting.
So I mixed up all I could find, but instead of looking like ground beef, it looked a lot like brownie batter, and pounds and cups of ingredients collapsed down into not enough to fill half of one muffin pan. I knew this wouldn't work with Dad's lettering, so I scrounged around and found more eggs and some chunks of yellow cake in my room. I also found bunches of herbs that I knew I could use, as long as I left out the woody stalks.
When even that didn't help, I went to Mom for help. She sent me out on the front porch to catch ants to add in. But she gave me specific instructions not to include the purple schooner ants, especially if they were carrying a brood of young. Purple schooner ants were about three inches long, purple, of course, and their abdomens looked like three marbles stuck together. In one of the marbles, the females carried at least a dozen squirming young. The worst of it was that they didn't crawl on the ground. Instead they hovered in the air, only dropping to the ground to feed.
Out on the porch, I could see them in the porch light, dropping down by the hundreds. They were the only ants I could see, so I went back inside to tell Mom, and then I woke up.
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