I dreamed I was on a band trip in Korea to solve a series of murders. Korea was like a combination of Las Vegas and an upscale shopping mall. There were fancy shops and twinkling lights everywhere. Some of the people in our group, including my good friend's mother, suddenly became ghosts. They would only regain corporeality if we solved the mystery.
We could predict who was going to be next, but not how they would be killed. We found the word "siostre" carved in strange characters onto the bottom of a dugout canoe, rotting at the side of a small river. This was an important clue, we were sure, but we didn't know what it meant.
The next victim was killed right in front of me as I was trying to keep watch and protect him. Some mechanism was triggered and a wire contraption came out of the wall behind him, slipped around his neck, and would have garroted him, if that hadn't been rendered completely unnecessary by the attached blade that slit his carotid.
There were silky red fibers caught in the joints of the contraption, and I thought I recognized them. As pandemonium filled the room, I looked across and met the eyes of the Columbian ambassador, who was still and watchful amid the chaos... and who wore a Columbian flag cravat in which one of the red starts of the flag was apparently missing, split by a tear in the silky red fabric.
But when we questioned him, he denied all involvement and invoked diplomatic immunity. Just as we were going to let him go, I saw a woman in a dark gray suit and deep scarlet tie raise a gun and point it at his back. I sounded the alarm, and she ended up shooting and wounding him, but we caught her. She, of course, was the murderer.
With the mystery solved and all the temporary ghosts returned the physical plain, I rejoined my group. Only to find that, by being late and missing several gatherings, I had lost all three of my happy snail marks, and would not be receiving any tokens that I could exchange for gourmet chocolate truffles at the world-renown chocolate shop in our hotel.
So I went and bought my own chocolates, and got on the bus to go home. We left the bright lights of Korea and drove east, over the large bridge that separated Southeast Asia from New Orleans. I realized I'd never noticed before how close an entire other continent was to my home. And then I woke up.
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