Saving the World with Advice from a Fortune Cookie ~ 8/29/2015

I dreamed the world was in danger and I was all alone. I wished the hero from my favorite childrens' book could come and help me, but I knew Alastar Adams wasn't real.  Still, I had an old DVD of the movie based on his books, and in the movie there was a phone number I could call...

In a last ditch act of desperation, I called the number, and Alastar answered! He agreed to come help, and, with hope renewed, I gathered a few friends. Alastar came, and I explained the situation, but he kept being distracted by my really pretty friend. Eventually, though, we all knew the plan. Alastar discovered how to activate the hidden elevator in the highest, narrowest tower of Hogwarts, where we would find the evil we needed to battle.

He wanted my friend to stay behind, because he'd fallen in love with her and wanted to protect her, but she insisted on coming. We all waited in the elevator lobby, waiting for the right car to come, but nothing we could do seemed to be working to summon it. Then I turned around, and tucked away back in a corner behind us, a small door had opened to take us up to the secret tower.

Gandalf still hadn't shown up, but we couldn't wait for him. We got in the elevator and headed up to the dark mystery that awaited us. We stepped out of the elevator into a circular room, cluttered with toys and stage scenery and props, but no sign of the evil wizard we had to defeat. Suddenly, a toasty golden fortune cookie appeared, floating before me, bearing Gandalf's mark.

I took the cookie and broke it open, and there was a fortune for each of us, giving us advice on how we could defeat the evil wizard. I passed the fortunes around, and just then, our enemy appeared. We began to throw curses and props at him, as we hid behind the scenery, and we finally had him backed into a corner, but couldn't figure out what to do to finish him off. My friend looked at her fortune, which just had pictures of balls and a monkey head on it. She stooped down to pick up some of the toys at our feet, and Alastar realized that the wizard had been guarding a prison lock, so my friend threw the balls at the control panel and managed to get the door open.

Out came Gandalf, who had been trapped there, and he sent us away so he could duel the evil one with us safely out of the way.  Since it was the evening of the college spring formal, and we all needed to get ready, we walked out onto Canal Street, and headed to our dorms up Royal and Chartres. My friend and Alastar were, of course, going together. There was another guy who had helped us out a lot, so I felt like I should be nice to him, but he was really a foul-mouthed jerk, so I was really glad that, in spite of how much he'd been hitting on my, he already had a date.

There was a good friend I'd have really liked to go with, because I had a secret crush on him, but he had a girlfriend. In fact, just the other day, he'd shown me a pair of earrings he'd bought because he said they'd go great with her dress. I'd told him they were beautiful, which was true, but I had to swallow back all my sadness, because I had a dress they'd go great with. When I got back to my dorm room, though, I found the earrings wrapped in a little package on my desk.

It turned out that the jerk guy was now going out with his former girlfriend, and had been for a while. The earrings were for me, to go with my dress, and there was a necklace, too. So I got ready and went out to find him. The door monitor in the dorm lobby gave me a note that said, "Cheese and Broth." So I figured we were meeting at The Melting Pot, on Canal and Bourbon, which I'd walked past on my way back to my dorm room. I hadn't seen him, but I went to look anyway.

It turned out he wasn't able to get a reservation there, but he was waiting next door, so I sat down to have dinner, and then I woke up.

Career Path Inspiration ~ 8/20/2015

I dreamed I was staying at the Hotel Monteleone. It had a shopping arcade on the ground floor. Two people in the last week had bought lottery tickets there, and won the jackpots, so I thought about buying a ticket on my way to work.

I worked as a script writer for an Asguard vs Olympus reality show.  The gods really came down and did battle, though sometimes battle was answering trivia questions or playing chess. The ratings fell, though, after we selected a new show host through a fan contest. She wasn't very popular, and the show was going to be cancelled soon.

I was chatting with her boyfriend and found out his name was John Strait Garrison. His parents gave him his middle name in honor of George Strait. We got to talking about country music, and I decided to go home.

I got back to the country just in time to help my brother pick out a new horse. There were a bunch of wild horses nearby, and he caught a black and white colt to break and train. We were riding the bus home, and a white-bearded old man who was the local community leader offered to do a blessing ceremony. He asked me to sing the top line, so as everyone else chanted in a drone, I sang four descending notes over and over. The old man lit the incense and sang the words while the colt chewed on a bulb of garlic that was hung like a pendant around my neck.

When we got home, men in suits were there and told us we had to release the colt. I took her out on the front porch and she turned into a grasshopper.  But somehow we always knew which grasshopper was her, and she stayed in our yard for always. Then I woke up.

TBTT#13 Next on CSI ~ 7/6/2012

I had an incredibly vivid and detailed CSI dream last night. Greg Sanders had been kidnapped, lured by a pretty blond co-ed, and forced to begin helping a bad guy dig up some sort of buried treasure. I was Catherine Willows, and I was sent in to get Greg out. The bad guy was threatening to blow up about a city block if we didn't help him, and his device consisted of explosives rigged to an electrical circuit where the charge was being generated by an electric eel and some sort of electric fish that had rainbow spots, that were both writhing about angrily in plastic grocery bags. To close the circuit and detonate the bomb, the bad guy had only to tap two metal prongs with a huge metal ring he was wearing. While we were digging for the treasure, which seemed to be buried under refuse that contained, among other debris, the carcasses of many brightly colored octopi, Greg and I hatched this plan to disarm the bomb. The linchpin of our plan was to somehow switch the metal wring with a plastic one. Somehow it worked, and when the bomb didn't detonate, the rest of the team came in and we saved the day. Then I went to the mall.

Bad Neighbors ~ 8/18/2015

I dreamed that my ex married one of my least favorite people, and they moved in next door. We both lived in lots adjoining my parents', and I found out that Mom and Dad were giving us both money to support our kids, which was nice of them, since only my son was related to them. Then I found out that least-favorite was angling to get some of my share of that money, since, she said, they often took care of my son, but I never took care of theirs. This began to extend to every aspect of our lives, including food on my plate when we all ate dinner with my parents.

Nobody seemed to see anything wrong with this, but me. I went to bed crying most nights, and there was this tissue box that would make loud static noises unless I had it pressed right against my side. Then I woke up.

Working in the Quarter ~ 8/12/2015

I dreamed I was a fifteen year old Japanese boy working in the French Quarter as a transvestite prostitute. I managed to piss off the leader of a biker gang, who was like the union leader of all the buskers who worked in the Quarter. He put a price on my head. I climbed into a truck full of green recycling bins. I curled up in a ball and pulled a bin over me to hide, but a group of Swedish school children came out of the Gumbo Shop, and they could see my feet. I was wearing bright green socks. They kept pointing and trying to lift the bin I was hiding under. Then I woke up. I found I was sleeping curled up in a tight little ball with all my muscles tensed, and now I'm sore.

Back to School in the Worst Way ~ 8/11/2015

I dreamed I was back in middle school. The only redeeming part was that, unlike actual middle school, the kids were all friendly, and didn't pick on me for being a nerd. My teacher didn't like me. In fact, she hated me. She interpreted something I had said weeks ago as a personal insult, and was determined to punish me now.

We had to do some sort of project based on some domino dice we drew out of a box. They were called dice, but they were each half a domino, but they went up to 43. Some of them had letters. Some of them had country names.

I had to do a research project, based on my dice, about Arkansas and Estonia. We all had 20 minutes to look up a smattering of facts. I had already had to do Arkansas before, so I just called that stuff up from memory. I thought I knew where Estonia was, at least, but I didn't feel very confident about my knowledge, so I went back to the reference section.

All the E encyclopedias were gone.  There were some thick reference books marked "E", but all they contained was the spines of a bunch of English journals, as an index volume. There was another book ingeniously constructed so that, if you flipped the pages side to side, was a dictionary, and if you flipped them up and down, it was a thesaurus. Estonia was not listed. By now I was pretty sure the teacher had hidden them all.

I lifted up the top of my desk to look inside, and found a bunch of sharpened pencils, some crayons, and other assorted scholarly detritus, but nothing to help me out with Estonia. I did, however, tuck the pencils in my pocket, because I was pretty sure by then that the teacher was a vampire, and she was going to hold me after class until the sun went down so she could attack me.

Eventually I woke up.

Short but Surreal ~ 8/8/2015

I dreamed I was Miss Elizabeth Bennett, and that I was newly married to Abraham Lincoln. We were sitting to have our wedding portrait sketched. I don't remember much else, but that seems crazy enough.

Helping a Goddess in Distress ~ 8/7/2015

I dreamed I was eating dinner with Tanya before Friday game night. But she just wanted a salad from a vegan place, and I definitely needed meat, so we split up. While I was in the cowboy-themed restaurant next door, my laptop somehow got connected to their network, and text boxes from one of the document suite maps I was working on got pasted all over their computerized menu boards.

So I missed game night, because I had to clean up that mess. The boards were really sophisticated, though. They were like touch screens, only you didn't have to touch them. You gesture toward them from a particular spot in the restaurant, and manipulate them that way. So I spent hours swiping right and left to find all the content I'd accidentally added, pointing to select, then swiping up to delete, as the last lingering patrons asked me all about my job.

Just as I was finishing up, a beautiful Indian woman stumbled in, very distressed, along with a little boy and a teenaged girl so blond and pale she was almost albino. I asked what I could do to help. She took me aside and revealed that she was a goddess, and these were two of her three children. She had lost her younger daughter, who was her oldest child by her divine spouse. The girl with her was half human, and the boy was her second child by the god. She had a way to retrieve her lost daughter, but she needed help.

You see, she could call her divine child to her if she reentered her true goddess form, but in this state she was monstrous, a giant worm, streaked with blue and green and gold, with a dragon head and horns. She would be a danger in that form to anyone more frail than she. This was not a problem for the daughter she would call; as her firstborn child by the god, she too had the power to change, and, in fact, would be changed by her mother's call, and would return to their human state when her mother did.

But her half human daughter and her second born son would be in danger, as would any other mortals nearby. So she needed a private place to change and someone to look after her children. I agreed to help, and we all piled into my smart car. We got stopped in a sketchy neighborhood by a crowd of people blocking the road. They'd gotten up an impromptu dog fight. Then I revealed my own super power, and transformed into an enormous, spectral black dog with a bark like a lion's roar, and I chased them all away.

We continued on to the motel where the goddess had a room she planned to change in. I took the other children next door to wait. But after an hour of meditation, attempting to sink into her true state through chanting the holy words with pure intent, she was unable to change because her door didn't lock properly, and people kept walking by, which worried and distracted her.

I mentioned that my family had farmland only an hour away, and the abandoned homestead was empty. The children and I could stay there and lock ourselves in, and she could find a secluded clearing away from everyone for her change. She agreed and we drove out there.

We had just gotten settled in the derilect old house, and the goddess had left us, when the little boy fell while exploring the attic stairs and broke his leg. The good news was, when his mother returned to human form, all would be healed, but we knew that would take hours, and if the boy gave in to the screams of pain that welled up in his throat, he might call the monster down on us all.

So for hours I held him and he crushed my hand in his agonized grip while he bit back cries of pain. Tears ran down his face, and his half sister ran back and forth to the sink, bringing cold wet cloths to drape over the break and wash his face. It was all we could do. Suddenly I heard a truck driving by. It was one of my uncles, I saw from a window. I was so worried he'd stop and find us, and somehow cause a scene that would bring the monster back.

He ended up just driving on, which was good, but I kept hearing more and more trucks as the sky lightened and the farmers got to work. I began to worry that the remote place I'd offered wasn't remote enough. Had anyone found and disturbed the goddess? But just then the little boy stood up on a leg healed good as new, and we all ran out to the carport.

Dozens of people were gathered along the dirt road to watch as a beautiful, dark-skinned woman and girl walked toward the house where we waited. And then I woke up.

Sea Lions in Bryan Bayous ~ 8/6/2015

I dreamed I was visiting my godparents at their house in Bryan with all my family (Daddy and Pat were still alive). The home next door to theirs was gone, and they had bought the land. They had workers there putting in a baseball field, but they had the outfield beside the house, instead of the diamond, and I was worried that they'd end up with a lot of broken windows.

It was raining, and Mom and I went for a drive, but we were a bit confused, because the T intersection right past their home had been turned into a roundabout, and there were a bunch of signs saying STOP in 300 ft or 200 ft or 100 ft, so it looked like there were stop signs every hundred feet, but their weren't really.

The concrete-lined drainage creeks were completely full from the recent rains, and the water was so clear you could see all the way to the bottom, a hundred yards down, and watch the sea lions gathering. There was a huge colony of sea lions. The babies stayed near the banks, and looked like puppies with longer bodies and flippers. I met a young man who's job was to observe the herd and care for any abandoned young. I sat and talked with him for a while, and he introduced me to two of the pups, who were super adorable and cuddly.

I was sitting on the edge of one of the bridges watching the sea lions when my mom came to tell me some bridges were washing out nearby, and I should be careful. So I set off walking on the more solid roads, and ran into a friend. We decided that, since he had a blond beard and long hair, he should spike up his hair and paint it green next Halloween, and go as a pineapple head. He tried to show me a swing dance move while we were walking, but we couldn't get into step right to make it work.

Throughout all of this, I kept having trouble with my sinuses, and the left half of my head kept filling up with gunk that I would periodically stop and blow out, using dozens of tissues. Eventually, I woke up.

Dark Prognostication ~ 8/4/2015

I dreamed I gave up everything to become a writer. I quit my job, I move away from home, and spent a year working on my second novel and trying to sell my first.  No one bought either, and I finally moved back in with my mother. Only my mother had moved into an addition on my high school boyfriend's family home. So that was SUPER weird. I avoided being at home as much as possible, and started hanging out in the high school band hall.

In my dream it was my high school band, instead of my college band, that scattered to formation and welcomed alumni. But there were no older students in the trumpet section. Only freshmen and old farts. So one girl said it was too stressful, because you had to stand really rigidly still and at attention, and I couldn't figure out what she was talking about at all.

I tried to play in one rehearsal, and I did all right from memory on the standards, but I couldn't read the music, so I bombed on everything that was new since my time. After rehearsal I tried to go look at the rest of the school and see if any of my old teachers were around, but security wouldn't let me in. Then I realized how weird and pathetic I was, wandering around my old high school with nothing to show for my life. Then I woke up.