Last night I dreamed I had to free-hand draw a map of North America, and I was having the most trouble with the Great Lakes, but I did a good enough job to win the competition, and my prize was an all-expense-paid gold prospecting trip to Alaska. On the contest website, you could go and browse all the available locations to do this, and after looking through everything (the flash interface was pretty slick), I decided that, as I was going in the summer, I would visit the northernmost option.
The countryside was gorgeous. Vast green rolling plains shading up into slate-gray mountains in the low slanting gold of the sun. I arrived at my lodgings to find I had a quite comfortable private room and bath in a large log cabin that was furnished like an old family farmhouse. Everything was serviceable and cozy, and nothing matched anything else. I was sharing the cabin with a couple of men, a family of four, the caretaker, and, at least when I got there, two grizzly bear cubs. We were pretty concerned about evicting the cubs before mama showed up and decided we wanted to keep them.
After that was taken care of, I was given the goody bags to pass out, but the only representatives of the family of four that I could find were their two little boys, so I had to explain to the boys that they needed to *share* these bags with their family, and until their mom and dad came back, they could each have ONE candy. ONE. Fortunately they were very well behaved little boys. They went on their way and I started to collect a few extra blankets for my bed, in case I got cold overnight.
At this point, the cabin caretaker came into my room stoned and, while he completely ignored me, he was acting SUPER creepy, so I got one of the guys to come and help me shove him out (he was HUGE), and then help me remake the bed because he left a big old sweat stain from his drippy hair. Anyhow, we got all that taken care of, and set off in an antique train to the gold-mining site to start panning. And I'll never know if there was gold in them thar hills (though everyone kept saying exactly that), because then I woke up.
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Thursday, October 20, 2016
TBTT#23 The Game ~ 3/29/2013
TBTT#23 The Game ~ 3/29/2013
I dreamed last night that I was staying at the foot of a mountain at some sort of educational camp with an assortment of friends and family. Late one night I felt a call and began climbing the mountain. As the sun rose, I found myself in a winding, ice-filled cleft, all around me blanketed in snow, except the path beneath my feet, which was pebbled with lapis lazuli, aquamarine, and piercingly blue chunks of glacial ice. The path wound out of the cleft, up along the ice-draped shoulders of the highest peak, at times no more than a slender ribbon of loose blue scree edging out over sheer drops into frozen valleys hundreds of feet below. I slid and skittered down five feet for every ten that I climbed, but I kept going.
I reached the summit at mid day and found an ancient altar, sheltered on one side by one last upthrown spar of granite just under twice my height. On the altar lay a sword of gleaming steel, shining bright as polished glass in the midday sun. As I grasped the hilt and raised the sword, a friend appeared over a ridge across from me, then another to my left, another and another until five of us stood in that high place, and each had faced their darkest fears in the climb, and each found their weapons of horn and iron and ebony, one a bow and arrows, another a long hafted axe. There was a dagger and a tall, barbed pike.
An old man, bent and bearded, appeared behind the altar, telling us of the enemy we had been brought to face. It would appear to each of us, he said, once as our dearest friend, once as our darkest nightmare, until each of us had wounded it and thrown it down twice. Then it would arise one final time.
The old man disappeared as we heard the scrabbling clatter of someone new climbing up the last slope. A woman appeared over the ridge, and the girl on my right choked back a gasping sob, ran to her, then dodged back to avoid raking claws, black and sharp as obsidian, as the woman's hands lashes out at her. The girl grabbed the outflung arm and raked it elbow to risk with her dagger, then flung the monster over a cliff.
As we heard it clawing it's way back up, we arrayed ourselves around the altar, one atop the highest ledge, one beneath the altar itself. I found an open space on the other side of the outcrop, where I could see the monster coming and keep the rock at my back, it came to each of us twice, and we fought it off and threw it down. When it came the tenth time, for the man with the long pike, it wounded him, and he died even as it fell.
The archer above me caught the pike as the dagger girl tossed it to him, then spun and hurled it at the enormous gray dragon that flapped up before me, with eyes like sapphire, spewing freezing flames the color of the walls of a glacial crevasse. I darted beneath it and grasped the pike, where it was lodged in the dragon's belly. Holding myself there beneath the beast, and twisting the pike deeper in, I hacked at it with my sword.
As it began to crumple to the ground, I wrenched the pike loose with my left hand, then darted out from under it. I hooked the base of its head with the barb of the pike, drawing it down and stretching its neck. I raised the sword in my right hand and brought it smashing down again and again. I almost had its head off when it reared back with the last of its strength, its back full of black arrows. The pike jerked in my hand, but I clung to it, stumbling forward. Then, grasping the pike again more firmly and crossing my right arm over, I jerked the pike from its neck, and with a backhanded slash, finally severed its head.
The five of us trudged back down the mountain, and helped the school janitor fix a broken toilet before washing up for dinner. Then I woke up.
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Zombies on Everest ~ 10/4/2016
I dreamed I was visiting Everest. There was a train up to the top. It stopped at Base Camp, Stone Camp, and the abandoned power plant perched on a stream near the summit.The view was pretty amazing from up there, but the building was just a damp, old concrete block of a place. Off to the south side of the mountain was a much nicer building: the temple of Ulan Batoor. It's spire was a high, slightly bulging cone with stone traceries running in tiers around its circumference, from base to tip. The whole thing was covered in green moss, and was very picturesque against the snows of the higher peaks.
To come down from the temple to the coast, you could walk along more paths, or you could ride a T-lift. I chose the lift, but I must not have tucked my camera snuggly enough in my pocket, because when the lift sped around a turn, flinging all of us like a roller coaster ride, my camera went flying to the rocks below. I was so sad, because, while I hadn't taken many pictures of Everest yet, since I wanted to get an overview before I started shooting, there were a lot of photos from earlier in the trip that I hadn't saved to my computer yet.
I decided to walk back up to where the lift track bent around overhead and see if I could find my camera and at least salvage the SD card. As I began hiking up the path, I noticed several groups of people coming down, and I wondered if maybe someone had found my camera and would be bringing it down to show around. Sure enough, as I passed a couple of guys, I caught the flash of red metal in one of their hands, and asked them if that was a camera they'd found, and told them it was mine. I had a momentary fear they'd ask me for some proof of that, but they handed it over without question. I did check to see if I could see any recent photos, and sure enough, I was able to power it up and it was, indeed, my camera.
But even though it turned on, it didn't work quite right. It was zoomed way in, and wouldn't zoom back out, and while I could scroll (zoomed in) among photos I'd taken, and see through the view finder, I could no longer actually take pictures, no matter how hard I pressed the button. So I decided I needed to continue on up to the temple and see if they sold cameras in the gift shop.
The gift shop was tucked into one wing of the enormous temple, all cold gray stone beneath its blanket of moss. Pressed up against one window, amid a ceiling high pile of rubbish, I could see a decaying torso of a man with a narrow face, short, medium-brown hair, and blue eyes filming over. He looked familiar, and I thought it might have been the clerk from the gift shop up at the peak. Other than that, I didn't think much of it.
Inside the walls were whitewashed and the floor was brown tile and the gift shop shelves were pretty bare. But they did have a modest selection of cameras. One was the size and shape of a mid-line DSLR, and I thought maybe this was my chance to upgrade from my point-and-shoot, but when the clerk handed it to me, I swear it weighed fifteen or twenty pounds. I said it was way too heavy, and my friend Kerri pointed out that it was much bigger than what I was used to, so of course it would feel heavy. So I handed it to her, and she said, oh, no, no way, I was right.
The next selection was right in my price range, but I wasn't sure. It was one of those skinny, flat, rectangular cameras like the one I had when I was little, and it took real film and flash cubes, and I wasn't really interested in going back to that era, after getting used to digital. I finally decided on a small, copper colored point-and-shoot that had most of the features I was used to, though since it was so cheap, I didn't have high hopes for its durability or reliability. Still, I really needed something to get me through the trip.
As I was ringing up, the brown-haired, blue-eyed clerk came in and began talking to the Chinese clerk who was checking me out. It was the same guy I'd seen rotting as a torso in the window, and he didn't look all that great ambulatory, either. I decided that the temple, and maybe the whole Everest complex, was being taken over by zombies, and me and my friends should quietly make our way out of there and get home as fast as we could. The big black dog in the corner seemed to think that was an excellent idea, and he'd rather like to come home with us. Then I woke up.
To come down from the temple to the coast, you could walk along more paths, or you could ride a T-lift. I chose the lift, but I must not have tucked my camera snuggly enough in my pocket, because when the lift sped around a turn, flinging all of us like a roller coaster ride, my camera went flying to the rocks below. I was so sad, because, while I hadn't taken many pictures of Everest yet, since I wanted to get an overview before I started shooting, there were a lot of photos from earlier in the trip that I hadn't saved to my computer yet.
I decided to walk back up to where the lift track bent around overhead and see if I could find my camera and at least salvage the SD card. As I began hiking up the path, I noticed several groups of people coming down, and I wondered if maybe someone had found my camera and would be bringing it down to show around. Sure enough, as I passed a couple of guys, I caught the flash of red metal in one of their hands, and asked them if that was a camera they'd found, and told them it was mine. I had a momentary fear they'd ask me for some proof of that, but they handed it over without question. I did check to see if I could see any recent photos, and sure enough, I was able to power it up and it was, indeed, my camera.
But even though it turned on, it didn't work quite right. It was zoomed way in, and wouldn't zoom back out, and while I could scroll (zoomed in) among photos I'd taken, and see through the view finder, I could no longer actually take pictures, no matter how hard I pressed the button. So I decided I needed to continue on up to the temple and see if they sold cameras in the gift shop.
The gift shop was tucked into one wing of the enormous temple, all cold gray stone beneath its blanket of moss. Pressed up against one window, amid a ceiling high pile of rubbish, I could see a decaying torso of a man with a narrow face, short, medium-brown hair, and blue eyes filming over. He looked familiar, and I thought it might have been the clerk from the gift shop up at the peak. Other than that, I didn't think much of it.
Inside the walls were whitewashed and the floor was brown tile and the gift shop shelves were pretty bare. But they did have a modest selection of cameras. One was the size and shape of a mid-line DSLR, and I thought maybe this was my chance to upgrade from my point-and-shoot, but when the clerk handed it to me, I swear it weighed fifteen or twenty pounds. I said it was way too heavy, and my friend Kerri pointed out that it was much bigger than what I was used to, so of course it would feel heavy. So I handed it to her, and she said, oh, no, no way, I was right.
The next selection was right in my price range, but I wasn't sure. It was one of those skinny, flat, rectangular cameras like the one I had when I was little, and it took real film and flash cubes, and I wasn't really interested in going back to that era, after getting used to digital. I finally decided on a small, copper colored point-and-shoot that had most of the features I was used to, though since it was so cheap, I didn't have high hopes for its durability or reliability. Still, I really needed something to get me through the trip.
As I was ringing up, the brown-haired, blue-eyed clerk came in and began talking to the Chinese clerk who was checking me out. It was the same guy I'd seen rotting as a torso in the window, and he didn't look all that great ambulatory, either. I decided that the temple, and maybe the whole Everest complex, was being taken over by zombies, and me and my friends should quietly make our way out of there and get home as fast as we could. The big black dog in the corner seemed to think that was an excellent idea, and he'd rather like to come home with us. Then I woke up.
Thursday, September 15, 2016
TBTT#22 Unconventional Transport
I dreamed I was trying to get back to new orleans from my grandmother's house by harnessing a wild rabbit, encased in a giant glass butter dish, and having it pull my bicycle. But my umbrella wouldn't work. The white rabbit kept trying to run down into the gully. I had better luck with the brown one.
Saturday, September 10, 2016
Ocean Depths to Office Space to Outer Space ~ 9/10/2016
I dreamed I went diving on this special reef where you could collect pet sea animals. I came back up to the surface with a dish full of golden yellow and bright orange brittle stars, one fish shaped like an angel fish, but bright, fiery amber, and a six inch tall rag doll that was really a mermaid under a spell.
I traveled home through a series of quaint British villages, and as I went, I learned the mermaid's story. She had fallen in love with a human, decades ago, and come up onto land to woo him. But she'd been pursued by a dirty old man who tried to rape her. Someone had transformed her into a tiny doll just in time. The man had thrown her into the ocean, and until she could find the person who could change her back, she was stuck.
I got my dish of sea life home, but I noticed the brittle stars were having to crouch tensely to stay under water, and even then their bristles poked up into the air a little. I needed to hurry up and get them a bigger aquarium of salt water as quick as I could. So I hurried to the post office, where at least I could buy sea salt, so I could replace some of the sea water I'd lost. But all I had was a $20 bill, and they refused to take anything larger than a $10, or credit cards. I yelled at them about how ridiculous that was for a bit, then hurried to the beach shop down the street.
The beach shop took credit cards and sold sea salt, which was good. I realized, after poking around a little, that they also sold aquariums and small animal cages. I started looking around, and kept finding tanks that were *almost* what I was looking for, but not quite. I finally asked for help, and was shown several aquariums that were the size I wanted, but not suitable for salt water. It took way too long, but I did eventually buy a suitable aquarium. I got the other chemicals I'd need to treat the water with and some gravel for the bottom, and went home.
I got the tank set up, with a layer of snapped green beans on the bottom, then a layer of gravel, then the salt water. I treated the water with the chemicals, and had to wait a bit. But before I could put the fish in, I noticed the bottom-most green beans had turned black, with a delicate layer of white mold, so I had to empty everything out and start over. By the time I got the fish, the brittle stars, and the rag doll mermaid setup and comfortable in the tank, I was running late for work.
I got myself to New Orleans, and had been working in the office for a couple of weeks, when I was told that the next Friday would be my last day. I was pretty upset, because I'd bought a car and taken an apartment just to come work in New Orleans. I left work early that day, and headed to a pub for a cider. Two women passed me, headed for the same pub. The taller one was a beautiful Indian woman wearing a dress of rich, stiffened, deep teal wool. The dress hugged her figure, all the way down her arms, up her neck, over her hips and down to her calves, before belling out to a two-foot circle around her ankles. Her hair was in a sleek, long, thick braid down her back, and she wore enormous gold hoop earrings.
The other woman was a pale-skinned, dark-haired, Russian woman with jade green eyes. She wore a mauve silk sari with a rosy mantilla of sheer silk around her arms and up to the top of her head. The mantilla was edged with gold, and her hair was piled up on her head, held in place by golden combs. This woman held the pub door open for me, and we all recognized each other. The two of them had been interns the summer before, and were working for Shell again this summer. They insisted I join them at their table for my drink, and we talked over the current business situation, and my layoff.
On my last day in the New Orleans office, I went to the cafeteria for lunch, and spotted a college friend I hadn't seen in years. I called out his old nickname, and he turned around surprised. I wanted to ask him how he'd gone from a free spirit in the peace corps to a starched white shirt and khakis, but I didn't get a chance. He immediately started reminiscing about the a cappella group we'd been in, and insisted we sing our arrangement of Billy Joel's "Lullaby". So we began to sing, and I actually remembered the whole thing.
Suddenly, it seemed like he'd received some sort of signal. He perked up, began to look around, then told me to come with him. We left the cafeteria, and outside the sky was black and the stars were out, and above us hovered a Firefly class spaceship. He'd been its captain for years, and the crew was calling him back. He invited me to go with them, and of course I accepted. We flew up and away from earth, and as we went deeper and deeper into space, the emergency he'd been called to help with became apparent.
When we turned on the exterior lights, we could see that an enormous space parasite had latched onto the ship. It was shaped like a big, flat pill bug, and was an orangey, mustardy yellow with green fronds all around it's edge. Somehow it had been invisible in earth's atmosphere, but had survived landing and take off, and creatures like it were latching themselves onto space ships all through that quadrant of the galaxy. We were trying to figure out what to do about it when I woke up.
I traveled home through a series of quaint British villages, and as I went, I learned the mermaid's story. She had fallen in love with a human, decades ago, and come up onto land to woo him. But she'd been pursued by a dirty old man who tried to rape her. Someone had transformed her into a tiny doll just in time. The man had thrown her into the ocean, and until she could find the person who could change her back, she was stuck.
I got my dish of sea life home, but I noticed the brittle stars were having to crouch tensely to stay under water, and even then their bristles poked up into the air a little. I needed to hurry up and get them a bigger aquarium of salt water as quick as I could. So I hurried to the post office, where at least I could buy sea salt, so I could replace some of the sea water I'd lost. But all I had was a $20 bill, and they refused to take anything larger than a $10, or credit cards. I yelled at them about how ridiculous that was for a bit, then hurried to the beach shop down the street.
The beach shop took credit cards and sold sea salt, which was good. I realized, after poking around a little, that they also sold aquariums and small animal cages. I started looking around, and kept finding tanks that were *almost* what I was looking for, but not quite. I finally asked for help, and was shown several aquariums that were the size I wanted, but not suitable for salt water. It took way too long, but I did eventually buy a suitable aquarium. I got the other chemicals I'd need to treat the water with and some gravel for the bottom, and went home.
I got the tank set up, with a layer of snapped green beans on the bottom, then a layer of gravel, then the salt water. I treated the water with the chemicals, and had to wait a bit. But before I could put the fish in, I noticed the bottom-most green beans had turned black, with a delicate layer of white mold, so I had to empty everything out and start over. By the time I got the fish, the brittle stars, and the rag doll mermaid setup and comfortable in the tank, I was running late for work.
I got myself to New Orleans, and had been working in the office for a couple of weeks, when I was told that the next Friday would be my last day. I was pretty upset, because I'd bought a car and taken an apartment just to come work in New Orleans. I left work early that day, and headed to a pub for a cider. Two women passed me, headed for the same pub. The taller one was a beautiful Indian woman wearing a dress of rich, stiffened, deep teal wool. The dress hugged her figure, all the way down her arms, up her neck, over her hips and down to her calves, before belling out to a two-foot circle around her ankles. Her hair was in a sleek, long, thick braid down her back, and she wore enormous gold hoop earrings.
The other woman was a pale-skinned, dark-haired, Russian woman with jade green eyes. She wore a mauve silk sari with a rosy mantilla of sheer silk around her arms and up to the top of her head. The mantilla was edged with gold, and her hair was piled up on her head, held in place by golden combs. This woman held the pub door open for me, and we all recognized each other. The two of them had been interns the summer before, and were working for Shell again this summer. They insisted I join them at their table for my drink, and we talked over the current business situation, and my layoff.
On my last day in the New Orleans office, I went to the cafeteria for lunch, and spotted a college friend I hadn't seen in years. I called out his old nickname, and he turned around surprised. I wanted to ask him how he'd gone from a free spirit in the peace corps to a starched white shirt and khakis, but I didn't get a chance. He immediately started reminiscing about the a cappella group we'd been in, and insisted we sing our arrangement of Billy Joel's "Lullaby". So we began to sing, and I actually remembered the whole thing.
Suddenly, it seemed like he'd received some sort of signal. He perked up, began to look around, then told me to come with him. We left the cafeteria, and outside the sky was black and the stars were out, and above us hovered a Firefly class spaceship. He'd been its captain for years, and the crew was calling him back. He invited me to go with them, and of course I accepted. We flew up and away from earth, and as we went deeper and deeper into space, the emergency he'd been called to help with became apparent.
When we turned on the exterior lights, we could see that an enormous space parasite had latched onto the ship. It was shaped like a big, flat pill bug, and was an orangey, mustardy yellow with green fronds all around it's edge. Somehow it had been invisible in earth's atmosphere, but had survived landing and take off, and creatures like it were latching themselves onto space ships all through that quadrant of the galaxy. We were trying to figure out what to do about it when I woke up.
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Office Space ~ 8/27/2016
I dreamed I was part of a team of people who had gone in together on an investment to build an office high rise. But we'd run out of money, I guess, so construction halted, and we all moved into the building, since we couldn't afford rent.
The entire crew of Serenity was there, except Inara. There were a couple of kids, too. We managed to get a shopping mall going on the ground and second floors, but the rest of the building was a maze of unfinished duct work, elevators we'd each secretly installed to our own hidey holes, and building supplies.
Mal found out the building code inspector was coming, and we all knew the building wasn't stable. We were down in the basement trying to wedge in iron supports to shore things up when we heard the inspector coming. We scattered, each to a different room or corner to whisk up in our elevators, which operated like pneumatic tubes at a bank drive through.
I went to one of the two main elevators, which were the only ones that went from top to bottom of the building. There was one on each end of the building's long footprint, but on the fourth floor, their tracks made a right angle turn to run level before turning up again, so that they ran side by side to the top. But when I got up to the 8th floor, I realized I could just leave the building. But Mal, Wash, and Jayne had cut power to the elevators. All except one emergency one.
Now, I hated this elevator, because it was not much more than a disk of metal, about 8 feet across, like a flying saucer, that dropped the entire height of the building through an atrium, slowed by a powerful jet of air. But I jumped on anyhow, and rode it down to the lobby, lying flat on my belly and clinging for dear life to some indentations in the floor. Then I made sure no one was watching before strolling nonchalantly down some back stairs and out into the street. Then I woke up.
The entire crew of Serenity was there, except Inara. There were a couple of kids, too. We managed to get a shopping mall going on the ground and second floors, but the rest of the building was a maze of unfinished duct work, elevators we'd each secretly installed to our own hidey holes, and building supplies.
Mal found out the building code inspector was coming, and we all knew the building wasn't stable. We were down in the basement trying to wedge in iron supports to shore things up when we heard the inspector coming. We scattered, each to a different room or corner to whisk up in our elevators, which operated like pneumatic tubes at a bank drive through.
I went to one of the two main elevators, which were the only ones that went from top to bottom of the building. There was one on each end of the building's long footprint, but on the fourth floor, their tracks made a right angle turn to run level before turning up again, so that they ran side by side to the top. But when I got up to the 8th floor, I realized I could just leave the building. But Mal, Wash, and Jayne had cut power to the elevators. All except one emergency one.
Now, I hated this elevator, because it was not much more than a disk of metal, about 8 feet across, like a flying saucer, that dropped the entire height of the building through an atrium, slowed by a powerful jet of air. But I jumped on anyhow, and rode it down to the lobby, lying flat on my belly and clinging for dear life to some indentations in the floor. Then I made sure no one was watching before strolling nonchalantly down some back stairs and out into the street. Then I woke up.
Thursday, July 7, 2016
TBTT#21 One Liner ~ 2/1/2013
I'm not sure WHY I woke up with the words, "demon sledge hammer vacuum cleaner" running through my head, but I'm sure there's a perfectly logical explanation...
Thursday, June 16, 2016
TBTT#20 CSI Calleigh Duquesne ~ 1/14/2013
I dreamed I was CSI Calleigh Duquesne, which was awesome to start with. So I went to treat myself to dinner at a super fancy buffet on Canal Street. The host who seated me was pretty attractive, so I asked if he'd join me for drinks when he was done with work. Turned out he was the owner.
We went for drinks, but as we were sitting at the bar, I received a cryptic note, which I couldn't make any sense of, but it was kind of threatening, and he recognized the handwriting as that of some mystery person who was stalking him. So he insisted I not go home, or the person might follow me and learn where I lived.
He put me up in a hotel room in the hotel attached to his restaurant. For such a nice place, it was kind of a crummy room, with the shower in a corner above the toilet. But it had a patio that looked over a grassy coastal field with palm trees and the whitewashed walls of a convent. Every morning, a flock of bright green and red parrots would flap down from the walls and waddle penguin style around the field eating grasshoppers.
After watching them for a while, I decided it was time to get to work, so I went out to the parking garage, where I found that my car had been flipped out off the second level, and was lying upside down and totaled on the ground below. But my CSI team was already on the scene. I couldn’t work it, of course, because I was too close to the case, but also because whoever had done it had stolen my kit and plastered the car with my own evidence tags.
It was determined that only a robot could have flipped the car. A fingerprint on one of the tags led us to a dance instructor and choreographer for a show at Harrah's that featured dancers and little rolly robots that she had both designed and programmed. In her studio, the team discovered the larger version that had flipped my car.
Turns out she had had a fling with the restaurant owner and, unbeknownst to him, gotten pregnant. She'd had an ectopic pregnancy, which she had to abort, and the procedure had caused some damage so that she'd never be able to have children. She went to court, pled guilty, got a light sentence, and I woke up.
We went for drinks, but as we were sitting at the bar, I received a cryptic note, which I couldn't make any sense of, but it was kind of threatening, and he recognized the handwriting as that of some mystery person who was stalking him. So he insisted I not go home, or the person might follow me and learn where I lived.
He put me up in a hotel room in the hotel attached to his restaurant. For such a nice place, it was kind of a crummy room, with the shower in a corner above the toilet. But it had a patio that looked over a grassy coastal field with palm trees and the whitewashed walls of a convent. Every morning, a flock of bright green and red parrots would flap down from the walls and waddle penguin style around the field eating grasshoppers.
After watching them for a while, I decided it was time to get to work, so I went out to the parking garage, where I found that my car had been flipped out off the second level, and was lying upside down and totaled on the ground below. But my CSI team was already on the scene. I couldn’t work it, of course, because I was too close to the case, but also because whoever had done it had stolen my kit and plastered the car with my own evidence tags.
It was determined that only a robot could have flipped the car. A fingerprint on one of the tags led us to a dance instructor and choreographer for a show at Harrah's that featured dancers and little rolly robots that she had both designed and programmed. In her studio, the team discovered the larger version that had flipped my car.
Turns out she had had a fling with the restaurant owner and, unbeknownst to him, gotten pregnant. She'd had an ectopic pregnancy, which she had to abort, and the procedure had caused some damage so that she'd never be able to have children. She went to court, pled guilty, got a light sentence, and I woke up.
Sunday, June 12, 2016
Saving the World is Hard ~ 6/12/2016
I dreamed I was helping to save three Islamic women who were under attack. We jumped into my jeep, and I was speeding around trying to get them to sanctuary while guided missiles were following right behind us, ready to blow us up. I was dodging in and out of ziggurats on the desert at sunset, with the missiles just on my tail, but I finally managed to lose them and get over the border into the safe zone.
After I left to go home, I stumbled into the zombie apocalypse. There was some sort of infection that, if the carriers bit you, your flesh slowly dissolved away and you became an animate skeleton. The team I joined was using pitchforks with long handles to spear the infected bone people and hurl them into a big bonfire. And keep them there, because burning them to final death took time.
Eventually the fire was dying down and it became evident that we were fighting a losing battle. One after another we became infected, and there just weren't enough uncontaminated people on the team to deal with the sick ones. One by one we fell to the disease, and soon we were all walking piles of bone. And we realized it actually wasn't that bad. What had seemed so scary was just another form of consious life, and we began to feel horrible about all the people we'd thrown into the fire just for being different. Especially since, given time, the condition reversed itself, and we were all normal humans again.
To work off my guilt, I became a detective. I was given a commission by a wealthy man to go inspect his mansion while he was away, because he thought someone was trying to take it from him. When I got there with my partner, there were three or for ruffians lounging around in the upper floors, so we called our client, but he said not to worry about them, but to check for some very specific signs.
Was the house keeper keeping the antique firearms clean, but was she obviously unaware of what they actually were? Yes. They were sparkling clean, but in several pieces that she couldn't even put back in the hidden wall cases correctly.
Were there three polished pebbles in the right hand drawer of the desk in the study? Yes, there were.
Were there any loose paving stones? Here we needed clarification. Did he mean the path outside, leading up to the main front door? Or did he mean in the gardens? The tiles around the pool? The slate floor of the kitchen? He said to check them all. And in every single place, every single stone and tile was loose. Uh oh! But then I woke up.
After I left to go home, I stumbled into the zombie apocalypse. There was some sort of infection that, if the carriers bit you, your flesh slowly dissolved away and you became an animate skeleton. The team I joined was using pitchforks with long handles to spear the infected bone people and hurl them into a big bonfire. And keep them there, because burning them to final death took time.
Eventually the fire was dying down and it became evident that we were fighting a losing battle. One after another we became infected, and there just weren't enough uncontaminated people on the team to deal with the sick ones. One by one we fell to the disease, and soon we were all walking piles of bone. And we realized it actually wasn't that bad. What had seemed so scary was just another form of consious life, and we began to feel horrible about all the people we'd thrown into the fire just for being different. Especially since, given time, the condition reversed itself, and we were all normal humans again.
To work off my guilt, I became a detective. I was given a commission by a wealthy man to go inspect his mansion while he was away, because he thought someone was trying to take it from him. When I got there with my partner, there were three or for ruffians lounging around in the upper floors, so we called our client, but he said not to worry about them, but to check for some very specific signs.
Was the house keeper keeping the antique firearms clean, but was she obviously unaware of what they actually were? Yes. They were sparkling clean, but in several pieces that she couldn't even put back in the hidden wall cases correctly.
Were there three polished pebbles in the right hand drawer of the desk in the study? Yes, there were.
Were there any loose paving stones? Here we needed clarification. Did he mean the path outside, leading up to the main front door? Or did he mean in the gardens? The tiles around the pool? The slate floor of the kitchen? He said to check them all. And in every single place, every single stone and tile was loose. Uh oh! But then I woke up.
Thursday, June 9, 2016
Weirdest High School Reunion Ever ~ 6/9/2016
I dreamed I was headed to my 20 year high school reunion. I hitched a ride on a space ship shaped like a VW microbus, only bigger, with dark brown sides and a white top. Among the travelers I joined was a very pale, sickly baby. He was the sweetest little child, but so quiet, and everyone knew he wouldn't live long. As I held him, the baby died. I began crying, and I placed him very gently back in his car seat. We were all silent as the millions of miles flowed past us.
We landed near the site of my reunion, and suddenly heard the baby laughing. He had come back to life, after being cold and stiff for hours! It was a miracle! I hopped out of the bus incredibly happy, and saw my father, who was helping set up the reunion. I told him the story as we walked to my old high school, where the party would be. Only the school had fallen into ruins. No one seemed to mind, though.
One of the guys in my class asked me if I was ready to dance with him that night, and I realized I'd lost my cowboy boots somewhere along the way. My dad had some bright yellow rain boots in his trunk, so I put those on instead. And started milling around the party guests, looking for old friends. I talked to a few, then I had to use the restroom, so I went looking for that.
There were still toilets in the old restroom, but more than half of the stalls had been demolished, and the ones that were left didn't have doors. There were a lot of anxious women and girls milling around trying to figure out how to pee in private when everyone at the party was just on the other side of a three foot high collapsed stone wall.
Fortunately, the reunion was a pizza party, and there were hundreds of pizza boxes stacked in a corner of the ruined kitchen. I went and got one and unfolded it, and it was big enough to make a sort of door for one of the remaining stalls. There were some cardboard tabs that I folded out so they'd hang on either side of the stall walls. There was a little girl with curly brown hair looking distraught, so I showed her how to make a door out of cardboard.
When I turned around to go into my newly private stall, I found someone else had gone in already, and now there was a line. I turned to get another pizza box, and then I woke up.
We landed near the site of my reunion, and suddenly heard the baby laughing. He had come back to life, after being cold and stiff for hours! It was a miracle! I hopped out of the bus incredibly happy, and saw my father, who was helping set up the reunion. I told him the story as we walked to my old high school, where the party would be. Only the school had fallen into ruins. No one seemed to mind, though.
One of the guys in my class asked me if I was ready to dance with him that night, and I realized I'd lost my cowboy boots somewhere along the way. My dad had some bright yellow rain boots in his trunk, so I put those on instead. And started milling around the party guests, looking for old friends. I talked to a few, then I had to use the restroom, so I went looking for that.
There were still toilets in the old restroom, but more than half of the stalls had been demolished, and the ones that were left didn't have doors. There were a lot of anxious women and girls milling around trying to figure out how to pee in private when everyone at the party was just on the other side of a three foot high collapsed stone wall.
Fortunately, the reunion was a pizza party, and there were hundreds of pizza boxes stacked in a corner of the ruined kitchen. I went and got one and unfolded it, and it was big enough to make a sort of door for one of the remaining stalls. There were some cardboard tabs that I folded out so they'd hang on either side of the stall walls. There was a little girl with curly brown hair looking distraught, so I showed her how to make a door out of cardboard.
When I turned around to go into my newly private stall, I found someone else had gone in already, and now there was a line. I turned to get another pizza box, and then I woke up.
Thursday, May 19, 2016
TBTT#19 A Wrinkle in SOMEthing... ~ 1/8/2013
I dreamed I was traveling with Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which across space and time in little ships shaped like silver dollar sized snowflakes. The ships also shot snowflake shaped projectiles as big as they were, and sharp as ninja throwing stars. I was a teen aged telepath and we were traveling the universe, through fire and swarms of yellow jackets, to solve and avenge the murder of a woman in the bathroom of a German bar. Turns out she had been killed by her husband and son (who were, of course, aliens in disguise) for the high crime of telling the boy he couldn't have a pair of expensive sneakers, and that he should be more polite to women. The bar looked a lot like Valhalla, and the weirdest part was... I ordered a Red Bull.
Saturday, May 7, 2016
Ghost in the Machine ~ 5/7/2016
I dreamed that I was working with some footage of the Lytle High School Marching Band, in parade formation, boarding a cruise ship that was taking them to an international marching band festival. My job was to edit the clips together, and add some animation to pizzazz up the montage.
First I removed a bit of aside banter I'd had with their drum major, where I'd told her I'd been a drum major for Medina Valley, and we had a bit of good-spirited booing and trash talking before things really got going. When I finally had everything lined up in my program the way I wanted, I went to go check the code and animation libraries to make sure it was all in a state I could work with. Sometimes code isn't, you know.
But, as I started scanning through the code, the program took on a life of its own, and started removing a lot of my semicolons, and replacing them with random animation tags. My film started playing, and there were weird, glistening spangles in a rainbow of colors, scattered across all the objects in frame. The sky had gone pink and purple, and the band was marching through a field of green clover, and going into a hole in the ground instead of a ship.
There were random beetles and butterflies and bats and stuff flying around, and the music was all jumbled into a cacophony. People's faces weren't quite right. They all seemed off-kilter, and some of them were sagging lopsidedly. It was a nightmare, and I couldn't even begin to imagine how long it would take to fix the code, because it would all have to be manual.
Then something even worse happened. One of the figures on the screen turned toward me, laughed, and came out of the screen to stand beside me. He was wearing a white suit and a rainbow tie, and had all the different spangly patches here and there on his clothing and skin. Even worse, one of his eyes sagged half out of it's socket, and his skin had little flaps that drooped away from his flesh, which was gray in some places. And I recognized him. He was a guy I'd had a crush on back in middle school.
He began to follow me around as I tried to leave the studio and find someone who could help me. He kept hitting on me, which was really off-putting since I had been SO OVER him for, like, decades, and I knew the real him was in a steady relationship. He disappeared, but just as I was feeling relieved, he returned with a woman, whom he must have pulled out of the animation, because she was just as partially melted and spangled as he was.
After all that hitting on me, he introduced the woman to me as his fiancee, and started begging me to help plan their wedding, and she was all syrupy sweet about it, but I could tell she was angry, and at ME. Whenever she stalked away, he would make a heavy pass at me before going after her. And all I wanted to do was figure out what was haunting my code (I suspected it was him), and how I could get everything back in order as quickly as possible.
Then I woke up.
First I removed a bit of aside banter I'd had with their drum major, where I'd told her I'd been a drum major for Medina Valley, and we had a bit of good-spirited booing and trash talking before things really got going. When I finally had everything lined up in my program the way I wanted, I went to go check the code and animation libraries to make sure it was all in a state I could work with. Sometimes code isn't, you know.
But, as I started scanning through the code, the program took on a life of its own, and started removing a lot of my semicolons, and replacing them with random animation tags. My film started playing, and there were weird, glistening spangles in a rainbow of colors, scattered across all the objects in frame. The sky had gone pink and purple, and the band was marching through a field of green clover, and going into a hole in the ground instead of a ship.
There were random beetles and butterflies and bats and stuff flying around, and the music was all jumbled into a cacophony. People's faces weren't quite right. They all seemed off-kilter, and some of them were sagging lopsidedly. It was a nightmare, and I couldn't even begin to imagine how long it would take to fix the code, because it would all have to be manual.
Then something even worse happened. One of the figures on the screen turned toward me, laughed, and came out of the screen to stand beside me. He was wearing a white suit and a rainbow tie, and had all the different spangly patches here and there on his clothing and skin. Even worse, one of his eyes sagged half out of it's socket, and his skin had little flaps that drooped away from his flesh, which was gray in some places. And I recognized him. He was a guy I'd had a crush on back in middle school.
He began to follow me around as I tried to leave the studio and find someone who could help me. He kept hitting on me, which was really off-putting since I had been SO OVER him for, like, decades, and I knew the real him was in a steady relationship. He disappeared, but just as I was feeling relieved, he returned with a woman, whom he must have pulled out of the animation, because she was just as partially melted and spangled as he was.
After all that hitting on me, he introduced the woman to me as his fiancee, and started begging me to help plan their wedding, and she was all syrupy sweet about it, but I could tell she was angry, and at ME. Whenever she stalked away, he would make a heavy pass at me before going after her. And all I wanted to do was figure out what was haunting my code (I suspected it was him), and how I could get everything back in order as quickly as possible.
Then I woke up.
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
The Adventures of Quentin and Marissa ~ 5/3/2016
I dreamed the adventures of Quentin and Marissa, young people who had grown up together. Quentin was a lanky, straw-haired kid who had bused tables and cleaned floors since he was so young he had to lie about his age to get a job. Marissa was a dark-haired beauty a few years older who used to try to look out for that sweet, skinny kid Quentin, until she got caught up in troubles of her own.
Both of them had big dreams. Marissa wanted to train as a fighter pilot, and join the French Resistance, and Quentin was wanted to be an author, and was always trying to find time to work on his book. But, in trying to earn money for flying lessons, Marissa fell in with a bad crowd. She never actually did drugs or turned tricks, but for years she was just a half a step away from both. She'd gotten involved with a guy who always had money to burn, and had offered to give her those flying lessons as long as she was dating him. He was as good as his word, at least, but he was also an abusive shit.
As he got older, Quentin realized he loved Marissa, and wished he could give her a better life, or at least just that she'd stop seeing him as a kid, and realize he'd become a good man, even if he couldn't afford flying lessons. In trying to get closer to her, he ran afoul of her boyfriend, who threatened to kill her if Quentin didn't help him deal drugs.
Marissa was supposed to be their go-between, and Quentin hated that she was being used like this, but knew the alternative was worse. But when she was supposed to hand him the drugs, instead she gave him a folded slip of paper, and on the outside it said, "Get out of here. Don't worry. Read this later." She slipped away into the night, and as he pondered this note, he heard a roar in the sky. He looked up, and there was Marissa, in the cockpit of a fighter jet, waving at him and headed toward France.
He had no idea what he would do if he left his jobs, but he knew that, while she might be safe, he was now in a lot of danger if he didn't follow her directions, so he left everything behind and got a bus to a different state. He got work in another restaurant, where he met Peter and Louis, who, like him, had big dreams. Like Quentin, they both played the trumpet, but while Quentin was a really talented ensemble player, Peter and Louis were improvisational masters. They really wanted to make a demo to send to a recording agency, but they didn't have the money for the studio time. Quentin agreed to help them save up.
For months Quentin slogged away, just like he had before, until one day Marissa walked into the diner where he worked. Now, he'd told Peter and Louis all about the girl he loved, and had shown them a picture of her that he had, so Peter recognized her, and came back to get him. Quentin ran out, full of questions, but Marissa was surprised to see him, and asked him what he was doing there. Quentin replied that of course he was working.
That's when she asked him hadn't he ever read her note? He pulled out the scrap of paper that he'd kept as a memento of the night she'd saved his life and achieved her dream, but had never opened. In it were the numbers to a bank account she'd opened in his name, after getting his book published for him, with the help of an editor she'd met. Quentin was actually now a multi-millionaire who could focus all his time on writing and get his friends studio time. He helped them record their album, and their talents were recognized by a famous agent, who launched them on wildly successful careers.
And, of course, Marissa revealed that she'd always loved Quentin, but never felt like she could pursue him until she'd gotten her own life together, and they were on an even field. Now that they had both achieved their dreams, and were set on an upward course, she admitted her feelings, he admitted his, and, though they couldn't always be together, because the French Resistance needed her, Quentin felt like the luckiest guy in the world, and loved her even more for her devotion to her cause.
And as they lived happily ever after, my dream world took a step back, and I could see that Marissa and Quentin were both patients with severe mental disabilities in a private psychiatric home, who enlivened their days together by living in a complex fantasy world. Then I woke up.
Both of them had big dreams. Marissa wanted to train as a fighter pilot, and join the French Resistance, and Quentin was wanted to be an author, and was always trying to find time to work on his book. But, in trying to earn money for flying lessons, Marissa fell in with a bad crowd. She never actually did drugs or turned tricks, but for years she was just a half a step away from both. She'd gotten involved with a guy who always had money to burn, and had offered to give her those flying lessons as long as she was dating him. He was as good as his word, at least, but he was also an abusive shit.
As he got older, Quentin realized he loved Marissa, and wished he could give her a better life, or at least just that she'd stop seeing him as a kid, and realize he'd become a good man, even if he couldn't afford flying lessons. In trying to get closer to her, he ran afoul of her boyfriend, who threatened to kill her if Quentin didn't help him deal drugs.
Marissa was supposed to be their go-between, and Quentin hated that she was being used like this, but knew the alternative was worse. But when she was supposed to hand him the drugs, instead she gave him a folded slip of paper, and on the outside it said, "Get out of here. Don't worry. Read this later." She slipped away into the night, and as he pondered this note, he heard a roar in the sky. He looked up, and there was Marissa, in the cockpit of a fighter jet, waving at him and headed toward France.
He had no idea what he would do if he left his jobs, but he knew that, while she might be safe, he was now in a lot of danger if he didn't follow her directions, so he left everything behind and got a bus to a different state. He got work in another restaurant, where he met Peter and Louis, who, like him, had big dreams. Like Quentin, they both played the trumpet, but while Quentin was a really talented ensemble player, Peter and Louis were improvisational masters. They really wanted to make a demo to send to a recording agency, but they didn't have the money for the studio time. Quentin agreed to help them save up.
For months Quentin slogged away, just like he had before, until one day Marissa walked into the diner where he worked. Now, he'd told Peter and Louis all about the girl he loved, and had shown them a picture of her that he had, so Peter recognized her, and came back to get him. Quentin ran out, full of questions, but Marissa was surprised to see him, and asked him what he was doing there. Quentin replied that of course he was working.
That's when she asked him hadn't he ever read her note? He pulled out the scrap of paper that he'd kept as a memento of the night she'd saved his life and achieved her dream, but had never opened. In it were the numbers to a bank account she'd opened in his name, after getting his book published for him, with the help of an editor she'd met. Quentin was actually now a multi-millionaire who could focus all his time on writing and get his friends studio time. He helped them record their album, and their talents were recognized by a famous agent, who launched them on wildly successful careers.
And, of course, Marissa revealed that she'd always loved Quentin, but never felt like she could pursue him until she'd gotten her own life together, and they were on an even field. Now that they had both achieved their dreams, and were set on an upward course, she admitted her feelings, he admitted his, and, though they couldn't always be together, because the French Resistance needed her, Quentin felt like the luckiest guy in the world, and loved her even more for her devotion to her cause.
And as they lived happily ever after, my dream world took a step back, and I could see that Marissa and Quentin were both patients with severe mental disabilities in a private psychiatric home, who enlivened their days together by living in a complex fantasy world. Then I woke up.
Thursday, April 21, 2016
TBTT#18 Shangri-La ~ 11/5/2012
I dreamed last night a vision of such breathtaking beauty that even in my dream I knew I could never adequately convey how sublimely, ethereally lovely it was. In my dream I scrambled and failed to take a photo before it vanished. But as I sit here trying to put it into words, I feel amazed that my mind could create such a place, and to carry such exquisite, pure and utter beauty in my head even now feels like a blessed gift.
I was traveling amid mountains, snowy white and deep, deep blue, in a lavishly and ornately appointed zeppelin. Everything from polished bronze to dark mahogany gleamed behind and beneath rich drapery and soft cushions. The craft was wonderful in and of itself, gliding along in silky, soundless luxury, but it was only the vehicle that I rode in.
We were traveling to Shangri-La, deep in these snowy mountains. We had seen nothing on the ground, but that wasn't where Shangri-La could be seen. Just as the sun was fully risen, we floated slowly up above the clouds.
As the shafts of fresh sunlight poured in around us between two peaks, the clouds around us turned to fine floating drifts of crystal ice, glittering like snow banks or vast piles of diamonds. And rising from these clouds, suddenly, were spires and chains and light, airy towers, with a thousand baubles and bells dancing and tinkling in the breeze, and everything made of glass-bright metal, licked into gleaming gold by the light of the new day. They rose around us like ships un-sinking from the sea of scintillating mist, with the sweet, gentle, chiming song of the bells drifting over us in tiny ripples of sound.
As the sun continued to rise, the clouds began to melt away, and that holy, magical, and deeply stirring city sank back into gray fog and vanished, leaving the clean air and vast forest below empty and haunted by the faint and far off ringing of bells.
I can't describe the awe, the wonder, the solemn joy that filled my soul with this vision. And the words of Coleridge keep running through my head.
"If a man could pass through paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke-- Aye, and what then?"
I was traveling amid mountains, snowy white and deep, deep blue, in a lavishly and ornately appointed zeppelin. Everything from polished bronze to dark mahogany gleamed behind and beneath rich drapery and soft cushions. The craft was wonderful in and of itself, gliding along in silky, soundless luxury, but it was only the vehicle that I rode in.
We were traveling to Shangri-La, deep in these snowy mountains. We had seen nothing on the ground, but that wasn't where Shangri-La could be seen. Just as the sun was fully risen, we floated slowly up above the clouds.
As the shafts of fresh sunlight poured in around us between two peaks, the clouds around us turned to fine floating drifts of crystal ice, glittering like snow banks or vast piles of diamonds. And rising from these clouds, suddenly, were spires and chains and light, airy towers, with a thousand baubles and bells dancing and tinkling in the breeze, and everything made of glass-bright metal, licked into gleaming gold by the light of the new day. They rose around us like ships un-sinking from the sea of scintillating mist, with the sweet, gentle, chiming song of the bells drifting over us in tiny ripples of sound.
As the sun continued to rise, the clouds began to melt away, and that holy, magical, and deeply stirring city sank back into gray fog and vanished, leaving the clean air and vast forest below empty and haunted by the faint and far off ringing of bells.
I can't describe the awe, the wonder, the solemn joy that filled my soul with this vision. And the words of Coleridge keep running through my head.
"If a man could pass through paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke-- Aye, and what then?"
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
TBTT#17 Peace ~ October 22, 2012
I've been thinking a lot of a dream I had a few weeks ago that filled me with a sense of peace. My father was alive, and so was Popo. I was out at the farm, and Popo and I were going out to check the cattle, like he always did. So we got in a little aluminum row boat, and started paddling up the creek. Against the rippling slate-gray water under a pewter sky, with the autumn grass waving tawny golden in the breeze, we paddled around bends and turns.
We passed a farm perched on a small mesa of rich red earth on one bend, then traveled along the road a while. We met an Italian foreign exchange student leaning on an old wooden fence weathered to smooth ash and silver. His old black Model T had broken down, so we gave him a ride as far as the mill pond where we turned around to head back. The black cows were all munching sedately up and down the banks. There was no sound but the sound of running water.
Popo let me off at the thirty story glass-walled sky scraper that stood alone in the last field before his land. It was a community college building with a cosmetology and massage school, so I was going to the spa on the first floor for a manicure/pedicure. Then I walked back through the wind-swept fields, the pinkish gravel of the road crunching beneath my feet, and the rustle of wind through the dark live-oak leaves filling my ears.
For all the bizarre non-sequitur and nonexistent landmarks that my sleeping mind populated that familiar space with, it was an incredibly peaceful, comforting dream. I felt at home, and I felt so loved.
We passed a farm perched on a small mesa of rich red earth on one bend, then traveled along the road a while. We met an Italian foreign exchange student leaning on an old wooden fence weathered to smooth ash and silver. His old black Model T had broken down, so we gave him a ride as far as the mill pond where we turned around to head back. The black cows were all munching sedately up and down the banks. There was no sound but the sound of running water.
Popo let me off at the thirty story glass-walled sky scraper that stood alone in the last field before his land. It was a community college building with a cosmetology and massage school, so I was going to the spa on the first floor for a manicure/pedicure. Then I walked back through the wind-swept fields, the pinkish gravel of the road crunching beneath my feet, and the rustle of wind through the dark live-oak leaves filling my ears.
For all the bizarre non-sequitur and nonexistent landmarks that my sleeping mind populated that familiar space with, it was an incredibly peaceful, comforting dream. I felt at home, and I felt so loved.
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Writing Science Fiction in My Sleep ~ 3/4/2016
I dreamed I was writing a science fiction story about a girl who was doing her grocery shopping. She picked up this truffle sort of thing that looked like a Brazil nut and smelled it. It smelled musty and sharp, and she didn't like it. As she put it back down, with the scent still in her nostrils, she began to hear and feel a strange buzzing in her head. No one else seemed to notice anything.
As she continued her shopping, it got worse, and the scene around her began to flicker. She could see a sort of flexible grid shining in darkness, and had the feeling she could follow it to alternate dimensions. This really scared her, but just as she was about to panic, she found a small, pine cone shaped spice that smelled like mint and cinnamon. The aroma cleared her head of all but the briefest glimpses of the grid, and made the buzzing stop.
She bought the spice, in case the visions and buzzing came back. She began to work out a formula using the spice and whiskey for a soothing drink that would clear away completely the effects of the strange truffle. The perfect equation turned out to be y = 3x + 17. She made her drink, and sat down in her armchair to enjoy it. But, plot twist! The drink actually transported her to the grid, leaving her to seek the world where the truffle and spice came from to find out how to get back. Of course she found it in peril and had to save it before she could gain the knowledge she needed to get back home.
I was getting ready to publish my work, and the director of the Rice MOB suggested that I adapt my story as a MOB show, and the band would perform it to garner me some publicity. I agreed to try, and started working on it. The biggest difficulty was that MOB shows are humorous, and my book, though it had its lighter moments, really wasn't. Also, the director wanted to use the formula as a clever Louie Louie count off, instead of the usual, "Five, six, seven, eight!"
But I just couldn't make that work, and we were really struggling with the whole concept when I woke up.
As she continued her shopping, it got worse, and the scene around her began to flicker. She could see a sort of flexible grid shining in darkness, and had the feeling she could follow it to alternate dimensions. This really scared her, but just as she was about to panic, she found a small, pine cone shaped spice that smelled like mint and cinnamon. The aroma cleared her head of all but the briefest glimpses of the grid, and made the buzzing stop.
She bought the spice, in case the visions and buzzing came back. She began to work out a formula using the spice and whiskey for a soothing drink that would clear away completely the effects of the strange truffle. The perfect equation turned out to be y = 3x + 17. She made her drink, and sat down in her armchair to enjoy it. But, plot twist! The drink actually transported her to the grid, leaving her to seek the world where the truffle and spice came from to find out how to get back. Of course she found it in peril and had to save it before she could gain the knowledge she needed to get back home.
I was getting ready to publish my work, and the director of the Rice MOB suggested that I adapt my story as a MOB show, and the band would perform it to garner me some publicity. I agreed to try, and started working on it. The biggest difficulty was that MOB shows are humorous, and my book, though it had its lighter moments, really wasn't. Also, the director wanted to use the formula as a clever Louie Louie count off, instead of the usual, "Five, six, seven, eight!"
But I just couldn't make that work, and we were really struggling with the whole concept when I woke up.
Saturday, February 27, 2016
The Teaching Snail ~ 2/27/2016
I dreamed that a friend and I worked at Angel Investigations. My friend was in charge of IT, and I did planning for the detective operations. I was also Angel's ex-girlfriend, which made things kind of awkward, even though the split had been amicable, since the reasons we couldn't be together were obvious.
My friend was out on an assignment where she was trying to lure an evil warlock to fall into his own trap. She was pretending to be enthralled, following his every command. We knew that he wanted to send a "message" to Angel, since we were getting close to capturing him, so chances were he was going to try to kill her, so we were all very on edge, as we watched through hidden cameras.
To prove that she was fully under his power, the warlock commanded my friend to do things like strip off her clothes, shave her head, and place her hand in a candle flame. She was so brave, she did all of these things. As we watched, he finally commanded her to touch a poisoned needle. She smiled, and immediately touched the needle on its side, not its point. He told her again to touch the needle, so she did it again.
He grew angry, as he tried to tell her in every way he could think to actually prick herself with the needle, and she, seeming upset and confused, continued to touch it on the side. Finally, he grew so frustrated that he came up to her and took her hand to guide it onto the needle's point. With a swift jerk, she pulled his hand down, jabbing the needle deep into his palm. He shuddered and died with a look of utter surprise on his face.
We were jubilant at my friend's success, and Angel pulled me into a celebratory hug that started to last too long, and then he tried to kiss me, and I pulled away, telling him this was a very bad idea and he knew it. I began babbling about improvements we could make to our servers, but before he could express how angry he was with me for rejecting him, there was a knock on the door.
I don't know how he knew it meant trouble, but he pushed me into a secret, hidden room inside a column. He went to the door and let in two beautiful, blond, twin vampires. Apparently they were part of a plot he had known was on to turn him evil again. They did their best to charm and allure him, and he certainly acted charmed and allured. I watched from my hiding place as he led them upstairs, and later, when they came back down, he was pretending to be evil. At least I hoped he was pretending. Either way, I knew what that meant, and knew that this was partly him wanting to pay me back for shutting down his advances.
The women were overjoyed at their new accomplice, and began to lay out a plan to wait until Angel's colleagues came back to the agency, and kill them off as they came in. Angel gave a wicked grin, and said there was no reason to wait, and for a moment I was terrified that he really had turned evil, and was going to pull me out of my hiding place and kill me.
Instead, he turned to the nearest woman and tore her throat open with his fangs. I hid my eyes, and tried to stop up my ears, but I couldn't help hearing the screams and thuds and other sounds of a huge struggle, sometimes growing fainter, sometimes slamming right up against the wall I hid behind. What seemed like hours later, when all had fallen silent, Angel came and took me out of my hiding place. All the anger had drained out of him, and he looked weary and sorrowful. He was not evil, and there was blood and gore everywhere. In silence we set to work cleaning up.
As I was scrubbing blood off of the ceiling in a corridor, I noticed there was a small shell fixed into a corner. As I watched, a small, green worm wriggled out and hung, like a drop of viscous fluid. I was worried that it would fall, and such a long fall would kill it, so I looked around and grabbed another small shell that I saw lying on the floor. As I held the shell beneath the little worm, the worm split in two, and one half dropped into the new shell, and the other half pulled itself back into the old one.
Where the worm had split, there was an orange liquid that I took to be its blood. But when I laid the shell I held gently onto a table, on a piece of paper, the new worm poked its end out and let the fluid drip onto the paper. The drop began to spread and darken and change colors, and words and pictures bloomed into life across the paper. The words formed a letter from a young man named Andy, but I could only read the signature, because the rest was in Chinese. The pictures were of lovely Chinese houses, in red brick and gray stone with gleaming marble ornamentation.
My friend got back from her heroic mission then, and, after gazing at the mess Angel was scrubbing up in the entry way, came to find me. I told her a very abridged version of the story, then showed her Andy's letter and the pictures. My friend was from China, and could read the letter. She was very moved by the story, and shared it with me.
Andy, it appeared, had died several years ago. He had been in his last stage of reincarnation, and had been granted admission into the blessed state, but had asked to go back for one last life, to share the beauty he had learned. So he had been reincarnated as the teaching snail, spreading the history of his last life. We who found his message were asked to appreciate it, and to add to it, if we would, by taking our own photos and fixing them onto the paper where he had written. The learning half of himself would absorb them, and, if we would reunite the two halves, the next person to encounter his lesson would see the beauty we had shared as well.
We thought we recognized the houses from a neighborhood in Dallas, so we wanted to go there and see if we could find Andy's family, and share his new story with them. We also thought hard about what we would add to the paper. We called some other friends together, and we all set out. It was a sort of pilgrimage.
We found ourselves in a quiet neighborhood tucked away in the bustling city of Dallas. There were no cars on these roads, and it seemed almost deserted. Some of the houses were obviously still maintained and lived in and loved, but every fourth house seemed to have been abandoned, and was falling into decay. And these were not small houses. Each one on the street was like a mansion, surrounded by lush gardens. They graying stones of the collapsed houses were covered in creeping ivies, as jungle growth sprouted in what had once been lavish halls and broad rooms.
We found the house that had been in the first picture. We thought it might be Andy's own, and we sat down to wait for the family to come home so we could ask them. Then I woke up.
My friend was out on an assignment where she was trying to lure an evil warlock to fall into his own trap. She was pretending to be enthralled, following his every command. We knew that he wanted to send a "message" to Angel, since we were getting close to capturing him, so chances were he was going to try to kill her, so we were all very on edge, as we watched through hidden cameras.
To prove that she was fully under his power, the warlock commanded my friend to do things like strip off her clothes, shave her head, and place her hand in a candle flame. She was so brave, she did all of these things. As we watched, he finally commanded her to touch a poisoned needle. She smiled, and immediately touched the needle on its side, not its point. He told her again to touch the needle, so she did it again.
He grew angry, as he tried to tell her in every way he could think to actually prick herself with the needle, and she, seeming upset and confused, continued to touch it on the side. Finally, he grew so frustrated that he came up to her and took her hand to guide it onto the needle's point. With a swift jerk, she pulled his hand down, jabbing the needle deep into his palm. He shuddered and died with a look of utter surprise on his face.
We were jubilant at my friend's success, and Angel pulled me into a celebratory hug that started to last too long, and then he tried to kiss me, and I pulled away, telling him this was a very bad idea and he knew it. I began babbling about improvements we could make to our servers, but before he could express how angry he was with me for rejecting him, there was a knock on the door.
I don't know how he knew it meant trouble, but he pushed me into a secret, hidden room inside a column. He went to the door and let in two beautiful, blond, twin vampires. Apparently they were part of a plot he had known was on to turn him evil again. They did their best to charm and allure him, and he certainly acted charmed and allured. I watched from my hiding place as he led them upstairs, and later, when they came back down, he was pretending to be evil. At least I hoped he was pretending. Either way, I knew what that meant, and knew that this was partly him wanting to pay me back for shutting down his advances.
The women were overjoyed at their new accomplice, and began to lay out a plan to wait until Angel's colleagues came back to the agency, and kill them off as they came in. Angel gave a wicked grin, and said there was no reason to wait, and for a moment I was terrified that he really had turned evil, and was going to pull me out of my hiding place and kill me.
Instead, he turned to the nearest woman and tore her throat open with his fangs. I hid my eyes, and tried to stop up my ears, but I couldn't help hearing the screams and thuds and other sounds of a huge struggle, sometimes growing fainter, sometimes slamming right up against the wall I hid behind. What seemed like hours later, when all had fallen silent, Angel came and took me out of my hiding place. All the anger had drained out of him, and he looked weary and sorrowful. He was not evil, and there was blood and gore everywhere. In silence we set to work cleaning up.
As I was scrubbing blood off of the ceiling in a corridor, I noticed there was a small shell fixed into a corner. As I watched, a small, green worm wriggled out and hung, like a drop of viscous fluid. I was worried that it would fall, and such a long fall would kill it, so I looked around and grabbed another small shell that I saw lying on the floor. As I held the shell beneath the little worm, the worm split in two, and one half dropped into the new shell, and the other half pulled itself back into the old one.
Where the worm had split, there was an orange liquid that I took to be its blood. But when I laid the shell I held gently onto a table, on a piece of paper, the new worm poked its end out and let the fluid drip onto the paper. The drop began to spread and darken and change colors, and words and pictures bloomed into life across the paper. The words formed a letter from a young man named Andy, but I could only read the signature, because the rest was in Chinese. The pictures were of lovely Chinese houses, in red brick and gray stone with gleaming marble ornamentation.
My friend got back from her heroic mission then, and, after gazing at the mess Angel was scrubbing up in the entry way, came to find me. I told her a very abridged version of the story, then showed her Andy's letter and the pictures. My friend was from China, and could read the letter. She was very moved by the story, and shared it with me.
Andy, it appeared, had died several years ago. He had been in his last stage of reincarnation, and had been granted admission into the blessed state, but had asked to go back for one last life, to share the beauty he had learned. So he had been reincarnated as the teaching snail, spreading the history of his last life. We who found his message were asked to appreciate it, and to add to it, if we would, by taking our own photos and fixing them onto the paper where he had written. The learning half of himself would absorb them, and, if we would reunite the two halves, the next person to encounter his lesson would see the beauty we had shared as well.
We thought we recognized the houses from a neighborhood in Dallas, so we wanted to go there and see if we could find Andy's family, and share his new story with them. We also thought hard about what we would add to the paper. We called some other friends together, and we all set out. It was a sort of pilgrimage.
We found ourselves in a quiet neighborhood tucked away in the bustling city of Dallas. There were no cars on these roads, and it seemed almost deserted. Some of the houses were obviously still maintained and lived in and loved, but every fourth house seemed to have been abandoned, and was falling into decay. And these were not small houses. Each one on the street was like a mansion, surrounded by lush gardens. They graying stones of the collapsed houses were covered in creeping ivies, as jungle growth sprouted in what had once been lavish halls and broad rooms.
We found the house that had been in the first picture. We thought it might be Andy's own, and we sat down to wait for the family to come home so we could ask them. Then I woke up.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
TBTT#16 Autumn 2012 Wasn't Very Good, it Seems
October 17, 2012
I need a better happy place, cuz my subconscious ain't it. Dreams that people are trying to shoot me because I witnessed a crime have me wondering how secure my apartment really is...
September 14, 2012
I dreamed that I was adopted, and I resembled my dad because I was actually the illegitimate daughter of his illegitimate brother. Having lost my dad and wanting a father figure, I went looking for this birth father, and was told that when I graduated college and defeated a certain video game, I'd gain information how to get in touch. Graduating college was the easy part. I finally beat the game, and went where I was supposed to go, and I had to dig through two feet of spider webs in an old chimney tile out on the front porch of the house I grew up in, to find a letter that basically said, "Congrats, keep up the good work."
September 4, 2012
Okay, subconscious, I get it. We have issues. But four nights running you've had us dreaming we can't sleep because we're fleeing from people who want to kill us. This is unacceptable, and as an aside, after last night's variation of left my wallet at a bus stop, had to go back, then couldn't find my hotel room, I want to kill you, too.
August 20, 2012
I had a dream last night that I met another Laura Berwick. Only she wrote her last name with the traditional Welsh spelling, "Bcgcick." No, I DON'T have any idea where my brain gets this stuff.
(And by the by, brain, Berwick is a SCOTTISH name. WTF???)
I need a better happy place, cuz my subconscious ain't it. Dreams that people are trying to shoot me because I witnessed a crime have me wondering how secure my apartment really is...
September 14, 2012
I dreamed that I was adopted, and I resembled my dad because I was actually the illegitimate daughter of his illegitimate brother. Having lost my dad and wanting a father figure, I went looking for this birth father, and was told that when I graduated college and defeated a certain video game, I'd gain information how to get in touch. Graduating college was the easy part. I finally beat the game, and went where I was supposed to go, and I had to dig through two feet of spider webs in an old chimney tile out on the front porch of the house I grew up in, to find a letter that basically said, "Congrats, keep up the good work."
September 4, 2012
Okay, subconscious, I get it. We have issues. But four nights running you've had us dreaming we can't sleep because we're fleeing from people who want to kill us. This is unacceptable, and as an aside, after last night's variation of left my wallet at a bus stop, had to go back, then couldn't find my hotel room, I want to kill you, too.
August 20, 2012
I had a dream last night that I met another Laura Berwick. Only she wrote her last name with the traditional Welsh spelling, "Bcgcick." No, I DON'T have any idea where my brain gets this stuff.
(And by the by, brain, Berwick is a SCOTTISH name. WTF???)
Monday, February 15, 2016
Trespassing ~ 2/15/2016
I dreamed I was looking for my dog Tippie's puppies outside our old house in the hill country, when I looked up and saw flames raging across the field on the front of the property. I turned to go to the water hose, planning to wet down the lawn around the house so the fire wouldn't spread to it. But when I turned back to the house, I just barely noticed pale, blue-hot flames licking up the foundation from underground.
I picked my way carefully to the water spigot and turned it on. First I put out the blue flames, then I started to soak the grass between me and the fire. Fortunately, all the fire was to the front of the house, so I didn't have to worry about the back. After I'd flooded the yard around the house, I decided to at least try to put out the burning field. I found the spray from my hose would, in fact, reach that far, and I finally managed to put out all the fires. I continued to drench the land for a while, just in case.
I went to apologize to my mom for using up so much of her water, and flooding the yard, but she wasn't there. Some friends were waiting for me, and we started trying to figure out where the fire came from, and if we should warn anyone, in case I hadn't gotten it all out. One of my friends pointed to a map of the area and asked if we should tell the church on the top of the hill.
I was very confused, because there *was* no church at the top of the hill. I looked down at the map, and there, next to the drawing of our house, was what looked like a church. I went out to the front porch and peered uphill, and sure enough, there was a building that looked like a church. We all went up to find out who lived there, and I was a bit upset, because it looked like part of the building extended onto my parents' land.
There was a sort of concrete bunker house part that was still under construction, and a very handsome, Frank Lloyd Wright style chapel building built of dark wood and pale stone. I went into the chapel, which was empty. There was a wide open ground floor, and a stair curving up to a second floor with round, cream colored chairs. I was upstairs when I heard the door open, so I jumped onto one of the chairs and curled up to hide. There were spaces between the boards that I could see through, and I tried to get a view of who had come in, hoping it wasn't the owner, and they wouldn't come upstairs.
Of course, it was the owner, and he did come upstairs, and it was Kylo Ren. I complimented him on his taste in building such a lovely chapel, but I told him I was concerned, because it looked like he was building over the property line to our place. We went out and I showed him the property boundary, which was a deep groove etched in the dirt, and he pointed out that he was definitely on his side of it. But then I explained that there had to be some sort of easement left, and that he'd certainly built into that area, and there was one corner of the house under construction that definitely came over onto our side.
I was really worried he'd be upset with me and try to kill me, but he seemed genuinely pleased that I'd explained it to him so politely, though he didn't seem like he was going to make any changes. But he let me go back downhill to my house, and didn't even get mad that I'd been trespassing.
Then I started looking for specs for the T9104 microchip, because I was using them in a dress I was making for a friend, but the little pins were coming off, and I wanted to make sure that my solution of soldering two together was okay. I thought they were both grounding pins, but I didn't want to short power to ground. Then I woke up.
I picked my way carefully to the water spigot and turned it on. First I put out the blue flames, then I started to soak the grass between me and the fire. Fortunately, all the fire was to the front of the house, so I didn't have to worry about the back. After I'd flooded the yard around the house, I decided to at least try to put out the burning field. I found the spray from my hose would, in fact, reach that far, and I finally managed to put out all the fires. I continued to drench the land for a while, just in case.
I went to apologize to my mom for using up so much of her water, and flooding the yard, but she wasn't there. Some friends were waiting for me, and we started trying to figure out where the fire came from, and if we should warn anyone, in case I hadn't gotten it all out. One of my friends pointed to a map of the area and asked if we should tell the church on the top of the hill.
I was very confused, because there *was* no church at the top of the hill. I looked down at the map, and there, next to the drawing of our house, was what looked like a church. I went out to the front porch and peered uphill, and sure enough, there was a building that looked like a church. We all went up to find out who lived there, and I was a bit upset, because it looked like part of the building extended onto my parents' land.
There was a sort of concrete bunker house part that was still under construction, and a very handsome, Frank Lloyd Wright style chapel building built of dark wood and pale stone. I went into the chapel, which was empty. There was a wide open ground floor, and a stair curving up to a second floor with round, cream colored chairs. I was upstairs when I heard the door open, so I jumped onto one of the chairs and curled up to hide. There were spaces between the boards that I could see through, and I tried to get a view of who had come in, hoping it wasn't the owner, and they wouldn't come upstairs.
Of course, it was the owner, and he did come upstairs, and it was Kylo Ren. I complimented him on his taste in building such a lovely chapel, but I told him I was concerned, because it looked like he was building over the property line to our place. We went out and I showed him the property boundary, which was a deep groove etched in the dirt, and he pointed out that he was definitely on his side of it. But then I explained that there had to be some sort of easement left, and that he'd certainly built into that area, and there was one corner of the house under construction that definitely came over onto our side.
I was really worried he'd be upset with me and try to kill me, but he seemed genuinely pleased that I'd explained it to him so politely, though he didn't seem like he was going to make any changes. But he let me go back downhill to my house, and didn't even get mad that I'd been trespassing.
Then I started looking for specs for the T9104 microchip, because I was using them in a dress I was making for a friend, but the little pins were coming off, and I wanted to make sure that my solution of soldering two together was okay. I thought they were both grounding pins, but I didn't want to short power to ground. Then I woke up.
Monday, February 8, 2016
A Nightmare within a Dream ~ 2/8/2016
I dreamed I was having a nightmare I couldn't wake up from. I was rehearsing with my brass octet, and the director was having us buzz particular tones on our mouthpieces, and I knew I was doing it right, but he said I was a full step flat. I tried and tried, and he just kept scolding me, and finally said if I couldn't get it right, I'd be replaced. So I told him, all right, I had to go, and I left.
I kept trying to wake up, but I couldn't. There was dead ivy all over my trumpet, and I went to pull it off, but it was sticky and crunchy and prickly all at the same time. I felt something sting my left hand, and looked down to see a tiny, spiny, green gnat looking thing. When I brushed it off my left hand, it stung my right as well. My hands began to itch and swell, and I hurried home to wash them off, but by the time I got to a sink, my skin and muscle and bones had gone transparent. I could see the veins and arteries and the flushed red of capillaries through the glass clarity of my hands. And as I washed them, the vessels burts and the flesh dissolved, and the sink filled with blood, and I struggled desperately to wake up.
Finally I did wake up, and that was all a dream, and it was time to record the first episode of the new Star Wars miniseries. To do this, we had to hook the kitchenaid mixer with recorder attachments up to the television. But my friend was using the mixer to grind meat. That was fine, though, I explained, as long as we were careful. But then I got called away.
When I got back, the television was flickering and the grinder was getting jammed. My friend hadn't set the mixer for record and operate, and was trying to control the recording with the television remote. At the same time, he'd let the recorder attachment power and receiver cables fall into the bowl, where they were fouling up the grinder blades. By the time I got it all sorted out, the episode was over, and we'd only made a faint recording of about half. The. I finally woke up for real.
I kept trying to wake up, but I couldn't. There was dead ivy all over my trumpet, and I went to pull it off, but it was sticky and crunchy and prickly all at the same time. I felt something sting my left hand, and looked down to see a tiny, spiny, green gnat looking thing. When I brushed it off my left hand, it stung my right as well. My hands began to itch and swell, and I hurried home to wash them off, but by the time I got to a sink, my skin and muscle and bones had gone transparent. I could see the veins and arteries and the flushed red of capillaries through the glass clarity of my hands. And as I washed them, the vessels burts and the flesh dissolved, and the sink filled with blood, and I struggled desperately to wake up.
Finally I did wake up, and that was all a dream, and it was time to record the first episode of the new Star Wars miniseries. To do this, we had to hook the kitchenaid mixer with recorder attachments up to the television. But my friend was using the mixer to grind meat. That was fine, though, I explained, as long as we were careful. But then I got called away.
When I got back, the television was flickering and the grinder was getting jammed. My friend hadn't set the mixer for record and operate, and was trying to control the recording with the television remote. At the same time, he'd let the recorder attachment power and receiver cables fall into the bowl, where they were fouling up the grinder blades. By the time I got it all sorted out, the episode was over, and we'd only made a faint recording of about half. The. I finally woke up for real.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Stargazing Festivals Are a Lot of Work ~ 1/27/2016
I dreamed my friend Kerri and I were in a fabric store. We were planning on making hourglass hijabs to wear as we watched the rising of Rigel, the end star in Ursa Major, which would be peaking over the horizon to the far north tonight. I wanted to buy a very special fabric for the floor-length head cover, and I saw so many beautiful patterns. There was a deep blueish-gray silk with fans and flowers embroidered on it in shades of red from dark crimson to bright cherry to a pink that was almost white. There was a light synthetic patterned in geometric splashes of black and gold and deep green. There were colors of the rainbow in every weight and texture.
I finally settled on a very special bolt that was printed with blue sky above a desertscape in gold and rust and sage green, with silken fringe along the bottom, threaded through polished oak beads. I thought it might be too long, since I'm not that tall, but I knew I could trim the long fringe. But when the proprietress brought it down and began to unwind the three yards I needed, we could see that beneath the first wrapped layer, the top edge of blue sky had been eaten away by moths or time. I was very disappointed, because it was really that blue sky that did it for me.
So Kerri and I went with some pinstriped navy lightweight denim, with broad bands of navy ribbon and lace for the ties and trimming. The proprietress offered to also make the hijabs for us, if we'd wait, so we decided to do that. While I was waiting, I went to examine a selection of fantasy steampunk ready-made outfits. There were corsets and cloaks and dresses and tunics. I found and fell in love with a heavy hooded cloak in silvery blue-gray silk-wool blend. I thought about buying it, but I was already spending more than I really wanted to on the hijab, so I let it be.
I left the fabric store because I had somewhere I needed to be. Kerri said she'd keep waiting, and we'd meet up later. I went to my high school gym just in time for a volleyball game with some of the folks I'd gone to school with. I did fine as long as I was serving and playing in the back court, but when I rotated up front, I couldn't hit anything to save my life. Eventually, I rotated out and set to work sewing letter and number patches onto my friends' jackets. I'd cut the patches myself, out of felt, and they looked very professional. Another guy I'd gone to school with came in, and the patches on his shoulders looked like they'd been a kindergarten class project. They were also pale peachy-orange, instead of the deep, bright orange they were supposed to be. I offered to redo them for him, but he said, maybe later, and went down to the gym floor with the rest.
They'd taken the volleyball net away, and were rehearsing for a sort of performance. Some of the guys were doing acrobatic flips across the floor, some of the men and women had formed a hip hop dance troop, and one guy was playing this coordination game with a group of women where he waved his hands in intricate patterns, and they had to try to anticipate his motions and stay as in sync with him as they could.
I finished my patching and left the jackets in a neat stack, because it was time to meet up with Erik and Kerri and the boys. Kerri waved me over to one of the turrets that stood at each corner of the gym, with circular stairs that lead up to each level of the stands, and some abandoned hotel rooms along the top. The door was very low. We always called them hobbit doors. I crept through, then started up the stairs. I met them up in the top room, and asked if there was a restroom up here, because I needed to go before we headed out. Kerri smiled ruefully, and said no, the restroom was back at the bottom, so we'd stop there on our way out. We all began circling back down the stairs, and then I woke up.
I finally settled on a very special bolt that was printed with blue sky above a desertscape in gold and rust and sage green, with silken fringe along the bottom, threaded through polished oak beads. I thought it might be too long, since I'm not that tall, but I knew I could trim the long fringe. But when the proprietress brought it down and began to unwind the three yards I needed, we could see that beneath the first wrapped layer, the top edge of blue sky had been eaten away by moths or time. I was very disappointed, because it was really that blue sky that did it for me.
So Kerri and I went with some pinstriped navy lightweight denim, with broad bands of navy ribbon and lace for the ties and trimming. The proprietress offered to also make the hijabs for us, if we'd wait, so we decided to do that. While I was waiting, I went to examine a selection of fantasy steampunk ready-made outfits. There were corsets and cloaks and dresses and tunics. I found and fell in love with a heavy hooded cloak in silvery blue-gray silk-wool blend. I thought about buying it, but I was already spending more than I really wanted to on the hijab, so I let it be.
I left the fabric store because I had somewhere I needed to be. Kerri said she'd keep waiting, and we'd meet up later. I went to my high school gym just in time for a volleyball game with some of the folks I'd gone to school with. I did fine as long as I was serving and playing in the back court, but when I rotated up front, I couldn't hit anything to save my life. Eventually, I rotated out and set to work sewing letter and number patches onto my friends' jackets. I'd cut the patches myself, out of felt, and they looked very professional. Another guy I'd gone to school with came in, and the patches on his shoulders looked like they'd been a kindergarten class project. They were also pale peachy-orange, instead of the deep, bright orange they were supposed to be. I offered to redo them for him, but he said, maybe later, and went down to the gym floor with the rest.
They'd taken the volleyball net away, and were rehearsing for a sort of performance. Some of the guys were doing acrobatic flips across the floor, some of the men and women had formed a hip hop dance troop, and one guy was playing this coordination game with a group of women where he waved his hands in intricate patterns, and they had to try to anticipate his motions and stay as in sync with him as they could.
I finished my patching and left the jackets in a neat stack, because it was time to meet up with Erik and Kerri and the boys. Kerri waved me over to one of the turrets that stood at each corner of the gym, with circular stairs that lead up to each level of the stands, and some abandoned hotel rooms along the top. The door was very low. We always called them hobbit doors. I crept through, then started up the stairs. I met them up in the top room, and asked if there was a restroom up here, because I needed to go before we headed out. Kerri smiled ruefully, and said no, the restroom was back at the bottom, so we'd stop there on our way out. We all began circling back down the stairs, and then I woke up.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
TBTT#15 Odds and Ends from Autumn 2012
October 17, 2012
I need a better happy place, cuz my subconscious ain't it. Dreams that people are trying to shoot me because I witnessed a crime have me wondering how secure my apartment really is...
September 14, 2012
I dreamed that I was adopted, and I resembled my dad because I was actually the illegitimate daughter of his illegitimate brother. Having lost my dad and wanting a father figure, I went looking for this birth father, and was told that when I graduated college and defeated a certain video game, I'd gain information how to get in touch. Graduating college was the easy part. I finally beat the game, and went where I was supposed to go, and I had to dig through two feet of spider webs in an old chimney tile out on the front porch of the house I grew up in, to find a letter that basically said, "Congrats, keep up the good work."
September 4, 2012
Okay, subconscious, I get it. We have issues. But four nights running you've had us dreaming we can't sleep because we're fleeing from people who want to kill us. This is unacceptable, and as an aside, after last night's variation of left my wallet at a bus stop, had to go back, then couldn't find my hotel room, I want to kill you, too.
August 20, 2012
I had a dream last night that I met another Laura Berwick. Only she wrote her last name with the traditional Welsh spelling, "Bcgcick." No, I DON'T have any idea where my brain gets this stuff.
(And by the by, brain, Berwick is a SCOTTISH name. WTF???)
I need a better happy place, cuz my subconscious ain't it. Dreams that people are trying to shoot me because I witnessed a crime have me wondering how secure my apartment really is...
September 14, 2012
I dreamed that I was adopted, and I resembled my dad because I was actually the illegitimate daughter of his illegitimate brother. Having lost my dad and wanting a father figure, I went looking for this birth father, and was told that when I graduated college and defeated a certain video game, I'd gain information how to get in touch. Graduating college was the easy part. I finally beat the game, and went where I was supposed to go, and I had to dig through two feet of spider webs in an old chimney tile out on the front porch of the house I grew up in, to find a letter that basically said, "Congrats, keep up the good work."
September 4, 2012
Okay, subconscious, I get it. We have issues. But four nights running you've had us dreaming we can't sleep because we're fleeing from people who want to kill us. This is unacceptable, and as an aside, after last night's variation of left my wallet at a bus stop, had to go back, then couldn't find my hotel room, I want to kill you, too.
August 20, 2012
I had a dream last night that I met another Laura Berwick. Only she wrote her last name with the traditional Welsh spelling, "Bcgcick." No, I DON'T have any idea where my brain gets this stuff.
(And by the by, brain, Berwick is a SCOTTISH name. WTF???)
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Local Color ~ 1/20/2016
I dreamed I was translating an ancient folk story that had been recorded in Spanish. It was an assignment for the Spanish class I was taking, that was taught by the Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond. The tale was about a Native American warrior who came into town to be a matador. The story beautifully and poetically described his proud posture as he rode his horse into town, and the amazement and admiration of the townspeople as his buckskins fell away to reveal the tight, ornate matador garb beneath.
The story went on to describe how after the first bull fight, there was a performance, where the most beautiful young girl in the town told a story, the wisest matron in the town told a story, and the oldest man in the town told a story, before the next bull fight began. After we finished our translations, we were going to go to a reenactment of the tale, that was held every year in a small Mexican town.
We all set to work on our translations. the first word that gave me trouble was "osage", which I took to mean that the young warrior was of the Osage tribe. This didn't make sense to me, because I thought the Osage ranged farther north. Ree looked over my page while I was pondering, and explained that "osage" was a generic word for the young, indigenous warriors, not a specific tribe in the Spanish. Others of my classmates were translating it as "savage," but I didn't like that. I settled on warrior, for the time being.
Suddenly I looked up, and all my classmates were done and packing up to go, and I had only finished the first paragraph. But I knew that they had all basically just written down literal translations, and the imagery and language was so beautiful that I was working hard to find an echo of it in my English. I finally finished and went to the festival, but I'd missed the first bull fight. Honestly, I wasn't too broken up about that. But I found the festival in complete chaos.
The woman reenacting the part of wise matron was actually a young, single woman, who was jealous that she hadn't been picked as most beautiful girl in the town. The man playing oldest man was actually not that old, but he was the wise-matron actress's father, and they were sabotaging the event out of jealousy. He was running around harassing the lovely young woman's suitors, and she had turned herself into a mouse and recruited other mice to run around pestering people, climbing up pants legs, devouring festival treats.
I helped the folks trying to bring everything under control, and I personally killed the very last mouse by decapitating it with a red rubber spatula. That mouse turned out to be the jealous woman, and when she died, she and her father both just evaporated, and everything went back to normal. So then I went on a cruise with my family, and had this whole thing where I couldn't take a shower because people kept trying to barge into my stateroom's bathroom, and then I woke up.
The story went on to describe how after the first bull fight, there was a performance, where the most beautiful young girl in the town told a story, the wisest matron in the town told a story, and the oldest man in the town told a story, before the next bull fight began. After we finished our translations, we were going to go to a reenactment of the tale, that was held every year in a small Mexican town.
We all set to work on our translations. the first word that gave me trouble was "osage", which I took to mean that the young warrior was of the Osage tribe. This didn't make sense to me, because I thought the Osage ranged farther north. Ree looked over my page while I was pondering, and explained that "osage" was a generic word for the young, indigenous warriors, not a specific tribe in the Spanish. Others of my classmates were translating it as "savage," but I didn't like that. I settled on warrior, for the time being.
Suddenly I looked up, and all my classmates were done and packing up to go, and I had only finished the first paragraph. But I knew that they had all basically just written down literal translations, and the imagery and language was so beautiful that I was working hard to find an echo of it in my English. I finally finished and went to the festival, but I'd missed the first bull fight. Honestly, I wasn't too broken up about that. But I found the festival in complete chaos.
The woman reenacting the part of wise matron was actually a young, single woman, who was jealous that she hadn't been picked as most beautiful girl in the town. The man playing oldest man was actually not that old, but he was the wise-matron actress's father, and they were sabotaging the event out of jealousy. He was running around harassing the lovely young woman's suitors, and she had turned herself into a mouse and recruited other mice to run around pestering people, climbing up pants legs, devouring festival treats.
I helped the folks trying to bring everything under control, and I personally killed the very last mouse by decapitating it with a red rubber spatula. That mouse turned out to be the jealous woman, and when she died, she and her father both just evaporated, and everything went back to normal. So then I went on a cruise with my family, and had this whole thing where I couldn't take a shower because people kept trying to barge into my stateroom's bathroom, and then I woke up.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Regency Vampires ~ 1/13/2016
I dreamed I was in a sort of Jane Austen novel setting. I was close to a family of three sisters, and we'd all been invited to a house party at the estate of a famous but very reclusive baron. The oldest sister was just out of mourning for her dead fiance, and still grieved for him, but the other two girls were excited about the possibility of meeting potential husbands.
Upon exploring the grounds around the manor, I discovered a lovely cottage where an eccentric old woman lived. She was kind of a regency Joan Rivers. She had some familial connection with the Baron, but she never spoke of it. She didn't go visiting, but was pretty friend and effusive when I met her and went to see her, bringing my friends. We all liked her very much.
The middle sister was the prettiest, and she got a lot of attention, but soon she seemed to really hit it off with a tall, slim young man with curly, light brown hair. They sat beside each other and talked for hours. They danced together as much as propriety allowed. We all knew it was just a matter of time before he asked her father for her hand, but her father had developed a severe dislike of the young man, and no one, not even he, could quite say why. His wife scolded him, and encouraged her daughter, because really the young man seemed so nice, and he was certainly wealthy.
Slowly, though, the oldest sister began to be suspicious, too. One evening she told us that the madwoman in the cottage had given her a secret device to take into the ball room that night. When the switch was flipped, the room would go dark, and if any evil lurked in the room, it would glow white and be revealed for what it was. We thought it was all a huge joke, but that it would be lots of fun to plunge the room into darkness.
So after dinner, as the musicians were warming up to begin playing the dance, we all glanced around at each other, looked over to the oldest sister, and nodded. She flipped a switch and everything went dark.
Except for the Baron, our host. Except for the middle sister's new suitor. And except for half of the young men in the room. These all glowed with an unearthly, sickly pallor, lips black, faces gaunt and haunted, and teeth lengthened into fangs. They were all vampires, and they knew what we had done. All the humans in the room began to scream and scramble for doors and windows, and we scattered across the grounds, into the night.
I was holed up with the middle and youngest sisters and their parents in a cave on the edge of a river that ran through the Baron's park lands. We were all weeping because the oldest sister was missing, and because the middle one was so heartbroken. We were glad she was safe from whatever horrible fate might have lain in store for her, but it was so awful to know that the man she was falling in love with wasn't a man at all.
We heard a scuffling at the back of the cave, and an opening gaped in what we had thought were solid stone walls. The Baron and his bloodthirsty minions began to stalk in, and we prepared to fight. Suddenly, there was a small flash of light, and one of the vampires shattered like glass. Then another, then another. We gazed to the mouth of the cave, and there stood the madwoman, but she was transformed into a radiant being cloaked in shimmering white, and she held a lantern that flashed out beams of sunlight that shattered the undead like dropped crystal.
Around her stood half a dozen other women, of all shapes and ages, with similar lanterns. Slowly, their newest recruit came forward. It was the oldest sister, her short auburn hair brushed thick and smooth around her head, hooded and gowned in glistening deep green. With her lantern she personally shattered the man who had threatened her sister, then the Baron and the Madwoman stood face to face. They were brother and sister, we could all see it now, and she wept at the thought of destroying him, but he was the last left of his hellish brood.
Suddenly, as they stared at each other, each grabbed onto the other's shoulder and they rushed out into the night, and presumably had their to-the-death standoff somewhere else. Neither was ever seen or heard from again. The oldest sister traveled around the country with the other women, hunting and destroying vampires wherever they found them, and the middle sister took her heartbreak overseas to the new world, where she began an American chapter of the League of Light. And then I woke up.
Upon exploring the grounds around the manor, I discovered a lovely cottage where an eccentric old woman lived. She was kind of a regency Joan Rivers. She had some familial connection with the Baron, but she never spoke of it. She didn't go visiting, but was pretty friend and effusive when I met her and went to see her, bringing my friends. We all liked her very much.
The middle sister was the prettiest, and she got a lot of attention, but soon she seemed to really hit it off with a tall, slim young man with curly, light brown hair. They sat beside each other and talked for hours. They danced together as much as propriety allowed. We all knew it was just a matter of time before he asked her father for her hand, but her father had developed a severe dislike of the young man, and no one, not even he, could quite say why. His wife scolded him, and encouraged her daughter, because really the young man seemed so nice, and he was certainly wealthy.
Slowly, though, the oldest sister began to be suspicious, too. One evening she told us that the madwoman in the cottage had given her a secret device to take into the ball room that night. When the switch was flipped, the room would go dark, and if any evil lurked in the room, it would glow white and be revealed for what it was. We thought it was all a huge joke, but that it would be lots of fun to plunge the room into darkness.
So after dinner, as the musicians were warming up to begin playing the dance, we all glanced around at each other, looked over to the oldest sister, and nodded. She flipped a switch and everything went dark.
Except for the Baron, our host. Except for the middle sister's new suitor. And except for half of the young men in the room. These all glowed with an unearthly, sickly pallor, lips black, faces gaunt and haunted, and teeth lengthened into fangs. They were all vampires, and they knew what we had done. All the humans in the room began to scream and scramble for doors and windows, and we scattered across the grounds, into the night.
I was holed up with the middle and youngest sisters and their parents in a cave on the edge of a river that ran through the Baron's park lands. We were all weeping because the oldest sister was missing, and because the middle one was so heartbroken. We were glad she was safe from whatever horrible fate might have lain in store for her, but it was so awful to know that the man she was falling in love with wasn't a man at all.
We heard a scuffling at the back of the cave, and an opening gaped in what we had thought were solid stone walls. The Baron and his bloodthirsty minions began to stalk in, and we prepared to fight. Suddenly, there was a small flash of light, and one of the vampires shattered like glass. Then another, then another. We gazed to the mouth of the cave, and there stood the madwoman, but she was transformed into a radiant being cloaked in shimmering white, and she held a lantern that flashed out beams of sunlight that shattered the undead like dropped crystal.
Around her stood half a dozen other women, of all shapes and ages, with similar lanterns. Slowly, their newest recruit came forward. It was the oldest sister, her short auburn hair brushed thick and smooth around her head, hooded and gowned in glistening deep green. With her lantern she personally shattered the man who had threatened her sister, then the Baron and the Madwoman stood face to face. They were brother and sister, we could all see it now, and she wept at the thought of destroying him, but he was the last left of his hellish brood.
Suddenly, as they stared at each other, each grabbed onto the other's shoulder and they rushed out into the night, and presumably had their to-the-death standoff somewhere else. Neither was ever seen or heard from again. The oldest sister traveled around the country with the other women, hunting and destroying vampires wherever they found them, and the middle sister took her heartbreak overseas to the new world, where she began an American chapter of the League of Light. And then I woke up.
Thursday, January 7, 2016
Fragments Can Be Just As Crazy ~ 1/7/2016
I dreamed my friend Kerri and I were walking through a field, discussing edible plants in the wild. I actually got Kerri to eat a leaf of wild mint, even though she detests most vegetables.
Then I was in a hall of Elvi. There were buttons on the walls, and when you pushed them, one of the animatronic Elvises would light up, move around, and sing an Elvis song. There was also an Austin Powers animatronic thrown in for some reason.
That's all I remember.
Then I was in a hall of Elvi. There were buttons on the walls, and when you pushed them, one of the animatronic Elvises would light up, move around, and sing an Elvis song. There was also an Austin Powers animatronic thrown in for some reason.
That's all I remember.
Monday, January 4, 2016
My Work with the FBI, the King, and Some Incompetent Pastry Chefs ~ 1/4/2015
I dreamed I was working with Fox Mulder on a case that looked like possession. Ordinary people would suddenly form a pack to do horrible things to others, then eventually turn on each other, and even themselves. In a trance I watched from within one of the possessed. I couldn't feel an additional presence, only the man's own horror at what he was doing as he helped his pack tear a woman limb from limb with their bare hands, and finally his utter terror as against his will he broke the window of the office building they were in and leaped out from the 34th floor. I was with him as he fell to his death.
Mulder and I located the office building and went to investigate the scene. The conference room we investigated was full of light and had an amazing view, but was in chaos, littered with overturned furniture and broken glass, and spattered with blood. Mulder went to the window to look out, then shouted to me to follow him, and we ran out of the room. As he had looked down, he had witnessed an attack. He said it had something to do with a young woman picking up a necklace.
By the time we got to the new crime scene, everyone had scattered, but Mulder traced the girl to a local university. We caught up with her and four other students in a dorm room. They were deciding how best to destroy the building. They turned to attack us, but Mulder tore a necklace off the neck of the blonde girl he'd seen downtown, and threw it out the window. Suddenly, the five students came to themselves, afraid and confused.
It turned out the necklace itself was possessed and cursed. It would infect people and take over their wills in a very specific way. It was perfectly safe to handle, until the person holding it was in a room with or within arm's reach of exactly four other people. If the person with the necklace touched one of those people, the magic in the necklace would be triggered, and the five people would become possessed.
Mulder and I collected the necklace from the bushes outside the dorm, and set off to transport it to a vault in the FBI buildings. We decided to walk, since that would give us the most control over our surroundings. I stayed behind him, out of arm's reach, and scanned the walkways ahead of and around us, making sure we avoided clusters of three or four people. Eventually this drove us to the edge of a river, with cold, slate-gray water roiling on one side, and the silver ghosts of a dead forest on the other, under a dreary sky of clouds.
Up ahead, I caught sight of a group of travelers in dark cloaks. There were a man, an elf, and four hobbits. This gave me an idea. I called out to them, and they paused, waiting for us to catch them up. I explained our situation, and how traveling close to their group would help keep things safe, and they allowed us to join them.
As we trekked down river, they refused to tell us where they were going, or why they were traveling together, but they spoke of a powerful king whom they expected to join them soon. They thought maybe he would know how to nullify the evil magic of the necklace. They warned us that he was watching over their party from far away, until he was free to join them, so if we did them any harm, he would see and punish us.
We had many adventures, and became friends in a week or so. I decided that once Mulder had the necklace secure, I would join their company and help them on their secret quest, even if they never told me what it was. Then, one day, as we were deciding if we should set up camp early, arrows came at us from all directions out of the forest. Mulder and the four hobbits were driven off to one side, and Mulder was about to stumble right into the nearest hobbit. I could see the fear on his face at the knowledge that the evil magic was about to overtake him, when a tall, strong man with long dark hair streaked with silver appeared out of nowhere, reached out, and prevented Mulder's fall. The hail of arrows ceased, and we could hear the sound of our hidden foes scuttling away through the dry undergrowth.
Our fellow travelers all fell to their knees as the newcomer lead Mulder and the hobbits back to our group. This was their king, of course, and his magic had stricken our enemies with fear and cloaked us from their sight as soon as he'd arrived. The other man in the party turned to Mulder and I with distrust, and voiced his suspicions that we had let the enemy know where the party was, somehow. But the king assured them all that we weren't spies or traitors. As he stood with us, the forest filled with golden sunlight, and began to leaf and bloom. He plucked a brilliant orange bud from a flowering vine, caught a hummingbird out of the air, and fashioned them into a living ring, which he placed on my finger as a token of his friendship with us. He took the evil necklace, glistening richly with fine gold chain and subtle gems in the glimmering light. He crushed it in his hand, and the light went out of it. The necklace crumbled to dust beneath our feet.
The king then reminded me that it was time I got back home, because the school year would be starting up again in a few days. I hurried home after that, and found my friends and my little sister looking for the official calendars for our school start times, and trying to make pies by flattening the crust in a pasta roller. They had enough crust for the three pies, but one guy had taken some of it to build steps for his gingerbread replica of our school, and another had tried to line three pie dishes with uneven strips, running them in circles around the edges of the pie plate, then trying to cover the centers of the pans with more scraps. It was a mess.
I gathered all the scattered bits of pie crust, kneaded them all back into a ball, divided that into three balls, and began to roll them out. We were almost ready to put pie crusts into three pie pans when I woke up.
Mulder and I located the office building and went to investigate the scene. The conference room we investigated was full of light and had an amazing view, but was in chaos, littered with overturned furniture and broken glass, and spattered with blood. Mulder went to the window to look out, then shouted to me to follow him, and we ran out of the room. As he had looked down, he had witnessed an attack. He said it had something to do with a young woman picking up a necklace.
By the time we got to the new crime scene, everyone had scattered, but Mulder traced the girl to a local university. We caught up with her and four other students in a dorm room. They were deciding how best to destroy the building. They turned to attack us, but Mulder tore a necklace off the neck of the blonde girl he'd seen downtown, and threw it out the window. Suddenly, the five students came to themselves, afraid and confused.
It turned out the necklace itself was possessed and cursed. It would infect people and take over their wills in a very specific way. It was perfectly safe to handle, until the person holding it was in a room with or within arm's reach of exactly four other people. If the person with the necklace touched one of those people, the magic in the necklace would be triggered, and the five people would become possessed.
Mulder and I collected the necklace from the bushes outside the dorm, and set off to transport it to a vault in the FBI buildings. We decided to walk, since that would give us the most control over our surroundings. I stayed behind him, out of arm's reach, and scanned the walkways ahead of and around us, making sure we avoided clusters of three or four people. Eventually this drove us to the edge of a river, with cold, slate-gray water roiling on one side, and the silver ghosts of a dead forest on the other, under a dreary sky of clouds.
Up ahead, I caught sight of a group of travelers in dark cloaks. There were a man, an elf, and four hobbits. This gave me an idea. I called out to them, and they paused, waiting for us to catch them up. I explained our situation, and how traveling close to their group would help keep things safe, and they allowed us to join them.
As we trekked down river, they refused to tell us where they were going, or why they were traveling together, but they spoke of a powerful king whom they expected to join them soon. They thought maybe he would know how to nullify the evil magic of the necklace. They warned us that he was watching over their party from far away, until he was free to join them, so if we did them any harm, he would see and punish us.
We had many adventures, and became friends in a week or so. I decided that once Mulder had the necklace secure, I would join their company and help them on their secret quest, even if they never told me what it was. Then, one day, as we were deciding if we should set up camp early, arrows came at us from all directions out of the forest. Mulder and the four hobbits were driven off to one side, and Mulder was about to stumble right into the nearest hobbit. I could see the fear on his face at the knowledge that the evil magic was about to overtake him, when a tall, strong man with long dark hair streaked with silver appeared out of nowhere, reached out, and prevented Mulder's fall. The hail of arrows ceased, and we could hear the sound of our hidden foes scuttling away through the dry undergrowth.
Our fellow travelers all fell to their knees as the newcomer lead Mulder and the hobbits back to our group. This was their king, of course, and his magic had stricken our enemies with fear and cloaked us from their sight as soon as he'd arrived. The other man in the party turned to Mulder and I with distrust, and voiced his suspicions that we had let the enemy know where the party was, somehow. But the king assured them all that we weren't spies or traitors. As he stood with us, the forest filled with golden sunlight, and began to leaf and bloom. He plucked a brilliant orange bud from a flowering vine, caught a hummingbird out of the air, and fashioned them into a living ring, which he placed on my finger as a token of his friendship with us. He took the evil necklace, glistening richly with fine gold chain and subtle gems in the glimmering light. He crushed it in his hand, and the light went out of it. The necklace crumbled to dust beneath our feet.
The king then reminded me that it was time I got back home, because the school year would be starting up again in a few days. I hurried home after that, and found my friends and my little sister looking for the official calendars for our school start times, and trying to make pies by flattening the crust in a pasta roller. They had enough crust for the three pies, but one guy had taken some of it to build steps for his gingerbread replica of our school, and another had tried to line three pie dishes with uneven strips, running them in circles around the edges of the pie plate, then trying to cover the centers of the pans with more scraps. It was a mess.
I gathered all the scattered bits of pie crust, kneaded them all back into a ball, divided that into three balls, and began to roll them out. We were almost ready to put pie crusts into three pie pans when I woke up.
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