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.

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???)

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.

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.