Part of my dream was a mash-up of Bambi and Harry Potter. I dreamed people could be born animagi, and that it ran in families, so of course Harry could turn into a dear at will. A fawn when he was little, and as he grew up, a stag. Animagus Harry was charged with clearing out a forest that had been invaded by aliens.
The aliens were books from outer space. There were 10 books in the series, and they had been sent to Earth to spawn because they needed iron, and Earth is such an iron-rich planet. They couldn't take over until all 10 books were brought together, and so far there had only been a number of copies of the first book, one copy each of several others, and two of the eight book. The books all communicated with each other wirelessly, and I wasn't sure what they'd do to the planet, but I just knew it wouldn't be good.
The numbers of books were controlled by the cream-colored cat that had been sent to manage them. The cat had these little round iron tokens, about the size of pennies, each painted the color of one of the book covers. If the cat had all the tokens, he could command new copies of the books into being. If any tokens were out of the cat's reach, none of the books could spawn. So of course, to help Harry, I stole a few of the tokens.
We were able to round up the books, and most of them we could just burn. But the eighth in the series was dense and not flammable. We only found the two copies of it after we thought we had it all taken care of. So we packed them up in a metal lined box and shipped them back to Amazon. Then the cat said the joke was on us because there was so much wireless traffic on earth that the books couldn't have talked to each other anyway, so they never could have fulfilled their plan, even if they'd spawned.
I stole the rest of the cat's tokens, and the cat ran off into the woods. I tried to chase it down, but as I got close, it dove into a group of cats and kittens that were hunting a flock of mother and baby birds. The birds were about the size of pigeons, but they were a soft brown, and had long curved bills and long, stilt-like legs. The mother cats were trying to teach their kittens to hunt, so no birds were actually getting very hurt, but I couldn't find the alien cat in all the confusion.
So Harry took some of the tokens and I took the rest, since we found we couldn't melt any of them down, except the one for the eight book, funny enough. We each swore to keep our tokens safe. Over the years, mine turned into clear, smooth, brightly colored stones. I kept them in a plastic bag with a bunch of polished quartz.
I was trying to learn a new Sousa march with my community band when I noticed that the stones were shrinking. The band director came and showed me how the problems I was having were because I wasn't blinking my eyelashes at the right times, and after we got that sorted out, I left rehearsal.
Outside, some teen-aged girls were giggling and whispering in a scandalized sort of way. I gathered they'd seen a dark, handsome, but heavily tattooed young man coming out of the edge of the forest, and for just a second it looked like he had antlers. I figured it was Harry, and he might be having trouble with the tokens he'd taken, too. We agreed to meet after I went to watch the ice skaters who had come up from Rice to compete in a national championship.
I went into the darkened rink and sat to watch the graceful skaters glide over the ice. The family sitting next to me saw that I was wearing a Rice shirt, and their kids started asking me questions, since they wanted to go to Rice some day. Then I woke up.
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