Rotten Melons and Diner Donnie ~ 7/21/2018

I dreamed I was just getting back from a marching band road trip where I’d had an adventure. I’d gotten zapped into a dimension where I had to solve a mystery as part of a team of young Star Wars characters. We were looking for clues in this creepy old cemetery at night, and we became part of the legends of hauntings when the groundskeeper saw us.

Somehow I’d managed to bring back a coconut, two watermelons, and some potted plants from this other dimension, so I planted them in my mom’s back yard. The watermelon turned out awful, but the coconut started growing into a tree.

Then I went with a friend to 59 Diner, and while we were eating, Donald Trump came in. Apparently he planned to eat there between rallies. He looked over at my friend and me, and he must have decided we looked like trouble, because he asked the manager to have us removed. I decided I was NOT leaving until I’d finished my pancakes, and maybe I’d have a few cups of coffee after that, and if they called the police on me, I’d videotape it on my phone, and show the world how “Diner Donnie” was too good to eat at a table next to two liberal women minding their own business. But then I woke up.

TBTT#37 A Series of Batshit Crazy Events ~ 3/16/3017

March 16, 2017

I dreamed that I was staying with my grandmother, and a few cousins and I were hanging out in the garage at night with the lights off. I could see a large but vague shadow come into the garage. I was sure, from what I could make out, that it was a cougar. I reached for a pellet gun, just in case, and turned on the flashlight app for my iPhone. In the diffuse, cold light, flaming orange striped with black flared into visibility, and a tiger sprang up from where it had been lying on the cool concrete and sped out of the garage into the yard.

We all ran to the garage door, and I shone my light out into the yard, and there were more tigers, and lions, and bears. And we all said, “Oh my!” in unison.

The next day, I traveled to Castroville for a high school reunion. It was still early in the morning when I got there, and I was really hungry, so I stopped at a Burger King for some breakfast. But my order just wouldn’t ring up right, no matter what I tried to order, or what the cashier did. I *knew* $25 was too much for pancakes, though, and the line behind me was getting really long. As I left, defeated and unfed, one of the other employees started yelling at me about how rude I was to not make up my mind and let the line get like that. I tried to explain that it wasn’t my fault, but she just kept berating me. And somehow she told the whole town, because after that, I passed a number of my old classmates, and said hello, but they pretended not to know me, or only barely remember me, even when I told them who I was. One of them finally said, okay, we’ll say hello to you on the street, but don’t act like we’re your friends.

So I headed out of town and ended up at a big, gloomy old hotel. There was an Amish family staying there, and the mother wanted her daughters to have nothing to do with me. I had to stay there for a few days while I conducted some sort of business dealing, and I tried going back to the Burger King, too, and finally got my breakfast to ring up correctly, but the family just seemed to get weirder and weirder.

The girls seemed to really like me, and wanted to talk to me, but they’d run and hide if their mother came calling. Finally one night they showed up, and they had both cut their hair to be short like mine! I knew there’d be trouble after that, and sure enough, their mother came raging at me for corrupting her daughters. She was much taller than me, and she grabbed me by the shoulders and leaned down right into my face and starting yelling at me to confess my “unclean acts”.

I tried over and over to tell her that actually all my acts were pretty squeaky clean, and I certainly hadn’t *told* her daughters to cut their hair. Finally she seemed to calm down, and said, very quietly, “Okay. Okay.” She sighed and put her hands on my cheeks, holding my head, and then she began to change.

Her face stayed right in front of mine, but her body sort of unfolded around her, and began curling in thick tentacles across the lawn and up into the big old tree beside the hotel, that we were standing under. Her hands turned into wiry tendrils that were twisted strands of bright blue and green sinew, and ropes of the same sprang from the nape of her neck. These looped themselves in the branch overhead, and began to come back down to wind around my neck. I fought them off, and found I could pinch them apart in my fingers. I kept struggling and pinching and yelling, and then I woke up.

Writing All the Things ~ 7/16/2018

I dreamed I was helping write up an investigation of a fire at a burger place. At first the owner had claimed that the cause must be a bunch of fried chicken that a patron had brought in for his autistic son who wouldn’t eat burgers. His reasoning was that the chicken grease was more flammable, and must have gotten too close to the grill. But the truth was much stranger.

It turned out that, obviously, the fire had nothing to do with the chicken. There was actually a hitman after the owner, and one of the things he would do was set up a flash bomb to disable security cameras. It should have been triggered when the owner unlocked for the day, and he would have been assasinated at that time. But since the bomb didn’t go off, the hitman had to wait, and by the time the thing did go off, it caught the burger grease on fire, and police and firefighters came, so the job got called off.

Investigators had a pretty good idea who the hitman was, and knew of other hits he might be behind, but they didn’t have enough direct evidence yet. So that phase of the investigation was wrapped up and written up and I moved on to a different project.

Now I was assigned to work up the display text for an exhibit on a famous black dancer from the 1940s. Her stage name was Queen Matafa, and she would celebrate her 90th birthday while the exhibit was running. She was actually a Montenegran duchess, who was born in Ethiopia and married  into European royalty at age 18. But her duke had died penniless, and she had moved to America after becoming part of a ballet company who was contracted for an extended tour in the States. She’d been a sensation, and had never left.

Her birth name had been M’kheefe, and she was six feet tall, with size 5-1/2 feet. We had her shoes in the exhibit, as well as some of her costumes. I was working on the write up that went with photos of her visit with the Obamas during his presidency. We had some great quotes from Obama about M’kheefe’s importance both to America’s dance history and the African American community. Then I woke up.

The Roman Chalice ~ 7/10/2018

I dreamed I was Carrie Bradshaw from “Sex in the City,” and I was in a committed relationship with Arastoo Vaziri from Bones. We were moving in together, and since we both collected Roman antiquities, specifically ceramics, we were having a hard time getting our combined collection housed and on display.

There was a particular piece of great ritualistic significance. It was a small, shallow Samian ware bowl on a short pedestal base, but it had a hand-molded lattice that rise up around most of its circumference, and was sculpted and gilded and bejeweled to look like the tiered seating around the Colosseum. There were tiny spectators, a tiny imperial box with emperor, and tiny gladiators and lions and tigers fighting in the pit.

This was the absolute gem of our collection, and we were trying to decide where to display it when I woke up.

Mysterious Experiments ~ 7/2/2018

I dreamed I was going back to school at Rice to get a philosophy degree. I was touring the library with my new advisor and a friend. While we were browsing through an encyclopedic Lives of Great Philosophers series, we got to see some of the EE department experiments in progress.

One experiment was displaying a map of the US, and some narrow, intersecting bars overlaid onto it. After watching for a while, I deduced that the bars were a function of sin(20) and cos(-2), with longitude and latitude worked in. Then, when the bars were positioned correctly, the area of overlap would be subjected to a small dose of proprietary energy. My advisor told us proudly that this work had been going on for almost a century.

My friend became obsessed with finding out if either of her parents had been born around the time their area was so evergized. We worked out that her mother had. We were trying to get into the ramifications of what that meant when we heard a plane roaring closer, closer, then right overhead. At first we didn’t think anything of it, since we were just south of the airport. But it got louder and louder and much too loud. There was an almighty bang, and the walls shook, and sparks flew from some of the computer equipment.

Then I woke up.