I dreamed I was visiting Yellowstone National Park. I was staying in one of the visitor centers, and a park ranger was showing me the movies I could watch that evening, and alllll the jellies I could have on toast the next morning. I couldn’t decide on a jelly, but for the movie I ended up selecting a reel of rare, vintage Disney animations, from about the same time as Steamboat Willie. The only option was a version dubbed in German, with English subtitles. Each short in the reel featured the adventures of a goat version of Abraham Lincoln.
The scratchy choral backing track started giving me a headache, so I paused the real and went for a walk. The grass was dry and springy. It was pale green with gold around the edges. The late summer sunlight angled through low gray clouds, laying shafts of gold across black hillsides, a lot like northern Wales. I walked to the edge of a ravine and saw a pale brown and white-dappled lop-earred rabbit gamboling below me. It was about the size of a beagle.
I went back to the visitor center, where two students were having trouble tuning their double violin. This was an instrument sort of like a regular violin, but with the neck twice as long and bent back at its middle, with an extra bridge. It was really tricky to tune, because each of the three segments of the four strings was tuned to a different pitch, so the whole thing could play an open string chromatic scale by bowing just right, or pitch could be varied by fingering, like a regular violin. And the three segments each had a different timbre and resonance. Also, until the strings were tightened into place, they tended to slip sideways off the bridges. I had a tuner app on my phone, but the strings were being finicky. But once I got them all tuned, the students gave me a lesson on how to bow the strings in different ways to make different sounds.
Eventually I went home to Houston. When I got home, I found that a friend from Chicago and a friend from New Orleans had met each other, gotten together, and had moved into the apartment above mine. They had just adopted a rabbit, and it turned out to be the rabbit from Yellowstone. The rabbit ate spiders, but it could also turn into a spider. In its spider form, it looked like a wolf spider, but was the size and fuzziness of a tarantula. Also, it was orange and black tiger-striped. It would turn into spider form to hunt other spiders along the ceiling, then scuttle back to the floor and become a rabbit.
As a rabbit, it could talk.
And then I woke up.
