Big Cats, and, Who'd Trust ME with a Gun? ~ 6/9/2014

My colleagues and I were trying to stop a dangerous, shape shifting, genius hacker who was being a terrorist. One of the guys on our team had files and files of code printed out that was like kernels of grain. He grabbed a handful and seeded the internet with it, in order to lure the hacker out into the internet somewhere we could find him.

I spent a lot of time crouching in corners with a handgun aimed head-high at closed doors in case the guy came out of them, but that would only wound him. He could only be killed when he was shifted out if human form. Finally, we had tracked him out to a wood, and we were hiding in a waist-deep stream, beneath a gracefully arched bridge. The water was crystal clear, and the surface was freckled and dimpled with yellow petals from the flowering trees above.

Suddenly, he was on the bank above us, in the form of a huge tiger. As he lunged down into the water, my partner turned into a tiger, too, and they fought as I scrambled out of the water and out of the way. My colleague held the bad guy under until he was drowned.

That job over, we went to work security at a sort of junior Olympic basketball tournament. It was being held on the seaside in a partially submerged and buried building complex that looked like the inside of a huge submarine. I crawled all over and through the upper bleachers to make sure everything was safe, then went to stay the night at my grandmother's house, which was tucked into a garden on the facility grounds.

I couldn't get to bed for a while, though, because people kept getting lost in the garden trying to find their own lodgings, and I had to keep them out of my grandmother's place. Then my mom came and told me my boss had called and asked me to patrol the beach at first light.

The next morning I walked down to the shore and began walking, past the facility, up a sandy rise. I could see, about another mile off, the bridge where the highway lifted up from the mainland to go out to one of the large barrier islands. Closer to me, just ahead, the beach broke up into dozens of sandy islets.

The islets were thick with otters and nesting gulls. Nearby, on the shore, I could see a largish wild cat. It was something called a sand lion, shaped and colored like a puma, but only about the size of a coyote. They were mostly shy, but could also be friendly and playful, and were definitely not dangerous. It had seen me, and was loping up a sandy ridge to see what I was, but when I looked past it, into the dunes below, an enormous golden head lifted up in a cleft between dunes. It was a lion, a real lion, not a sand lion, but gigantic. It was a lioness the size of an elephant, at least, staring up at me with eyes like molten gold.

I froze. The lioness stood to watch me, the sand lion was still headed my way. I hadn't been issued any weapons for this assignment, so I was completely unarmed. I began to back slowly away, stumbling a little in the sand. When I was out of sight down the other side of the slope, I turned and slogged faster through the sand, trying not to look back too much, or break into a run.

I did make it back to the arena, and scrambled through a heavy side door that I shut and locked behind me. I turned to go report to my boss about the huge lioness, and found I was in a deserted hall with no obvious way out. The walls were pale tiles that looked sickly in the greenish light. They had depth marking on them, like this had been a stories-deep diving pool.

That gave me an idea, so I looked and found a rusty ladder up to a terrace. I climbed up that, and could hear the sounds of basketball and crowds from the other arenas, and I realized the whole thing was a renovated set of these deep diving pools. I climbed in and out of courts looking for my boss. I finally just reported to a colleague and left.

I met up with some friends for pho, but after everyone else had ordered theirs, when I began to place my order, the waitress told me they were now out of pho. So I decided I wasn't hungry, and I left. Some other friends pulled up in a school bus, and said they were going to my high school, so did I want to make a visit. I said sure, so an odd mix of my New Orleans game night and my college band friends headed to my small town high school.

A lot of the buildings had been replaced, but the band hall was the same. I went in to visit my high school ban director, then met up with my sister, who explained that what looked like apartments where the tennis courts use to be were dorms for student athletes, and that high school basketball especially was getting to be a big thing. We had turned in the bus, and now we were headed home, and all had to squeeze in a huge old Crown Victoria. We got on the road, and then I woke up.

Where Am I and What Am I Doing Here??? ~ 6/2/2014

I was visiting southern England. I was lying on a headland looking out across the Channel, and I was enormous. I must have been reclining along several miles of coast, my body nestled comfortably in the dips and furrows above high cliffs. I listened to the waves crashing below and gazed out over the deep blue water. I decided I should take a day trip over to France, so I stood up and I was normal sized again.

I got in my car and decided I would drive to the Louvre, which was housed in a palace on a hill in a deep forest an hour north of Paris. Some American tourists I met on my way said it was really crowded, and that standing in line for the Mona Lisa was a bigger waste of time than waiting for rides at Disney World, but I pointed out that I was on vacation, and there was no such thing as wasted time as long as I was relaxing and not stressing about work.

I never did make it to the Louvre, though. I might have woken up and gone back to sleep, because then I was driving in the US, and I'd stopped for lunch, and was working a crossword puzzle. One of the long clues was a quote by Roger Rabbit that I couldn't remember. I knew where to find the answer, though, because there was a particular brand of cream soda in a gold and white can, that, when you popped the top, played quotes from that actor. Even after you drank the soda, you could put the end of some headphones in the empty can and listen. So I bought some soda, found the quote, and continued driving home.

Home, when I reached it, was our old house in the hill country, and Mom and Brooke still lived there, too. I went to bed, then got up the next morning, sure I was about to be late for the first day of my senior year of high school. I threw a change of clothes in my truck and started driving into town.

About halfway down our cul de sac road, I realized I was no longer in high school, and I was still in my nightgown, and now I was DEFINITELY going to be late for work. I made a three point turn and drove back home. I thought for a moment, since I was back from vacation but not back at work yet, and possibly just out of high school, maybe I could just take another week off and sleep. But that didn't seem right. Still, Mom and I decided I must be sick, since I tried to leave the house in my jammies, so she called my boss and I went back to bed.

When I finally woke up for real, I was very confused.

Can't See the Forest for the Pop Culture References ~ 5/20/2014 and 5/21/2014

The night before last, I was walking down a path in a mountainous pine wood. I hiked the trail for hours, but took a few breaks along the way. My first stop was in a big auditorium where I was in the chorus for a musical production of Frozen. But I kept leaving the stage and sneaking out into the seats, because I could see ghosts in the audience, and I needed to talk to them and help them find the light.

I got back on the trail, and it got steeper and steeper, until finally I was climbing up a rock face. Then, suddenly, I lost my footing and I was hanging by my hands from a ledge. I kept scrambling to haul myself onto the ledge. I was sure it was the top of the trail, and things would get easier. My hands gripped the rock and pulled as I tried to push with my feet, but I just couldn't do it. My fairy godmother Claudine, from the Sookie Stackhouse books, appeared atop the ledge to help me, but she couldn't get to me in time. I began to slide and fall, and I think I woke up for a bit, but when I went back to sleep, I was back on the flatter, forested part of the trail.

I began to hike again, and met up with my friend Emily, who insisted we go down a side trail where the actors who play Sam and Dean on Supernatural were being filmed in a new Game of Thrones adaptation. So we found the set, down in a ravine beside our path, so we could look down over a railing and watch the filming. They were doing Game of Thrones in the style of Hamlet, with wooden swords and ghosts coming out of trap doors. Mostly the ghost of Tywen Lannister. Who came up out of the ground as a sort of noodley skinny golden yellow cartoon lion, then faded into a noodley skinny white cartoon horse that Sam and Dean tried to lasso, but the ropes slipped through the ghost and it loped off down the trail.

That's all I remember from that night. Last night I was sort of a fly on the wall of Twilight. Bella had married into the Cullen family, but they weren't vampires, just super rich superheroes. As she explored their family mansion, she found rooms full of diamonds. But she grew weaker and sadder as the months passed, because she kept having dangerous miscarriages, and Edward wouldn't sleep with her any more.

I left there, finally, because it was just too sad, and all the sadder because of the beauty of the house and people, and their success with every other aspect of their lives.

I was back on my forest trail, but then it dipped down into a cool stream and continued as a water path.  I waded upstream and met up with my mom and some friends, and we were all looking to catch the first catch of a sort of seasonal freshwater krill. There were also freshwater pearl oysters that we wanted to collect.

The banks along the stream became the rock walls of a small canyon, and the water became deeper. Knee deep, hip deep, chest deep, then the current was too strong and I had to leave the group and drift back down the stream. I went with some friends who had already been farther upstream and were returning. One of them was a guy with long black hair who let me hang onto the tube he was floating in while he showed me a knife he'd made or won. It was a square cross section that tapered to a sharp point. It was made of a strong, dark wood, and it connected to its handle at a pivoting ball joint like a human hip. I couldn't see why this was a good thing, but apparently it was.

We drifted down the stream until it emptied into a lake back at the Cullen mansion. There we found a small, amphibious plane, flown by Sam Merlotte from the Sookie Stackhouse books. He was waiting to fly me to Bon Temps to meet with the vampire king Felipe de Castro.

We flew a ways, then landed, then I was walking on the same wooded path, and loosely disperses around me were gray-cloaked, hooded figures. The sun was setting and a mist was rising. As the last gleams of daylight faded, the figure in front of me turned and smiled inside his hood, and it was the vampire king, and the others were the vampires in his retinue, and we were almost to town, where we were supposed to meet, and I couldn't see Sam anywhere. I was alone with them in the woods. Then I woke up.

TBTT #3 Eat My Heart Out While You're at It ~ 2/7/2012

One of the most disturbing dreams I've had in a life of disturbing dreams...

Last night dreamland started out pretty normal, you know. Singing three part harmonized Christmas carols with my college band friends in the Walgreens on Royal St. I went out to help two little blond, curly haired, blue eyed girls get to their mom's car, but then she drove off without them. We turned around to go back to the Walgreens, and noticed these things on the roof. They looked like metal flamingos covered with black ostrich feathers, like they were trying to blend in with the vultures that were perched up there, but they weren't very convincing. The buzzards weren't buying it, either. When we got back to the Walgreens, the apocalypse had begun, and we each got one plastic cup of water, and had to go to the bathroom in groups in special stalls that would recycle everything. In the greeting card aisle the three of us met a very nice and very big man who became the littlest boy's best friend (they were now two little boys, a 2 year old and a 6 month old). The bird robot things were coming to claim dominion over the earth, so we all got in a big red truck to be herded into camps. But our driver pretended to miss the exit, so we were blazing down the highway trying to get out of the city while the apocalypse robots were firing blue lasers at us from their helicopters. Which was bad enough, but then they teleported my littlest boy away from me, and I screamed to stop, and we stopped, and then one of the robots brought him back, and he smiled at me, and his teeth were all rows and rows of shark teeth, and he leaned over, out of the robot's arms, and I wanted to take him anyway, because I loved him like he was my own, and he said he couldn't see me, and he couldn't hear me, and I wasn't his mother, so I couldn't nurse him, and I said no, I couldn't, and he said, "But I can still devour your eyes and your ears so you can't see or hear me either," and he opened his mouth and I was terrified, but I reached for him... and then I woke up.

All Over the Map ~ 5/9/2014

I was working on a team building some sort of spaceship. The psychologist from Bones, Doctor Lance Sweets, was there, and when the team leader clapped for one of us, and we came near Sweets, these small objects that were lodged in out brains would hover invisibly outside our heads, exactly a foot away in the direction of the doctor. When the boss waved his hand between us and the doctor, they would drop into visible reality. They were smooth but irregular, like river stones, somewhat kidney-shaped, about an inch and a half long. They were made of deep blue stone, wound about with gold wire, threaded with gem-bright beads or components of some kind.  Their purpose was to allow us to behave predictably in multiple quantum states, so that, say, three Lauras could be working at once.  And to do a full update on our devices, all three of us would have to be called in and compiled back into one.  My boss made some adjustments to my device to see if it would help me work more safely, but when he put it back in my brain, the world was all in black and white, and I got very depressed, so he had to put it back to the way it was and do more research.

After that I was back in Castroville, where I grew up.  Mom and Brooke and I went to Saturday evening mass at St. Louis Church, then I went for a walk down Highway 90.  I noticed from a banner that today was the 26th anniversary of an unsolved shooting at the Dairy Queen. There were wreaths of flowers hung on the outside of the church and down the streets.

After a while, Mom and Brooke and I went to a pool, and Aunt Liz was there, too, and so was my little buddy Kieran.  I was watching over Kieran VERY closely, because a vampire named Long Shadow was swimming around, just below the surface of the water, and I knew he was going to try to drown someone. He must have succeeded, because suddenly I was walking up to the top of a hill to go to Holy Rosary Church in Hostyn, to a funeral service. All my family was there, and one of my cousins was holding tight to my hand and crying, but I couldn't figure out who had died, because I counted aunts and uncles and cousins and cousins' kids, and everyone seemed to be in the pews.

Then I began working remotely on my laptop.  Joe had sent me a spreadsheet with two columns of linked URLs.  I couldn't figure out how this spreadsheet was different from the previous one he'd sent, so I couldn't tell what he needed me to do with it. I knew he wanted me to update one of our web pages, but it wasn't at all clear what needed to be changed, and I couldn't figure out why the link for HSE0011 and the link to the to a page showing the SKU number for glazed strawberry cake doughnuts were in the same spreadsheet row, because I had NO IDEA what HSE0011 had to do with doughnuts. I kept trying to explain to Joe on the phone that I didn't know what to do with what he sent, and he kept insisting it was obvious from his changes to the spreadsheet.

So I put that project aside for a while, and went over to an area where I was designing new museum exhibits, and brainstorming ideas for merchandising lines to go with them.  The exhibits would feature new archaeological finds, like a skeleton found in Peru, with jewels in the eye sockets. The gemstones were carved in the shape of flowers and stars, so one of the things we would sell in the gift shop was a plastic skull replica with bright acrylic copies of the gemstones. There was another exhibit having to do with findings along the Oregon Trail, and we were reviving the game, and arranging for wagons to be built.  Another exhibit featured finds by a museum team on an island nation in the Pacific.  I went out to the island to photograph a city-scape, that included the museum, one of the prettiest buildings there, from a hill that had the best view. I had a hard time getting up to the hill, though, because all the tourists were trying to drive on the British side of the road when that wasn't actually the correct side of the road to drive on.  While I was on this trip, I picked up a packet of a local snack food, which was little balls of salty, soft yellow cheese that were soaked in honey and spiced with cinnamon. These were sticky and gooey and remarkably delicious.

I finally rejoined my group after taking these photographs.  It was night on the island and the trees were full of huge, fragrant white blossoms that gleamed in the moonlight.  We all got into shiny convertibles, tops down in the warm night air.  As we set off to drive down to the seashore, I realized was Sookie Stackhouse, riding in a car with Eric the Viking vampire. Then I woke up.

Blue Whales, Gollum, and Roaring Tubas ~ 5/7/2014

I dreamed I was at a sewing camp in a small town perched on a dry rock coast. There weren't many plants, mostly tall, dark, dusky dusty cypress trees. The sea was dark and deep and steely in the sunlight. The stones of the hills and crags were a deep, warm brown, striped with amber and rust and gold. All the villas in the town were built of golden sandstone, with wide bare lawns walled with the same, and brown ceramic tile roofs. You'd think the dryness and lack of brighter colors would have made it seem barren and ugly, but there was a lovely minimalism and simplicity to the landscape and architecture.

The streets were steep and narrow, and all the vehicle traffic ran on rails. There were rail carts of all sizes, from individual transport ones that were hand driven like the little carts in old movies, to huge motorized trailers that were built to haul blue whales in and out of the ocean. Because the spit of land that the town was on divided two bits of sea that the whales favored, so the sentient whales had negotiated a system to be hauled overland quickly to get from one deep bay to the other.

So I was at this sewing camp, and I knew a friend of mine was coming soon who kept kosher. I walked down to the kitchen buildings to talk with the cooks and make sure they could accommodate him. That took a while, and when I came out, I had to wait to go back up the street because a whale was coming. I watched in wonder as it passed, long and gray and sleek, sides dripping with cool salt water. I saw it go down into the sea, then climbed back up to camp.

The sewing project that year was to make a sundress. There were hundreds of bright rolls of fabric to choose from, almost as if to compensate for the lack of color and flowers in the town, and my eye was caught by them all, of course. But I ended up deciding on a pattern that had a light, loose under dress gathered at the neck, that I'd make from light, sand colored linen, and an over dress to cover and fit the shape, that I chose to do in midnight blue lace.

I finished my project and went home to Rio Medina. I still lived in the house I grew up in. I discovered that my mom had moved back to that area, too, to a house she'd had built up FM 471, that was a perfect reproduction of my great grandmother's house in Ammansville. My grandmother had decided to move in with her, so they were both there.

Also, Gollum lived nearby.  He didn't seem to mind Mom and Momo, and they didn't seem to mind him, but he HATED me. Whenever I came to see them, or to drive them somewhere, because they didn't have a car, he'd lurk around trying to get me alone so he could strangle me.  Finally, he hid in my car one day when I went to pick Mom up to take her to a friend's house.  After I dropped her off, I was continuing down to Castroville, where I was headed to help the Medina Valley band director out with a show they were working on.  Suddenly I saw Gollum in my rear view mirror, and before he could get his fingers around my throat, I grabbed his scrawny neck, pushed him out my open window, and held him outside my truck as I rolled the window shut. I told him, before thrusting him away and closing the window, that next time I'd shut his neck in the window and let him flap along beside me, choking, at 70 miles per hour.

I got down to the school, and the band was already in the gym, working on their show.  I checked to make sure there were video cameras set up hanging from the ceiling, so that they'd capture the overall footage.  The show opened with a single guy in the spotlight on the floor of the darkened gym, playing the bass line of Chameleon on a marching baritone.  And man, that kid could blow!  His sound in the lower register was huge, and filled up the whole gym.  He vamped that line for a bit, then everything went silent in a dramatic pause.  Then, the stage lights went up in a flare of color, showing the rest of the band, and the tubas, in rows along the side, took over the bass line in a pretty thunderous roar, and the trumpets picked up the melody... it was pretty awesome!  And then I woke up.

Feeling Loved ~ 5/6/2014

I was in an autumn forest, searching for my love. He was close, close, I could feel it. I crept through thick drifts of rustling amber leaves, and the air was soft and damp and sweet, blue with moonlight and mist. I couldn't find him, and his brother was also looking for him, and kept telling me to leave, but I kept looking.

As the sun rose behind the fogs, turning the sky dove gray and rose pink, I wandered out of the forest onto the sea side, near Venice.  I turned to head back to the city, where my huge and very rich family lived, in a white marble villa on the water.

As rich as they were, they were still greedy and grasping, and didn't approve of my love any more than his brother approved of me.  But my twin brother was different. He understood.  He was a brilliant engineer and builder, and while I was gone he had built for me the most fantastic floating house.  It rose above the water in two stories of shell pink stone, with delicate support pillars, carved like forest trees, supporting the ceilings of wide, airy rooms, lighted by enormous windows.  All the windows and doors were open, and the fresh morning breeze, tinged with salt, drifted through every room.  Wide, columned galleries surrounded the central structure, with balustrades along the outer edges.

The most incredible part of this floating structure was that, while it nestled snugly against the terrace of my family home, where it met the canal, it also could be moved across the water to its own niche, across the bay, a new address where I could build my own life with whomever I wanted. For some remarkable reason, half the house was moved by a hand-cranked motor, but the other half was powered by the motion of walking clockwise around the galleries on that side, back in through one door, out an opposite door, and around the galleries again. My brother and I sailed my new house to its new dock and back several times, while we waited for my love to join me there.

I woke up for a bit, and when I went back to sleep, I lived in the upper story of a red brick house somewhere in Uptown (New Orleans). My landlady lived in the lower story. I had an outer stair up to the gallery, to get into my half of the house.  There was a huge oak tree in the front yard, and the neighbors had three big long haired dogs that like to play and dig around our tree.

My family was now my normal, awesome, huge Czech family, and they came to visit.  My great grandmother was still alive, and reasonably spry, but on a rainy day, the dogs tripped her, and she got cold and wet, so I had to get her into a warm bath.  But after that she felt just fine, and she came out in a pink fuzzy night gown and wanted to play dominoes.  Mom and Momo and one of my older cousins wanted to play, so as the youngest player, I let one of them have my place.  Momo and Great-grandma totally whooped up playing fourty-two, and it was an amazing learning experience to watch.

Some friends of mine invited me to watch a movie nearby, so I left my family, pet the dogs as I passed by the tree, and met up with a friend who was visiting from Austin.  We met the others in a pizza place, and watched the movie there, but it was Fellowship of the Rings, and the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy was showing on TV, and we decided we'd like to go to someone's house to watch Two Towers.  We had to hurry, so we all ran, even me. I ran and jogged and trotted and sprinted blocks and blocks.

There were at least six of us, but we all piled onto one couch, without bothering about personal space, and I sat, cuddled up amid people who cared for me, and it just felt amazing to be that loved and safe and comfortable and welcome, and to have my family back at home, where I was also loved and where I always belonged.  And then I woke up.