The Queen of England ~ 4/9/2020

I dreamed I was a little girl named Alice. I lived with my parents on a little farm by a river, just outside of a small town. We were peasants, and our cottage floor was hard-packed earth, but I was loved and we were happy.

Then one day three men came while I was home alone and my parents were working in the manor fields. They were identical triplets, and wore the same suits and ties, had the same dark hair and the same cut of beard. They said they were my Uncle John, and I needed to come with them. My parents had died that day in a horrible accident, and I was going to live with my other family.

They took me to a luxurious hotel. We sat at a table in the gold and amber light that drifted across the Art Deco ground floor restaurant. The walls and pillars were of a honey-rose marble and the lamps were all shaded behind paper-thin plates of tortoiseshell. They told me this was my home now, and soon I would meet my grandmother, who lived in a penthouse suite. I wouldn’t be living with her there; there was a second floor suite prepared for me.

We had to wait a long time, so my Uncle Johns began explaining to me my new family ties. I thought I saw my parents, then, behind a large man who was hustling them out of a back door. I couldn’t be sure, though. I was about to get up when the Uncle Johns told me that my real name was Mary, and if I agreed to marry a man named William when I was old enough, I would become Queen Mary 2.

And that’s what happened. I grew up in that hotel, which was on Canal Street in New Orleans. I met and married William, and I became queen. One day I went out for a ceremonial meeting with a Highland pipe and drum band. One of the Scots looked like Jonathan Van Ness. He was particularly angry to be there and to have me there, and he led the band in an army song. The lyrics he sang were full of anger and profanity, and I just sat there smiling blandly because that was my job. I made a note to have a meeting with him later so I could see if there was anything I could do.

As we arrived back at the hotel, it was such a beautiful sunny day, and I told my assistant how sad it was that I lived here in New Orleans, which people came from all over the world to visit, but I could never wander the streets and enjoy the sights like they did. I just have distracted my assistant, because instead of pushing the elevator button for my second floor suite, she pushed the button for the ninth floor, where she lived and had her office.

We rose passed the second floor before she could push the button. For the lower floors, the elevator ran up a well in the front of the building, but in the upper floors, the elevator was in the back. After we passed the third floor, the whole elevator slanted to run along a diagonal before straightening up in the rear well. My assistant apologized profusely the whole time. As we started back down, some people got on the elevator. I pulled my har down to hide. It turned out that the elevator couldn’t stop at the lower floors on its way down. It had to go all the way to the ground floor in the back of the building. To get back to the front and the elevator I needed, we had to ride the airport shuttle van. I got into the van, and then I woke up.

A Whole New Game ~ 2/25/2020

I dreamed that I only needed a few more credits to get a history degree, so I went back to college. I ended up registered for a history class about the history of bowling and a math class focused on crossword puzzles. After only remembering to attend one class my first week, I went to the campus store to see if they had wall calendars so I could write down my schedule and remember better.

I ended up only finding the campus store departments that sold athletics gear and memorabilia and canoes, but I couldn’t find books and stationary. I was running late for work so I has to leave. I worked at a bar run by the guy who played Sam Merlott in the True Blood series, but his real name was Bill Stewart. He was a great boss. His birthday was coming up, so we were all planning a party.

I was supposed to organize some party games, so I decided to invent a bowling/crossword puzzle mash up. The idea was, you bowled a ball across the floor to the wall where either a bunch of pins were lined up or some skee-ball holes were installed. If you knocked over a pin or sank a hole, then you could try to guess either the down answer or one of the across answers arranged on the wall above that pin or hole. I planned to create a puzzle with clues all relating to my boss.

I had everything mostly set up, the drinks and snacks were ready, and guests were starting to arrive, when Robert Downey, Jr. walked in. We learned it was his birthday, too, so I started to rewrite the clues to the crossword to include him. I was very pleased that one of my answers was “Bran Stark” because to the original clue, “Fantasy character with the same initials” as my boss, I could try to work in a Tony Stark reference as well. But then I woke up.

A Mostly Victorian Adventure ~ 2/11/2020

I dreamed I lived in a historic American city, in about the 1920s, and my life was a sort of mashup between Middlemarch and Gone with the Wind. I was a cross between Scarlet O’Hara and Rosamund Vincy, and my Dr. Lydgate/Ashleigh love interest had a medical practice on 9th Flu Street and was engaged to my older, uglier sister.

The doctor’s name was Neville Clair, and I knew he preferred me, but he was a very upright, principled, honorable man, full of high ideals. To make my sister angry, I would call him her Angel Clair, after the Thomas Hardy character. He would turn red when he heard me, but she never got it. She just thought I couldn’t remember his name.

I wandered away from my mother while she had me out shopping for a bridesmaid dress to wear at my sister’s wedding. I made my way through a luxurious hotel and scandalized everyone by entering the colored areas. But on the other side of the hotel was the 9th Flu Street office, and I was determined to win the doctor away from my sister.

When I found the doctor, I tried to start flirting, but he hurried me out of the shop to find my mother and sister so he could take us all on some outing. We were all walking along a lake when I saw two puppies treading water a ways from the bank. They were too little to swim well, and weren’t making any progress toward the shore. I jumped in to save them, and the doctor jumped in after me, and we brought them in to safety, and I decided to keep them.

As the doctor was driving us home, I got him to promise to marry me instead. Then I asked him why the city had a 1st Flu Street, a 3rd, 5th, 9th, and 10th Flu Streets, and whether it had anything to do with a series of flu epidemics in the 19th century. He said that was exactly it, that each street marked the limit to which that numbered epidemic had spread. Then I woke up.

The Surreal History of the Pink Carnation ~ 1/28/2020

I dreamed I was going to a costume party, and I had a tartan dress and a heavy brass great sword, and would be going as a sort of Scottish Joan of Arc. But as I was walking through a red sandstone canyon to get to the party location, I changed my mind. I decided I should go as Turnip Fitzhugh masquerading as the Pink Carnation. I figured I could make it work. I had most of an elaborate outfit of buff pants, black boots, a brocade waistcoat and coat, a flowing cape, and the sword with me, which for some reason all seemed in character.

I decided all I needed was a mask. So I went to a general store near the party site that had a sewing sundries section. I bought some elastic cording, and I snagged a paper plate and some crayons from where the party was setting up, in a small-town community center. I drew pink carnation petals all over the plate, with a hint of green stem and sepal at the bottom. I cut eye holes and threaded the cord into small holes on either side, and my mask was done. It seemed like a quite clever costume to me.

But then I realized that my boots and a really great hat were in my closet in Houston, which was a 2 hour and 45 minute round trip. I decided I had the time, and it was worth it, so I got in my car with a friend who wanted to come, and we set off. I had a really hard time steering and breaking. It was an awful trip. Right outside of Houston we hit a detour. It led us to drive up a grassy, overgrown track, then onto a narrow bridge made of plywood. The detour ended in a residential back yard, where the car would be moved out to the street in front, but not with us in it; we had to walk through the house.

The family didn’t seem to be home, or at least wasn’t downstairs in their kitchen or living room or front hall. We hurried through and we’re almost to the front door when a white Pomeranian and a basset hound bounded into the hall and started barking at me. I turned to make friends, but then I woke up.

Travel by Dolphin Boat ~ 1/19/2020

I dreamed my high school was turning the band hall into a multi-use facility where there would be band practice, standardized testing, and rented office space. The company I worked for was renting space, so I was back at my old school.

As part of getting things set up for our office, we started finding a bunch of drawings and poems I’d done, that had gotten tucked in the back of my instrument cubby. So that was kind of embarrassing. But I also found out a community band was going to use the space in the evenings, so I joined up, and started playing my trumpet again.

I decided to go on a trip then, and ended up on the southeast coast. I planned to take a boat home, and there was this company that rented boats that were towed by river dolphins on their migrations down or up river. I was in luck, as I needed to go down river to Houston, and it was a down river time of year.

Part of using this method was being part of rounding up the dolphin that would pull your boat, so you would know what was involved in hitching the dolphin up and letting it loose in an emergency. So I helped the handler catch three river dolphins. They were leaner and more fishlike than I was expecting, with pointed, streamlined faces. Still, they were definitely air breathing, and their tail flukes lay horizontally, not vertically. They were a shimmering, glittering, deep, electric blue color across their backs, and a pearly silver underneath. Their skin felt cool and smooth.

One dolphin had no marks from previous hailing’s, and there was a rule that no new dolphins would be taken, so that one got released. The other two had markings and scars along their tails showing where they’d been rigged for hitching before. I helped the handler remove an old hitching stud that bolted on either side of the tail.

Very early versions of the hitching gear had involved piercing through the tail muscles with gradually larger gauges, until a thick rope could be passed through. If a dolphin still had the large gauge hole, this could still be done. So the handler had some fittings for this. The fitting was like a large, thick bolt, about two inches in diameter at the head and an inch and a half at the shaft. The heads had a groove and a complicated quick release mechanism which was still more humane than the early methods of just bolting the lead cord through the dolphin’s flesh, but they looked just brutal, and I was glad I wouldn’t be using them.

The small stud we replaced was part of the release for the more modern harness. This was rigged around the dolphin’s tail, then hitched to my boat. A crowd of children gathered as we were hitching the dolphin up, and most of my job of helping was continually shooing the kids away from the dolphin and our equipment. Over and over again. The little brats just wouldn’t listen, and one of them almost drowned after they spooked the dolphin and got tangled in the rigging as the animal thrashed.

Finally everything was hooked up, and we paid out the line to give the dolphin room to be comfortable. It wasn’t so much about harnessing and controlling its motion as taking advantage of the energy it would already be using. By then it was night, so I bedded down in my boat. When I woke the next morning, the handler had unmoored me and I was on my way.

I traveled slowly and steadily westward, giving a light pull on the lead every so often to judge from the tension how the dolphin was swimming and whether debris was tangled in the line. The river banks were grassy, muddy, marshy, stony by turns as we went. We made good time. The next day, as evening drew on, we entered a channel of sand as white as sugar. The water was a brilliant turquoise around us.

I thought about staking down an staying the night here. Staking down involved wrapping the line around a stake with a sort of rounded M for a head. The downward legs of the M on either side were spikes to anchor the lead line, passed through the M arches, firmly to the ground when the stake was pounded into the earth. But the sand was too soft and loose, so nothing could be securely anchored there.

Not far ahead the river went through a city in a series of canals. I knew my dolphin knew the way and would stick to the best course. The boat rental company had a deal with some lodgings in the cities along the route, so I decided to stay on land instead of in my boat. I tied off at the company’s anchorage and walked up a cobbled path into a lamp lit courtyard.

There was a coffee shop there, and I saw a friend sitting at one of the tables. I sat with her as she read the paper, because no one behind the counter seemed to hear me when I tried to talk with them. I knew they had a shuttle to a hotel I could stay at, but when I asked they ignored me so I sat with my friend and drank a coffee she ordered for me and fetched new sections of the paper for her.

I finally decided to go back to my boat, and as I stood on the quay, a wavering, red light sprang up down the street. I looked over to see one of the brick townhouses halfway down the block was on fire! As I watched, the building next door to it, closer to us, caught fire as well. We yelled for the people in the coffee shop to come out, because the fire was now only two houses away.

I figured my dolphin was the safest creature around, but I followed the line down river to check on it. I found it had used its slack to swim into a deep canal that ran beneath a hill. It had been shepherding a bunch of street urchins to safety down here. There was a little girl with long, tangled, dark hair, crouched at the water’s edge, sobbing with fear, as the smooth, blue head raised out of the water to look at her. And then I woke up.

The Wild Things Are in Texas ~ 1/10/2020

I dreamed I was in my back yard in the Hill Country when I came across a mother animal with her litter. The mother looked something like a young wild pig, but with thick soft fur, brown with white spots like a fawn, and darker stripes, like a chipmunk. And she could fly. Her litter was about half fuzzy yellow ducklings and half fuzzy yellow golden retriever puppies. I sat with them for a while under the night sky.

When it got light, I got up to visit friends. On my way to Houston, I stopped at a Hogwarts themed cocktail bar to visit with my sister. There was a gift shop and winding corridors labeled things like, “Dungeons, Potions, Slytherin,” and, “Griffendor, Charms, Hospital Wing, Library, Restrooms.” You’d think it would be gray stone walls, like a castle, but it looked more like holes left when the roots of a giant tree have vanished, burrowing through golden sandstone, with a veneer of Lisa Frank colors. I had a pale pink cocktail that involved grapefruit juice, gin, and rosemary.

I continued on to Houston to visit my friends the Welshes. They told me all about the audiobook Erik was narrating, loosely based on their family. The main characters were a royal family of elephants, except the mother was a special magical space elephant. They were all very excited about this production, of course. We were all going to drive up to Dallas, where Erik was going to do a recording session.

Then my mom called me to let me know she wanted to have me and my sister’s family all do a family photo with her the next day. She wanted to meet in Weimar, TX, at the church. So I went there instead of Dallas, and sat down for the church service, and then I woke up.

Abraham Lincoln and the Talking Rabbit ~ 12/9/2019

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.