Dogs Everywhere ~ 6/1/2015

I dreamed I kept walking by a pet shop in a mall, and there was a game at the back, and every time I walked past, they were giving some kid a different weird prize that they were calling a shark leg. The first one was a really slender, turquoise and forest green plastic lamprey. The second was the hind-quarter of a black dog. The third was an ice cream cone. But that kid's mom looked right at the game's host and said she was calling the cops, and when he protested, she insisted he remove the stolen gun from her son's ice cream cone. He did so and the whole game speedily decamped.

So I went into Half Priced Books, and I was thrilled to find a copy of A Hundred and One Dalmatians, the book Disney based their movie on. I always liked the book better, and it was my very favorite for a long time when I was little. So I bought it for $7, so I could read it to all my little buddies when they came to visit. Then I started wondering if I'd actually sold my copy, and was now buying it back, and how ridiculous that would be.

I went home for the holidays, though, and verified that Mom still had my old copy. I spent the night at our house in the hill country, and then we were all going to drive into San Antonio to work, then meet up again out at La Grange. Mom kept asking me to do things to help out, but I kept finding them impossible to do. Like, I was supposed to go get something from the garage, but it wasn't where she said it was, and when I went back to ask her where else to look, she told me to go pack up our matching Christmas shirts, and also our plain white shirts, in case that looked better in the family portrait, but I hadn't brought my Christmas shirt or white shirt because no one told me.

When I went back to tell her this, she said no, what she had asked me to do a hundred times now was to feed the boys breakfast, because my friends' two boys were staying with us. So I went to pour them cereal, but it kept disappearing from the bowls, so I put Poptarts in the toaster, but they never came up, so I started browning some sausage in my cast iron pan, but it evaporated, so in desperation I threw in some leftover macaroni and cheese, and that finally stayed whole, and warmed up, but when I served it, both boys were yelling at the top of their lungs, but I couldn't figure out what was wrong, but it was now 8am, and I needed to get to work.

But Mom said, well, first you need to bake the cake.  And then you need to do the dishes. Or you could do them after work. And I reminded her I was leaving straight from work to go to Momo's like everyone else. So she said that was fine, but I just needed to get these other chores done. I finally just walked out to get in my car to drive to the office, but my car kept turning itself back around.

Finally I got the car to stop bringing me back home, and I was running really late, but instead of taking me into work, it took me to this house full of dogs. Which at first seemed cool, but none of the dogs were interacting with me doggishly, and it was kinda weird for so many of them to be in a frat house, and then the frat guys came home, and when they called each dog by name, it shook itself like dogs do when they're wet, and transformed into a gorgeous young woman. These women then set about keeping the house clean, cooking dinner, and, of course, performing other services behind closed doors.

One of the girls got mad at her "owner" and turned back into a dog, snarling, hackles raised, ready to attack. But the frat boy shook himself and became a dog also, and they got into a vicious fight, until he pinned her by the throat and then proceeded to assert his dominance in every possible way, at which point, thankfully, I woke up.

Magical Meatloaf ~ 5/27/2015

I dreamed I was working on shipping docks on a point of land jutting out into darkness. My dad, my godfather Bud, and his son-in-law Tom all worked there too. The bosses wanted to give my dad an award, but he wouldn't accept it unless they also recognized Bud.

I had to leave the point, along with a group of friends and acquaintances, including Neil Degrasse Tyson, because we all had magical abilities, and evil wizards were trying to recruit us. If we didn't agree to join them, they'd kill us. We had to leave everything behind, including our names. They had put a hex on our true names, so if we spoke them aloud, the evil wizards would find us.

We'd been away from our rooms for a while, to find a safe place for our golden retriever Rustler. I stumbled upon a message about how the evil ones had found the rooms while we were out, and they'd jinxed all the thermostat levels so that if the heating or cooling went above level 2, they'd be signaled that we'd returned. I hurried back to find my companions had indeed turned up the air conditioning, but the level hadn't gone to 3 yet, so I turned it back down and explained.

I went to visit a friend of mine who was working on an educational cartoon. He was telling all sorts of useful parables using xkcd-style stick figure drawings. He was hiding out, to, so he couldn't distribute his work. I agreed to help, and took a pile of pamphlets with me to hand out.

I snuck home real quick to check on my mom and dad. I wasn't going to go in, but my mom caught sight of me and insisted I help her with dinner. We were going to have meatloaf muffins. Dad was preparing the muffin trays. He had a stick figure cartoon of Darth Vader and a storm trooper pinned up for inspiration. He was using a mixture of black pepper and gun powder to form letters in the pan so that, when turned out, the muffins would spell, "I find your lack of faith disturbing!" Then he could run a wick from muffin to muffin, and when he lit it, the letters would look like sparklers.

My mom handed me a bowl and said to mix all the hamburger meat and eggs I could find, and to Aldo mix in chunks of cake that she had lying around, instead of bread crumbs. I told her I'd use the chocolate and vanilla chunks, but I was NOT putting strawberry cake in, because that was just disgusting.

So I mixed up all I could find, but instead of looking like ground beef, it looked a lot like brownie batter, and pounds and cups of ingredients collapsed down into not enough to fill half of one muffin pan. I knew this wouldn't work with Dad's lettering, so I scrounged around and found more eggs and some chunks of yellow cake in my room. I also found bunches of herbs that I knew I could use, as long as I left out the woody stalks.

When even that didn't help, I went to Mom for help. She sent me out on the front porch to catch ants to add in. But she gave me specific instructions not to include the purple schooner ants, especially if they were carrying a brood of young. Purple schooner ants were about three inches long, purple, of course, and their abdomens looked like three marbles stuck together. In one of the marbles, the females carried at least a dozen squirming young. The worst of it was that they didn't crawl on the ground. Instead they hovered in the air, only dropping to the ground to feed.

Out on the porch, I could see them in the porch light, dropping down by the hundreds. They were the only ants I could see, so I went back inside to tell Mom, and then I woke up.

Why I've Been Awake Since 4AM ~ 5/20/2015

I dreamed I borrowed a motorcycle to drive home from New Orleans one evening. I practiced driving it around the quiet neighborhood. To speed up, you pulled the handlebars toward you. To slow down, you pushed them away. I wound around the quiet streets, lined with old oaks and shotgun houses as the sun went down.  Finally reasonably comfortable that I could drive the thing, I began to try to find my way out of the neighborhood.

I ended up right back at the house of the friend who'd lent me the motorcycle. There were a few people sitting out on the porch, including my friend's landlord/roommate. All of them were pretty amused at me. They gave me directions and I set off again.  And I got lost again, and ended back at their house again. I took a break, went in to get a drink, and followed my friend from her rooms over a walkway to the house next door and back, as she chatted with me.  I set off one last time, and as the sun rose, I finally found my way out of the neighborhood.

It took me most of the day to get to San Antonio. I kept getting turned around and having to use the position of the sun in the sky to set myself right. I finally ended up getting bogged down in construction at I-10 and Loop 410, and exited the highway. I knew Culebra road was northwest of the interchange, and I could just take surface streets up to it if I kept the sun on my left. I knew there was a patch of pretty bad neighborhood between where I was and where I needed to be, but as there were still a couple of hours of daylight left, I figured I'd be fine.

But I kept ending up going down cul-de-sacs and roads closed for construction and roads that narrowed into sidewalks, meandering through low-rent apartments and rundown houses.  I ended up walking the motorcycle through a seedy apartment complex as the sun was setting again, and stopped to get my bearings and watch the children playing. One curly-haired little girl came over to hand me her doll, and her older brother was fascinated by my motorbike. I struck up a conversation, and they invited me into their home. I decided to go with them, because maybe their family could help me find my way.

Instead, I was told off by their grandfather, who found me sitting in the living room. He yelled at me that I needed to stay away from his grandkids, and that me coming into their home as a stranger was really creepy, and if I didn't leave, he'd call the police. So I left. I walked past a large stone church with a dark, wood-shingled roof and bright stained glass windows, but no one was around. I hoped I could cut through the retirement community next door as a shortcut. If I could just get to the other side, I knew I could find Thousand Oaks Drive, and take that over to Eldridge Parkway, which would lead me over to Culebra.

I wheeled my bike through an archway, hoping to find a parking lot and street on the other side. Instead I ended up in a strange room that had an old brass firemen's pole down from the floors above, a few rounded steps down from the corresponding but slightly offset story of the adjoining building, and some slides down to the ground level. The floor and all the steps and slides were smoothly polished wood that gleamed as golden as the old brass. From this room I ended up in the suite of rooms belonging to an old woman. Her grandson saw me and helped me out her front door, which was on the opposite side from where I entered, and, sure enough, brought me out on to Thousand Oaks.  He showed me a map, and it looked like Thousand Oaks would take me all the way to Culebra, but then he told me that road construction had that end blocked off.  But I pointed out that I could walk the bike around, and he agreed that should work just fine.

It was really late when I found myself headed northwest on Culebra Road.  My dad called to tell me that Mom had come into town to pick me up, but hadn't been able to see me, so she'd stopped at the San Antonio Light newspaper offices. I'd already passed those up, but only by a block or two, so I turned back.  I saw the blue neon sign gleaming in the dark up ahead, and wheeled my bike into the dim parking lot. A few reporters were hanging around a news van, and I found my mom chatting with them. We loaded the motorcycle into her van and she drove me home.

The next day I walked around Castroville. I went to Super S and found a boxed mix for a gluten free chocolate Doberge cake. The sample cake was at least eight inches tall, and I decided I needed to try it. So I got the mix home, but found out I'd gotten lemon Doberge, instead of chocolate. I made the cake anyway, and it was very good. That evening, I found my friend Roy in the high school gym, doing Karaoke with a few other friends. He wasn't singing, though. The place had a machine that would remove instrumental tracks, too, so he was playing guitar. He stood in the center with his equipment, and the floor around him spun in a circle, and was scattered with rolling office chairs for singers.  I sat down in one of them and Jo Dee Messina's "Bye Bye" came on the karaoke machine, and Roy played guitar and I sang.

When the song was done, I pushed myself in my rolly chair off the gym floor and up a nearby freeway exit ramp. I couldn't make it all the way up, which was probably a good thing. A voice began to lecture me that if I thought my suicidal behavior showed some ammount of self-control, in that I appeared to wish to exert control over the ending of my life, I was wrong. That true control came from living in balance. I tried to argue that I hadn't been trying to kill myself, but I couldn't see who was talking, so I just gave up and rolled my office chair back down off the ramp.

When I came to the edge of a lake, I got up. I could see black-robed Bene Gesserit women swimming around the center of the lake.  Without taking off my own black robes, I stepped down into the murky water to join my sisters. I swam around, trying to find balance, I guess. I dove beneath the surface, but then found that I'd gone in much deeper than I'd meant. I began to struggle my way back up to the surface, my lungs bursting for air, but I knew I wasn't going to make it, even though I could see the light gleaming silver above me. I woke up mid-stroke, and lay paralyzed in my bed for a few seconds, still holding my breath, before I realized that if I inhaled, I wouldn't be inhaling water, so I took a breath and woke up completely.

Murder, Intrigue, and Gourmet Chocolate ~ 5/18/2015

I dreamed I was on a band trip in Korea to solve a series of murders. Korea was like a combination of Las Vegas and an upscale shopping mall. There were fancy shops and twinkling lights everywhere. Some of the people in our group, including my good friend's mother, suddenly became ghosts. They would only regain corporeality if we solved the mystery.

We could predict who was going to be next, but not how they would be killed. We found the word "siostre" carved in strange characters onto the bottom of a dugout canoe, rotting at the side of a small river. This was an important clue, we were sure, but we didn't know what it meant.

The next victim was killed right in front of me as I was trying to keep watch and protect him. Some mechanism was triggered and a wire contraption came out of the wall behind him, slipped around his neck, and would have garroted him, if that hadn't been rendered completely unnecessary by the attached blade that slit his carotid.

There were silky red fibers caught in the joints of the contraption, and I thought I recognized them. As pandemonium filled the room, I looked across and met the eyes of the Columbian ambassador, who was still and watchful amid the chaos... and who wore a Columbian flag cravat in which one of the red starts of the flag was apparently missing, split by a tear in the silky red fabric.

But when we questioned him, he denied all involvement and invoked diplomatic immunity. Just as we were going to let him go, I saw a woman in a dark gray suit and deep scarlet tie raise a gun and point it at his back. I sounded the alarm, and she ended up shooting and wounding him, but we caught her. She, of course, was the murderer.

With the mystery solved and all the temporary ghosts returned the physical plain, I rejoined my group. Only to find that, by being late and missing several gatherings, I had lost all three of my happy snail marks, and would not be receiving any tokens that I could exchange for gourmet chocolate truffles at the world-renown chocolate shop in our hotel.

So I went and bought my own chocolates, and got on the bus to go home. We left the bright lights of Korea and drove east, over the large bridge that separated Southeast Asia from New Orleans. I realized I'd never noticed before how close an entire other continent was to my home. And then I woke up.

The Wonderful World of Harry Potter ~ 5/7/2015

I dreamt that Harry Potter went to Hogwarts, which was a 52 story office building built above Momo's house, on her land near La Grange.  There were large lobbies on the upper floors with floor to ceiling windows and galleries looking down on fountains and indoor plants. The Griffindors lived above one of these, on about the 45th floor. Ravenclaws were up above, Hufflepuffs below, and Slytherins in the basement.

At the end of the school year, all witches and wizards born in July, including Harry, Neville, and Luna, went into a bacchanal killing trance for one evening. They hunted the other students, and the final exam was basically staying alive. I, too, was a student born in July, and all I could remember the next day was colluding with my fellow July students on hunting tactics in the very beginning, chasing screaming people toward the stock tank, then walking into the water to wash the blood off of my boots.

I had four pairs of boots. I pulled them all out later to see if any of them would jog my memories. One pair was a light tan ostrich skin. Another pair was a pale buff ostrich skin. There were my black ropers, of course, and then the pair I wore that night, which were cracking and shapeless because of the water. Those were a deep oxblood calfskin, so they didn't show any stains. I gave up trying to remember.

I went home to find that my mom had bought me a new X-Files computer game. I had all the X-Files games now. But my dad had already opened it up and was playing it in the TV room, so I sat and watched.  It was a first person shooter with lots of metal corridors and gray aliens. While I waited for him to finish, I patted my sister's dog, who had curled up in my lap.  Our other dogs, all black and white in various sizes, came to greet me, and followed me to the grocery store.

In the back of the grocery store there was a big, swampy, sandy-banked river garden. The dogs had a good roll in the damp sand while I talked a bit with the children that all waded around tending the plants in tall mud boots. The children, it turned out, were mentally different, and in some cases quite disturbed, in one way or another. But they could see and talk to ghosts. After chatting with them a while, I realized that I, too, could see and talk to ghosts.

I started to wonder if I'd really seen my father, playing my computer game, or if it was actually his ghost.  I learned there were a number of ghosts in my house. There was a round, pretty black woman with shoulder-length ringlets. There was a little blond girl and her blond aunt. There was a middle-aged priest with ruddy cheeks and brown hair, who used to dress up as Santa Claus every Christmas. And there was an evil old queen, with a big, fat round face all chalky pale, glinting eyes, silver gray curls, and at least four chins.

The evil queen had the power to kill other ghosts for good, by pushing them down the sink drain with the disposal running. Once a ghost was sucked completely down, they were completely gone. The rest of us decided she must be stopped. I particularly wanted her gone because I was really afraid by now that it was the ghost of my father I was seeing, and I didn't want him sucked down into the disposal forever. I wanted to keep him however I could.

One of the children from the river garden came to help us find the queen. She was the identical twin sister of the little girl ghost, and she had never spoken since the day her sister had died. But she came and spoke to me now, and told us how to lie in wait and follow the evil queen as she stalked around looking for other ghosts to slaughter. We tailed her into the kitchen and found her trying to force the priest down the kitchen sink. The disposal was running, and only his head was visible. His face was twisted in anguish.

We grabbed him and pulled him out by his hair, and before she could stop us, we began to push the queen down the drain.  We held her hands so she couldn't reach out and turn off the disposal. She didn't moan or shriek or show any sort of pain. She cackled and grinned evilly at us all the while, her eyes glittering malevolently, until only her eyes and the top of her head was showing. We struggled to force her all the way in, but then I woke up.

Craft Store Adventures ~ 5/5/2015

I dreamed I was in a huge craft store, like Garden Ridge Pottery, trying to decide if I wanted to carve a pumpkin this year, or buy a wooden or ceramic one to paint, or even just by a pre-painted jackolantern decoration. My friend Tanya was definitely buying a ceramic one to paint, and I was helping her pick out supplies, and made sure she didn't forget to buy antiquing. I was looking at the different colors of antiquing, then realized I was actually looking at a spice rack with cinnamon and cardamom and nutmeg and chili powder and all spice and all sorts of other brown and red powdered spices.

I must have messed up something, because suddenly I found myself in the craft store jail. This was a row of cells along the back wall with dirt floors strewn with hay and bars for their front and side walls. Everyone could see in, like we were animals in the zoo. We got one little locker to put our stuff in, but we were only allowed one travel sized bottle of shampoo, one of conditioner, and supplies for the work they gave us. I almost got into more trouble because I was storing toiletries for the guy in the next cell, since he didn't have a locker. But when I explained why I had extra to the guard, he accepted that.

We also had laces and little bits of fabric and sewing kits, because our task while we were imprisoned was to make a Snow White doll from a kit they gave us. But when we laced up her little bodice, we learned they had tricked us, because all the kits had rips somewhere, so there was no way we could dress the dolls as quickly as they wanted. But we could still do it slowly, so we set ourselves to sew up the rips and lace up the dolls and have done with it.

Eventually they let me out, and I began to wander the store again to decide what decorations I wanted to buy. There was one really neat ceramic pumpkin I could paint, but it was huge and cost $324, which was a lot more than I wanted to spend. There were smaller ones, but nothing was quite right, and I really wanted to paint my own. I also wanted a rabbit, so I took a break and went into the garden off to the side of the store. They had okra, and I went to find Tracey to see if she wanted some for the gumbo. I knew she had frozen, but fresh-picked would be so much nicer.

When I found her, she was beside a discount table, and there they had this absolutely adorable do-it-yourself haunted house kit. It was only $24, and I decided THAT was what I wanted, instead of a ceramic pumpkin. I picked it up, and Tracey reminded me that I needed to save money for a rabbit. But I decided the rabbit could wait, and this is what I would buy that day. So I set off for the registers, and then I woke up.

Post-Apocalypse ~ 5/3/2015

I dreamed I lived in a post apocalyptic world controlled by mutant people with no ties to their former humanity. We lived in an abandoned office building in rooms with red lights, because that way they couldn't see our lights and know we were there. If they found us, they would brain wash us into being killing machines like they were, and we'd lose all pigment in our skin and be milk-pale albinos.

The sun shone a harsh, purplish white in the sky and there was no longer free flowing liquid water. We had to drink bottled water and eat packaged junk food. We weren't supposed to have children because we were afraid the radiation in the atmosphere would warp their development and make them come out like the murderous white mutants.

I had a partner, and he and I would hibernate for weeks, then he would go out to forage for food packs, but if he stayed away too long, the radiation would make him forget what he was doing and who he was, and he'd wander back in days later all confused and I'd have to remind him about everything.

We decided to try to have a child, in spite of the risks, and that seemed to be something he could hold onto in his mind, so he got better at making longer foraging trips. I had to stay in our rooms to minimize my radiation exposure. Then, when it got close to time to have the baby, I was buried up to my chest in a special sand that would shield the baby from things in the air that could harm it as it was born. I waited in the sand room, which was very dark, except when the dim, blood-red lights were turned on for the birth.

After the baby was born, we had to all go out sometimes to see the doctor and get as much food as possible. The roads were awful. Huge sections had been blown out, leaving gaping holes in the middle of elevated freeways. Some of them were covered by grates, but avoiding those that weren't while driving at freeway speeds was like an awful video game.

Sometimes we got a friend to drive us. The first time, we had to give very careful directions, because all the streets around and through the old office complex started with "Yelling." We lived in the building wing that had its entrance on Yelling Cave Drive, which was the next left after Yelling Bear Drive. We had to hurry out of the car and up our elevator to the fifth floor where we had our rooms, because the white mutants had offices across the street, and didn't know we were basically squatting in the back wings of our complex. We were riding in the elevator with a coworker of mine and a fox when I woke up.