TBTT#22 Unconventional Transport

I dreamed I was trying to get back to new orleans from my grandmother's house by harnessing a wild rabbit, encased in a giant glass butter dish, and having it pull my bicycle. But my umbrella wouldn't work. The white rabbit kept trying to run down into the gully. I had better luck with the brown one.

Ocean Depths to Office Space to Outer Space ~ 9/10/2016

I dreamed I went diving on this special reef where you could collect pet sea animals. I came back up to the surface with a dish full of golden yellow and bright orange brittle stars, one fish shaped like an angel fish, but bright, fiery amber, and a six inch tall rag doll that was really a mermaid under a spell.

I traveled home through a series of quaint British villages, and as I went, I learned the mermaid's story. She had fallen in love with a human, decades ago, and come up onto land to woo him. But she'd been pursued by a dirty old man who tried to rape her. Someone had transformed her into a tiny doll just in time. The man had thrown her into the ocean, and until she could find the person who could change her back, she was stuck.

I got my dish of sea life home, but I noticed the brittle stars were having to crouch tensely to stay under water, and even then their bristles poked up into the air a little. I needed to hurry up and get them a bigger aquarium of salt water as quick as I could. So I hurried to the post office, where at least I could buy sea salt, so I could replace some of the sea water I'd lost. But all I had was a $20 bill, and they refused to take anything larger than a $10, or credit cards. I yelled at them about how ridiculous that was for a bit, then hurried to the beach shop down the street.

The beach shop took credit cards and sold sea salt, which was good. I realized, after poking around a little, that they also sold aquariums and small animal cages. I started looking around, and kept finding tanks that were *almost* what I was looking for, but not quite. I finally asked for help, and was shown several aquariums that were the size I wanted, but not suitable for salt water. It took way too long, but I did eventually buy a suitable aquarium. I got the other chemicals I'd need to treat the water with and some gravel for the bottom, and went home.

I got the tank set up, with a layer of snapped green beans on the bottom, then a layer of gravel, then the salt water. I treated the water with the chemicals, and had to wait a bit. But before I could put the fish in, I noticed the bottom-most green beans had turned black, with a delicate layer of white mold, so I had to empty everything out and start over. By the time I got the fish, the brittle stars, and the rag doll mermaid setup and comfortable in the tank, I was running late for work.

I got myself to New Orleans, and had been working in the office for a couple of weeks, when I was told that the next Friday would be my last day. I was pretty upset, because I'd bought a car and taken an apartment just to come work in New Orleans. I left work early that day, and headed to a pub for a cider. Two women passed me, headed for the same pub. The taller one was a beautiful Indian woman wearing a dress of rich, stiffened, deep teal wool. The dress hugged her figure, all the way down her arms, up her neck, over her hips and down to her calves, before belling out to a two-foot circle around her ankles. Her hair was in a sleek, long, thick braid down her back, and she wore enormous gold hoop earrings.

The other woman was a pale-skinned, dark-haired, Russian woman with jade green eyes. She wore a mauve silk sari with a rosy mantilla of sheer silk around her arms and up to the top of her head. The mantilla was edged with gold, and her hair was piled up on her head, held in place by golden combs. This woman held the pub door open for me, and we all recognized each other. The two of them had been interns the summer before, and were working for Shell again this summer. They insisted I join them at their table for my drink, and we talked over the current business situation, and my layoff.

On my last day in the New Orleans office, I went to the cafeteria for lunch, and spotted a college friend I hadn't seen in years. I called out his old nickname, and he turned around surprised. I wanted to ask him how he'd gone from a free spirit in the peace corps to a starched white shirt and khakis, but I didn't get a chance. He immediately started reminiscing about the a cappella group we'd been in, and insisted we sing our arrangement of Billy Joel's "Lullaby". So we began to sing, and I actually remembered the whole thing.

Suddenly, it seemed like he'd received some sort of signal. He perked up, began to look around, then told me to come with him. We left the cafeteria, and outside the sky was black and the stars were out, and above us hovered a Firefly class spaceship. He'd been its captain for years, and the crew was calling him back. He invited me to go with them, and of course I accepted. We flew up and away from earth, and as we went deeper and deeper into space, the emergency he'd been called to help with became apparent.

When we turned on the exterior lights, we could see that an enormous space parasite had latched onto the ship. It was shaped like a big, flat pill bug, and was an orangey, mustardy yellow with green fronds all around it's edge. Somehow it had been invisible in earth's atmosphere, but had survived landing and take off, and creatures like it were latching themselves onto space ships all through that quadrant of the galaxy. We were trying to figure out what to do about it when I woke up.

Office Space ~ 8/27/2016

I dreamed I was part of a team of people who had gone in together on an investment to build an office high rise. But we'd run out of money, I guess, so construction halted, and we all moved into the building, since we couldn't afford rent.

The entire crew of Serenity was there, except Inara. There were a couple of kids, too. We managed to get a shopping mall going on the ground and second floors, but the rest of the building was a maze of unfinished duct work, elevators we'd each secretly installed to our own hidey holes, and building supplies.

Mal found out the building code inspector was coming, and we all knew the building wasn't stable. We were down in the basement trying to wedge in iron supports to shore things up when we heard the inspector coming. We scattered, each to a different room or corner to whisk up in our elevators, which operated like pneumatic tubes at a bank drive through.

I went to one of the two main elevators, which were the only ones that went from top to bottom of the building. There was one on each end of the building's long footprint, but on the fourth floor, their tracks made a right angle turn to run level before turning up again, so that they ran side by side to the top. But when I got up to the 8th floor, I realized I could just leave the building. But Mal, Wash, and Jayne had cut power to the elevators. All except one emergency one.

Now, I hated this elevator, because it was not much more than a disk of metal, about 8 feet across, like a flying saucer, that dropped the entire height of the building through an atrium, slowed by a powerful jet of air. But I jumped on anyhow, and rode it down to the lobby, lying flat on my belly and clinging for dear life to some indentations in the floor. Then I made sure no one was watching before strolling nonchalantly down some back stairs and out into the street. Then I woke up.

TBTT#21 One Liner ~ 2/1/2013

I'm not sure WHY I woke up with the words, "demon sledge hammer vacuum cleaner" running through my head, but I'm sure there's a perfectly logical explanation...

TBTT#20 CSI Calleigh Duquesne ~ 1/14/2013

I dreamed I was CSI Calleigh Duquesne, which was awesome to start with. So I went to treat myself to dinner at a super fancy buffet on Canal Street. The host who seated me was pretty attractive, so I asked if he'd join me for drinks when he was done with work. Turned out he was the owner.

We went for drinks, but as we were sitting at the bar, I received a cryptic note, which I couldn't make any sense of, but it was kind of threatening, and he recognized the handwriting as that of some mystery person who was stalking him. So he insisted I not go home, or the person might follow me and learn where I lived.

He put me up in a hotel room in the hotel attached to his restaurant. For such a nice place, it was kind of a crummy room, with the shower in a corner above the toilet. But it had a patio that looked over a grassy coastal field with palm trees and the whitewashed walls of a convent. Every morning, a flock of bright green and red parrots would flap down from the walls and waddle penguin style around the field eating grasshoppers.

After watching them for a while, I decided it was time to get to work, so I went out to the parking garage, where I found that my car had been flipped out off the second level, and was lying upside down and totaled on the ground below. But my CSI team was already on the scene. I couldn’t work it, of course, because I was too close to the case, but also because whoever had done it had stolen my kit and plastered the car with my own evidence tags.

It was determined that only a robot could have flipped the car. A fingerprint on one of the tags led us to a dance instructor and choreographer for a show at Harrah's that featured dancers and little rolly robots that she had both designed and programmed. In her studio, the team discovered the larger version that had flipped my car.

Turns out she had had a fling with the restaurant owner and, unbeknownst to him, gotten pregnant. She'd had an ectopic pregnancy, which she had to abort, and the procedure had caused some damage so that she'd never be able to have children. She went to court, pled guilty, got a light sentence, and I woke up.

Saving the World is Hard ~ 6/12/2016

I dreamed I was helping to save three Islamic women who were under attack. We jumped into my jeep, and I was speeding around trying to get them to sanctuary while guided missiles were following right behind us, ready to blow us up. I was dodging in and out of ziggurats on the desert at sunset, with the missiles just on my tail, but I finally managed to lose them and get over the border into the safe zone.

After I left to go home, I stumbled into the zombie apocalypse. There was some sort of infection that, if the carriers bit you, your flesh slowly dissolved away and you became an animate skeleton. The team I joined was using pitchforks with long handles to spear the infected bone people and hurl them into a big bonfire. And keep them there, because burning them to final death took time.

Eventually the fire was dying down and it became evident that we were fighting a losing battle. One after another we became infected, and there just weren't enough uncontaminated people on the team to deal with the sick ones. One by one we fell to the disease, and soon we were all walking piles of bone. And we realized it actually wasn't that bad. What had seemed so scary was just another form of consious life, and we began to feel horrible about all the people we'd thrown into the fire just for being different. Especially since, given time, the condition reversed itself, and we were all normal humans again.

To work off my guilt, I became a detective. I was given a commission by a wealthy man to go inspect his mansion while he was away, because he thought someone was trying to take it from him. When I got there with my partner, there were three or for ruffians lounging around in the upper floors, so we called our client, but he said not to worry about them, but to check for some very specific signs.

Was the house keeper keeping the antique firearms clean, but was she obviously unaware of what they actually were? Yes. They were sparkling clean, but in several pieces that she couldn't even put back in the hidden wall cases correctly.

Were there three polished pebbles in the right hand drawer of the desk in the study? Yes, there were.

Were there any loose paving stones? Here we needed clarification. Did he mean the path outside, leading up to the main front door? Or did he mean in the gardens? The tiles around the pool? The slate floor of the kitchen? He said to check them all. And in every single place, every single stone and tile was loose. Uh oh! But then I woke up.

Weirdest High School Reunion Ever ~ 6/9/2016

I dreamed I was headed to my 20 year high school reunion. I hitched a ride on a space ship shaped like a VW microbus, only bigger, with dark brown sides and a white top. Among the travelers I joined was a very pale, sickly baby. He was the sweetest little child, but so quiet, and everyone knew he wouldn't live long. As I held him, the baby died. I began crying, and I placed him very gently back in his car seat. We were all silent as the millions of miles flowed past us.

We landed near the site of my reunion, and suddenly heard the baby laughing. He had come back to life, after being cold and stiff for hours! It was a miracle! I hopped out of the bus incredibly happy, and saw my father, who was helping set up the reunion. I told him the story as we walked to my old high school, where the party would be. Only the school had fallen into ruins. No one seemed to mind, though.

One of the guys in my class asked me if I was ready to dance with him that night, and I realized I'd lost my cowboy boots somewhere along the way. My dad had some bright yellow rain boots in his trunk, so I put those on instead. And started milling around the party guests, looking for old friends. I talked to a few, then I had to use the restroom, so I went looking for that.

There were still toilets in the old restroom, but more than half of the stalls had been demolished, and the ones that were left didn't have doors. There were a lot of anxious women and girls milling around trying to figure out how to pee in private when everyone at the party was just on the other side of a three foot high collapsed stone wall.

Fortunately, the reunion was a pizza party, and there were hundreds of pizza boxes stacked in a corner of the ruined kitchen. I went and got one and unfolded it, and it was big enough to make a sort of door for one of the remaining stalls. There were some cardboard tabs that I folded out so they'd hang on either side of the stall walls. There was a little girl with curly brown hair looking distraught, so I showed her how to make a door out of cardboard.

When I turned around to go into my newly private stall, I found someone else had gone in already, and now there was a line. I turned to get another pizza box, and then I woke up.