This was a long dream, lasting through a snooze button push. This is rare. It was tri-part, as if there was a complete circle finished in each part.

I know we were after a murderer, and we knew where he lived. I believe the dream took place on a DS9/Phantom of the Opera hybrid, but it was a closed community—people couldn’t just come from all over without proper documentation and authorization.

At any rate, a little girl had vanished, and we were pretty sure it was this particular person but we didn’t have enough evidence to even detain the dude. At some point, I was in a room with Quark and Major Kira and they started to use a Spanish word so I wouldn’t know what they were talking about, but it was one of those words that’s the same in English and Spanish. Conf---dammit I knew it earlier.

At some point I was at a playground and this girl who spoke a language I didn’t understand ran up and hugged me around the waist and pulled me toward a wooden jungle gym-type structure. There were other kids, but she was happy I was there, and the other people I was with seemed glad to have the break to play.

There was another part where we were in this huge ballroom, and a party was going on, but the host was some how in favor of protecting the guilty dude. There was a chase, over these bluish staircases that seemed to glow. Some of the time I could see the chase from overhead.

At the end of the dream, we caught the guy, in his quarters just like we thought he’d be, and we were all together, standing there in the corridor outside his room, and I said “we could have saved that little girl.” I started to cry, and many others also did. It reminded me of the day I cried in class because one of my closest classmates had been arrested for driving the car for his brother and some other kids who were robbing people at gunpoint. It was that kind of tears, for the senseless loss.

It seemed like that was the end of the dream, and I had to wake up anyway. I wish I knew what made it a three part dream, but in my grasping for memories all I remember was that it was three-part.

But yay for remembering dreams during the week! All it really takes is for me to think about it, and I can do it.

Yesterday I dreamed I was with my mom and I kept running into Dr. Sautter and her husband.

Dream: Mountains and the underground caves

There is so much to this dream and I think I might have experienced many things “at once” that supposedly came before or after other instances, but I must say I’m very glad to have these very vivid (color-wise), very present and aware dreams.

My cousin Kayla and I were at a gas station, and she was sitting in the driver’s seat. A man came up behind her—I’ve never seen him, but he looked older, somehow withered and heavily lined. Her window was shut, but he reached through the glass and started to comb her hair. I went around locking all the doors (they had locks like the ninja’s car) and handed her a mirror, asking if she knew the guy. Not that locks would matter if he could reach through glass anyway. For some reason I had to drive, and somewhere around there I knew I was dreaming, so I decided we were going to go to a really nice place.

I think we were driving approaching a suspension bridge, like the Mackinac or Golden Gate.

And then I was on this rise in what I think was a forest—but it was a clearing, and I could see in the not-so-distance a higher-than-I-was mountain. It seemed to be all huge boulders, and there was this large cave opening that I knew I was heading to. Somehow I was barefoot for a little bit of the walk, and I stepped on something that was sharp, but it didn’t puncture my heel. I picked it up—a shell, but a strange shell. It looked like a normal snail shell—as big as my hand, but then on top of it there was a protrusion that looked like a pinky finger, even detailed like a finger, the nail, the lines in the knuckle. On top of that, there was a smaller shell, exactly the same, except for this one, the finger on top of it had a spine where the knuckle connecting to the hand would be. It was bright green and blue, shiny and iridescent, really pretty. I thought it was strange to find a shell on the mountain. There were other people, a father and two sons walking by, on their way to the cave. I wasn’t bothered that there were other people somehow, but I went with them toward the cave.

I was with someone during part of it but I’m not sure who it was. It seemed female. When I got into the cave it was lit by these lights shining through crystals in the wall—it was more like a crystal facet than a spray of them, but it wasn’t bright, and everything seemed evenly lit. In one of the tunnels, I found a gallery of oil pastel paintings (I think they were oil pastel simply because of how brilliant and vivid the colors were) of characters from my books. I wasn’t totally pleased with the interpretations of my characters, but I still thought they were pretty good. Brygen/Regen was wearing this deep sapphire gown, and wore this white headdress with her black hair spilling over it. There were several pictures of her and I didn’t think her face was quite right. It was showing different expressions and I was thinking it was like an “Emotion Eric” sort of thing, and I recognized several of the scenes, but there was one of her hunched over and screaming and I thought it was well done, but I didn’t recall a scene where she would have been like that.

There was also a picture of Zathrew, and I thought his nose was too cartoony. I adjusted the way I saw it so I could clearly imagine him with a different nose, and thought that would be more acceptable. In some of the pictures he looked too old for Zathrew, so I thought it might be from one of the later parts of the story. I could rotate him in the picture I was looking at, so I was scrutinizing his appearance. It wasn’t quite right, but I appreciated the effort that was done.

We continued through the tunnels—it was like a 3d labyrinth through the mountain, and there seemed to be airlocks of some sort.

I saw this thing about the size of one of those long pieces on a pen cap, except it seemed to have been lathed. I had to put down the shell to pick it up, and when I picked it up, it turned into a staff, and I thought it was really cool, but I could only take one thing, and I wanted the shell more. I stood in front of them and tried to pick something up, but the program didn’t seem to be allowing me to, like if there are too many things next to each other in a game, the program doesn’t know which one you mean. I walked away and tried again, but it didn’t work, so I left the shell behind.

I started to walk out, but there was some kind of disturbance, and a fight started. Someone grabbed the shell, and a huge plasma blade poured out of it. It was like an axe-sword, and they were performing all these spins and flips with it. This was when I realized that the opponents were after us, but the tunnels and entrances were set up like a puzzle game and we had to meet certain criteria to open the doors.

In one of them, we needed something red, so I grabbed this red-headed girl (Megan who used to go to school at NMU) and pushed her in front of the door for it to open. Stuff like that. It was all quite dark and comfortable except for the people coming after us.

Dream: The killer escapes

There was a dude who had been convicted of killing many people, and he was handcuffed to this row of chairs in a room after his trial, waiting to be transported to the prison. The lawyers and police people were across the room discussing the dangers outside and how they had to wait for some situation outside to be resolved. It seemed like a stake-out or something, really, because people could leave, but they couldn’t all go, and they certainly couldn’t go to take this convict to prison.

The killer was being played by John C. McGuinley (Intensity, Scrubs). I was actually a person in this dream, and she was in her late thirties, with short, curled hair, but her personality was a part of myself only I would recognize. She sat next to him—well, one chair away from him, and leaned closer to him saying “How’s it going?”

He looked over and smiled, and asked if I needed a napkin. Then he handed me one—not that it mattered, because no one was paying attention to us—and I read the message he’d written. They were instructions to notify him if Asian food was being ordered. Somehow I understood that he was going to drug the food with some kind of poison, that when it started to take effect would have symptoms of MSG. It would actually kill them about a half hour after the MSG-symptoms began. The confusion would buy enough time, and when everyone was dead, we could get him out of there.

The next scene was in a car, the camera focused on the killer, who was driving, and his hair was a bit longer and weirdly curled. He was wearing sunglasses and laughing, and I understood that the character that I had been playing had also been killed. “I” was just a camera. There was a woman in the car, and she was giggling stupidly, and the watcher knew she was going to eventually be murdered too.

There was a cut to another scene, where there was a detective who was going to take a plane to the city where the killer was running loose. I’m not sure who the detective was, but I woke up there anyway.

Dream: Herman Munster fakes his death

So I might have been watching a tad too much DS9 (no such thing!). I dreamt there was a dude who was Herman Munster as a Cardassian. I just realized Cardassian sounds like someone with a really flat bum. At any rate, this person decided he would fake his death so his family could get insurance money and a pension sort of thing from the place he worked.

So it looked legit to outsiders, he would lay stomach down in this rather deep puddle—as puddles go. His face was on the leafy ground, and he would sleep there so it looked to the world that he was dead.

Since he had a lot of time on his hands during the daytime, he would try to fill his time by entertaining himself. A music montage ensued, showing various scenes. In one he was practicing Tai Chi, but flexed his hands weird and then hooked his thumbs together and said “Eagle Spreads Its Wings” and “Bird Flutters By” or something similar, then dissolved into laughter. He did other things.

Finally, after applying make-up to make himself appear greyer and more ghostly, his wife came out of the house—I think she might have been a blonde Cardassian lady too—and told him enough time had passed and people thought he was dead, and then she hugged him and said he could come back to the house.

Dream: Injured toe

My toe had a large gouge in it and needed stitches. I thought it was weird that I wasn’t bleeding at all. My mom said the clinics would all be closed but I looked for phone books anyway. There were several old ones and one for a county with a four letter name, Grey or Cass or something. Mead County.

There was a hotel with 15 floors—I counted the windows from the outside. I tried to imagine a building seven or eight times that height, but couldn’t.