Watchtowers, Interview with the Haunted.

       In the dream that I remember, from a night or two ago, paper walls with cardboard towers made a barricade around a vinyl battlemat the size of the whole front yard. There were Lego mini-figs All Along the Watchtowers.
       The music (All Along the Watchtower) began to play in my head, and I knew that I, too, was a Cylon. But the game had to go on, so I resolved to ignore the call and throw a few more rounds of dice with my friends.

       This morning's dream found me in a large house in the countryside. I was interviewing a woman who believed her house was haunted. During the interview her grandfather came down to the kitchen table and scoffed at her haunting.
       "The house is old, it shifts when the temperature changes, nothing more." Grandfather chided his adult daughter. "Now, if you want to know about a real haunting, your Nana and I lived in a real haunted house, one that stands abandoned to this day. I'm sure she's gone and joined the haunts in that place."
       "Nana is in heaven."
       "Aye, she may as well be, she never found the spirits of that house as disturbing as I. She loved that house, the spirits in it, loved it all, far more than me."
       "Grandpa!"
       "It's true! I'm not complaining, she loved me, too, just not as much as that place, but love enough for me, love enough for me."
       I turned to the old man. About his daughter's haunting, I had to agree with him based on the notes I'd taken during her interview. I pulled up a new notepad on my small tablet computer.
       "Do you mind if I take notes."
       "Eh?"
       "It's what I do."
       "I don't know."
       "I won't use your name and the real locations if you wish. But someone should make a record of your experiences."
       "All right then, make notes, or recordings, or whatever you do these days. But I don't want to be seeing or hearing any of this until I'm gone." He smiled at me and prepared to tell his tale. "After I'm done here, we can go and get the other side of the tale, it's only a couple dozen miles from here. I still own the place."
       "Gran, I thought you'd sold the place years ago, after Nana died."
       "She didn't want me to. I sold another bit of property and set up a trust to pay the taxes on the place."
       "How come I didn't know about that?"
       "It don't concern you, child, you've got enough of my property, most of it while I'm still kicking around here, so enough about it. We're wasting Mr Firefly's time."
       I was surprised that he called me by my pen name, I hadn't used it here on this visit.
       "Yes, I know who you are, that's why I'm talking to you. I trust you to tell the tale, clean up the telling, but not change it all around. I knew that when I read your piece that was told to you by Gail Miller, it was prettied up a bit, better than Gail ever told it, but it matched more what she told me fifty years ago than the tangled tale she tells now. I don't know how you did it, but you managed to dig the original tale out of her, right and true."
       "Gail is crazy, none of that stuff ever happened."
       "True enough, but" Grandpa and I finished the sentence together.
       "She believes it did, and that's what's important."
       "It shaped her whole life, and the lives of many in her community for three generations. It is a tale that wanted to be told." I added.
       "And you did it without calling her a 'nutter' or worse. I almost wish you hadn't changed her name, maybe she'd get more of the respect she really deserves."
       "Really, Gran."
       "Your grandfather is right, Ms Miller experienced something powerful, and no matter the truth of the event itself. The truth of the power of the event is still there, and still echoes through her life, bouncing ripples off everyone she's loved, or helped or opposed her whole life. Some people find God, some are touched by a book or a play or a person, and some are touched by something that we can only marvel and wonder about. There is no evidence, and there is not a single other person with that experience. It is not any less profound because only she experienced it. The change in her life still ripples through the community.
       "People have been inspired to great and terrible deeds by the smallest of fictions. That makes a good story, and good story is about change."
       "I don't know that there is much change in my tale, but it is as true as I can remember it."
       The old man began to speak and I began to record and make notes. I know that I didn't need to write his words down, I had those, but I needed to keep the timeline square, to notice hesitations for further questioning, to note where detail was missing. The cool part of the technology on this was that there was a timeline on the recording, and everytime I made a note it linked to the moment in the recording that I started to make it (and pulled out a high resolution still image to tag it with.)
       I don't know what that software is, but I want it, and I want it now....