The Striding and Stalking Cloud Horrors

The dream started as I walked through the central part of my childhood town. The air was heavy with impending rain, but I knew the actuality of rain was still a distant promise. I looked towards the east, where the rain clouds had begun to darken in earnest. The rain began to fall, but then stopped to swirl and take on the ink in water appearance filling out into thick misty shadows. One a tall manlike shape, that upon its feet reaching the ground, began to stride North across the edge of town. Its footfalls rumbled like thunder, and likely to were taken as such by any who didn't see the apparition responsible. It strode on, completely indifferent to the chaos that exploded in the shadows of its footfalls. A second shape started similarly, but shorter, then bent over, long fingers of smoky blackness curling down into the edges of the down, stalking along the pathways between buildings and silently into then through open doors, windows or chimmneys. There the being found and turned a being here and a few there amongst the terrified souls who huddled in the shadowy tracks of its larger partner. Instead of the wise course, running far away, I found myself compelled to race towards the growing sounds of terrified people and animals in the wake of the two cloud horrors. I found myself drawn to a church, now crowded by terrified people, all milling about, many fallen to their knees, many arms raised to the ceiling all wailing in fear and calling out to various gods and saints, their religions fused into a single grasping need. In one corner of the crowd was a single small woman who was, to me, a single golden glowing figure, transfigured by an otherworldly power, but frustratingly incomplete. I looked down at myself, I too was suffused by an incandescent light, silvery but not as bright as the golden glow that was somehow still bound up in the shape of the woman. I straightened and strode over to the woman who was being stalked now by members of the impromptu congregation who'd been touched by inky dark tendrils that had diffused down from a ventalation shaft over the choir loft. I offered a hand on a shoulder here, a touch there and a word to those I approached, they moved out of my way, and grew still as I passed. The choir members, eyes now filled with a shimmering creamy emptiness, shrank back from me, confused and confounded. I reached out to the glowing woman, who was both relieved but still terrified. Her golden glow flowed through me, and, as the woman collapsed into my arms, radiated out into the space. Those who I'd touched, stood, and reached out to their fellows, offering comfort, support, and even leadership. Those touched by the smokey tendrils, howled and struck at their fellows until finally being overpowered by the recovering members of the crowd. I cradled the woman in my arms and stepped out of the building, growing and striding across the city for the next shadowed footprint. This one was a school and its immediate neighborhood. We shrank back down and the woman came to her senses, still frightened, but in control, she slipped her hand in mine as we enetered the parking lot. "Not the children, no..." she cried. I held her agains my chest, the top of her head barely reached the top of my sternam. While I still radiated the silvery light, almost like distant lightning, or moonlight, the woman's golden glow was not present, apparently depleted. I refused to abandon her when she suggested that I should find another. "We will find another." We entered the campus and I tried to find the adults to calm them so they could begin to protect the children. Eventually we exited the building and strode across the playground, now empty save for the stalking shadows that raced towards the handball courts where a small golden figure huddled in a group of sopping wet children. We broke into a run, hoping to reach the terrified mass before the shadows. We had dropped hands so that I could run faster, but when one of the shadows detached and swung back towards the woman I turned backn racing against the tendril. We reached her at the same time, The tendril massing around her face, trying to find its way in. She held her breath and stifled a scream. I grabbed her outflung hand, which drove the smokey tendril away. I could feel its frustrated curiosity and a casual poking-ants-with-a-stick cruelty as I passed through it. I looked up to see the stalking horror pulling up the rest of its tendrils and it hesitated as though debating what to do with this new development. Then it "looked" north across the sky, and lifted, turning to catch up with the striding horror that had moved a couple of long strides ahead of it. It reminded me of a small child who's stopped to play with something in the dirt, but then suddenly realizes that their parent has continued on without them. We were completely forgotten to it, dismissed. I realized the striding horror didn't care about the chaos and terror it left in its wake. The lights, both golden and silver, were something else that followed, feeding on the terror. We were just their hosts. The golden light seemed to leave its hosts intact, but I was not so sure about the silver light that inhabited me now, as I had very obviously been changed. I don't think I could step through walls and stride a half mile at a time before the silver entity empowered me to do so. I knew, however, that it was not its intent to empower me to help my fellows, that was just a side effect of absorbing the terror.

The Apparition

Was running through a bunch of corridors full of beige and steel colored pipes. The apparition chasing us (myself and a group of high school aged kids) and I was falling behind. When I finally caught up to the group, they were trying to open the rusty bolt of a door whose little round window showed the outside. The apparition appeared on a large screen monitor, terrifying everyone, I stood between it and the kids, arguing that it was just an image, urging them to keep on trying to open the door by rotating the handle back and forth to loosen up the rust. They were making progress when the apparition leaned out of the monitor, splashed us with rusty water, then grabbed both my hands with its own. I turned my hands over and returned the grasp, but with all my force. "So much for not being real..." it started to taunt us.

"You're not," I insisted and pulled myself up by its rough dry hands towards the monitor and into wakefulness.

Full on thundering heart and drenched in sweat, but happy to know I was right.

Fever Dreams with Robots and...

The fever dream started like any other dream, a nice normal seeming classroom of ten year olds taking my "Robotic Programming" class. I was working a two hour a day shift at a private elementary school, teaching the very fun class with robots and then supervising the playground in the afterschool hour while waiting for parents to come get their students. All in all a very good gig. It was paying the bills while I used my pension to make board games. It was one of those classes where I had as many parents in the room helping as I had kids.

One afternoon, as the classroom began to empty out, the Principal arrived to tell me that they were cutting the class. I pointed to the parents still straightening up the room and kids still excitedly reviewing what they'd accomplished. I didn't understand the decision. She reassured me it didn't have anything to do with my teaching or my class, it was that the board had decided to purchase a new turnkey curriculum and my course couldn't be fit into the new system. She handed me an envelope with my current pay and two weeks extra. I said thank you, but pointed out that I had a contract for the full school year that would have to be bought out. "Unless we can find you another position, which we're trying to do."

I was still mighty unhappy about the situation, but resolved to deal with it another day. I stuffed my anger down and went back to helping clear out my classroom. One of the moms was a labor attorney, she handed me her business card, "just in case you decide you need me." I thanked her and went out into the playground to fulfill my after school supervision. Kids eventually got picked up. Several of the other teachers had stayed behind and we all went into the school, having to duck between the movers who were packing up everyone's classroom in neatly labeled boxes, even taking apart the school's furniture. We watched in disbelief as box after box with our class names on them went out of the building to be loaded up on big trucks. The Principal arrived to let us know that the board had agreed to let us teachers go through the materials from our classrooms to keep what was ours and any thing else they weren't using before it was all sold at auction. A couple of my colleagues were shouting and upset that the movers were packing up their private stuff, including one who's purse and car keys (thus her way home) had already been packed. We managed to intercept the box from her room before it got put on the truck and rescued her personal belongings. I went to my room and grabbed my hat and coat as well as my computer bag, figuring I had the time to go get anything else later.

Saddened by the state of things, I asked why the Board hadn't retrained their current staff, and she started to tell me that there was no robotics... I cut her off, and asked about all of the basic education teachers, some who'd been at the school for decades, weren't re-trained.

"That doesn't concern you."

I put on my coat and hat and stepped out into the stormy afternoon. The weather had changed to match my mood, dark threatening clouds, hints of thunder in the distance, the thick smell of pent up rain. I walked out into the public park.

A row of Thundermen appeared and gathered in front of me, grey fedoras, beige trench-coats, black shoes with wide white spats, immaculately tied ties over white shirts. They stopped my progress. They lined up behind the leader, and a row of apparently meaningful gestures began to form behind him. While I couldn't make out what they were trying to signal I mimicked the gestures as best I could. My Beige trench-coat and fedora (green instead of grey) seemed to confuse them a bit. Finally, after exchanging some pleasantries, and commenting on the delightful lightning and thunder that had begun in the sky behind the school, the leader of the thundermen told me I could be locked in the bathroom until the storm passed, or I could re-enter the school through J-3. I had no desire to be locked in the public restrooms, so entered the classroom, which was still having its desks assembled, oddly, in the desks that were already put together, there were students, or some sort of simulacra of students already seated and working on their lessons. I had a very uneasy feeling, the teacher looked up from her planner and I apologized for the interruption, moving through the room into the schools central hallway. There I ran across the Principal who was beaming at how efficient and trouble free it was all going to be. I started to worry about what was going to happen to all of our students. Were they being replaced, too?

I made my way through the faculty room, and out onto the little patio that faced the open hillside behind the school. Lightning filled the sky, thunder rolled across the valley and shook the windows of the school, I could hear them rattling all down the length of the building. I looked out to see the fluffy pink bunnies and leaping unicorns lightning struck and suddenly come to life. The plastic cavorting turned into the real thing, accompanied by a tinkling and high pitched whistling music, they danced under the darkening sky until they seemed as one, to notice me watching. They lined up facing me, much in the same way as the lightning men. I started to make the same gestures and then stopped myself, speaking directly to the head unicorn instead.

She blinked. Obviously not expecting me to actually try to interact with them. At first she seemed to think I was a Thunder man, and wanted to run me through, but I somehow managed, by taking my hat off and bowing, I think, to convince her that I was just a former teacher who'd been replaced. This saddened her and she raced away, leaving me to watch her fluffy bunny and unicorn minions cavort to unearthly music. Eventually she returned, accompanied by a large pink and white dragon. The dragon had to be as big as the school she surveyed from end to end with a single sweep of her long neck. She settled over the hill and curled around her bunnies and unicorns, shielding them with one giant wing. She began to shoot the unicorn who'd spoken with me, jolt after jolt of pink lightning.

"Stop" I shouted. "She hasn't done anything wrong!"

"You live, Thunder man, that is not to be tolerated, I will get to you in a moment."

I don't know where the courage to do so came from but I stepped in front of the unicorn, letting my wet trench coat drag the lightning to the ground. I felt the tingle on my feet, but though painful, it wasn't in any way debilitating.

"If you kill her, how will she learn and become an even better leader for you?"

The dragon stopped mid breath. Her great head lowered down to my own, her eyes, as large as myself, took turns looking at me. I felt like I'd been put in a giant MRI or CAT scan machine.

"You are not a Thunder man."

"Thanks, I think."

With that she picked me up and flung me high in the air over the hill and above the clouds. I don't know how every bone in my body wasn't broken by ahd acceleration. I found myself cresting the top of my arc in the clear sky overlooking a vast ocean and a road, suspended in the air. There were small figures, moving, single file along the road as I flashed overhead. A rope was tossed to me and I managed to grab it as I dipped below the road. I crammed my hat on my head, and held on with both hands as the rope curved my fall into a pendulum swing just below the roadway. I pumped and at the crest of the next swing back, managed to grab the hands that were being offered down below the road edge. The large scaled arm pulled be up past the road and let me down on my feet.

It was an assortment of characters, I think from my own gaming past. The large spear toting Lizard Man, a pair of spindly hobbits in all black kit, and an elf of surprising beauty with two longswords on his (her?) hips. The only one I didn't recognize was a nearly topless scaled woman with short curled horns and long nails. Like the Lizard Man, she had a long tail, whip-like rather than trunk-like. They greeted me and one of the hobbits asked if I was a Thunder Man. The Lizard and Demon Girl looked like they were ready to throw me back off the skyway.

"No" was all I could manage to croak. I checked my bag, somehow it hadn't dumped anything. I took off my hat and bowed, that seemed to convince them. I surmised at that point that the hat was part of a thunder man, so they couldn't do that.

"Where are we going?"

"To the other end of the road!" chimed in the hobbit twins, getting disgruntled looks from their companions.

The elf spoke, explaining that they were on a quest and had traveled on the skyway for the better part of two days. They believed they were much closer to their destination than their beginning, which was, though civilization, nothing the matched what I knew. Plus I only had a muffin and a half bottle of water in my back, so didn't fancy going that way until I could replenish my supplies. The Hobbits were the only two in favor of letting me travel with them, but somehow they managed to convince the demon girl after the two women had a hurried conversation out of earshot of the rest of the group. They resumed travelling, single file, except for the hobbits who trotted ahead of the group hand in hand.

"They are a cute couple," I volunteered, trying to make conversation.

"They're twins." The Lizard man grunted, shouldered his spear and leaned forward to pull away from me. The elf had dropped back far behind us and only the demon girl stayed close enough to converse with until we met the end of the road.

I had to explain that I wasn't flying but falling, as I'd been thrown by the pink and white dragon. The hobbits looked at the elf and said "your prayer must have worked!"

"I doubt that." The Elf had barely spoken to me the whole trip, he seemed to have something against me from the very start, but never revealed what he was thinking or feeling.

It had been much easier to befriend the Lizard man, I taught him tic-tac-toe, and despite there not actually being toes in the game, he was quite taken by it.

The Hobbits seemed to love everyone equally, and the Demon Girl, seemed to be practicing sultry on the Elf, and not succeeding, ignoring the Lizard Man, who seemed all too interested. I had the impression that there was some history there best left lie. She would at least converse with me, explaining her own world and listening intently to tales of my own "crushingly boring" world, which the hobbits seemed to enjoy.

We sat at the end of the road, obviously not what any of us were expecting. I noticed that there was a large blue square with writing in it, but I couldn't make it out from where we were.

Soon I found myself being lowered on the end of the rope. "Press to Call" was what the writing said. I asked them to pull me up and we looked around, but didn't find a button like it in the covered bridge area, at least, not on the side we were on. One of the hobbits took the rope and tied it around her waist. The Lizard man tossed her over to the other side. She landed with a giggle, and found the button, but it had been smashed in and wasn't working. They hauled her back over, and I thought of an idea.

The rope wasn't long enough for me to swing over to the skyway support column, though. I then thought of another idea. We filled up my water bottle and unraveled the knitted border of my sweater to lower it towards the button, again not long enough, until they lowered me on the rope. The bottle landed on the four foot square button, and the elevator shot towards me. the team started pulling me up, but I still slammed into the platform. The bottle rolled off the button and the elevator slowed to a stop and began to fall. I managed to recover enough to pull the bottle back up and roll over to the button. Whoosh, the elevator slowed and then accelerated skyward.

It took a few tests to figure out how to raise and lower the platform smoothly enough not to launch me into the ceiling, or more importantly to land at less than terminal velocity. Apparently whatever controls were supposed to be in operation were no longer working. I drove the platform up to the team and they let me fly them back to the ground. The elf looked greener than usual after the trip down, but the hobbits wanted to stay and see how fast they could make the elevator go back up. As we left One of the hobbits had put a rock on the button I turned in time to see the elevator platform crash through the roof of the bridge structure at the top of the skyway, and then come fluttering, obviously no longer under control back to the ground. We all ran out of the range of the falling debris. When the Elf started to chastise the hobbits they just pointed at each other.

Somehow they convinced me to come with them rather than build a hundred foot ladder to climb back to the roadway. (Even though I was pretty sure the roadway didn't lead back to where I needed to go, I felt it was at least closer to home.) There was a short barrage of other travel stuff. Something to do with a big blue glowy thing, and a pretty wild celebration party that ended with an acrobatic naked tangled celebration between the Demon Girl, Hobbit Girl and myself. The team asked the pink dragon to send me home. Good thing I hadn't tried going back by the skyway.

There was a knock on the door. The police were looking for me, as I had gone missing. I explained that I had been playing a video game the whole time, and was right here. They looked dubious. I noticed the figures on the screen were the Lizard Man, Demon Girl, Elf and Hobbit Twins with a Long Coated stranger in a Green flat brimmed hat. They were waving good-bye as the stranger headed into a pink and white portal and the rest of the team, escorting a wagon with a strange blue glow coming from under a tarp, headed into town, they turned and waved, not at the portal, but at the screen. I was at my computer, but dressed in the clothing I'd been wearing since my "disappearance" including an adventure's worth of wear and tear. Not to mention a bag of gold coins and semi-precious stones that I might have some difficulty explaining.

House Creature, Home Wrecker, New Cats

Rough Night last night, but I woke up enough to remember bits of three different dream experiences.

In the first dream, I had a small flying house. I was able to float between my three or four "landings" depending on which weather I preferred. On one of my Landings there was a knock at the door. Some local "Inspectors" were at the door wanting to check the premises for mice. I looked around the three rooms, and the little grey mouse got a worried look on his face, and dashed into the closet. The Inspectors spotted the motion, so I had to let them in and then had to admit that I had a small grey pet...The closet curtain fluffed out and a moose stepped out...moose. The inspectors were taken aback, and frantically started looking at their field book and ticket books. Apparently there was no infraction for having a grey house moose. Or a grey and silver cat, or a silver and black coatimundi, or a flying monkey, though the last one was more than a little bit scary when it jumped out and landed on my chest, asking, "how are we doing, boss." The Inspectors fled.

In the second dream, I was sleeping, when the whole house shook with a bang and then rattled to the sound of a heavy engine for a few seconds afterword. I just figured the neighbor was getting ready for work and had closed his gate, which is part of the fence running between our houses. Just as I was falling back to sleep, it happened again, only I could tell the sound was coming from my back yard. I struggled up out of my sound sleep and into some clothes and shoes. I looked out the window and saw that the back hill was covered in sandy dirt. A little darker and redder than street sand, and more powdery. It had over flowed the retaining wall, and only the top of the trees showed at the top of the hill. I could hear the sounds of engines and cracking wood from behind the slope. I noticed a pair of treaded tracks down the sandy embankment and then turning just at my now dirt covered patio, then up the hill over the space where the ivy used to be thickest. I didn't like this at all, I certainly hadn't given any permission for any work to be done. I followed the tracks up the hill, slipping occasionally in the soft dirt. I crested the hill and was looking over the back neighbor's yard. Bulldozers and backhoes were at work tearing down the house. There was a gap under the house where the granite had been dug up and pushed out the back yard and down the hill. Fairly shortly I saw a spinning cylinder covered in two foot steel spikes tearing up the granite as it drove out from under the house. The spikes were mostly bare metal, but the cylinder still retained some of its construction vehicle yellow. The fellow driving the vehicle looked very wide eyed and happy under his orange destruction cap. the tractor rolled back under the hill, then came out again, pushing the dirt in front of the now stopped cylinder, up the slope, across the back yard, and then toppled the heap over the hill into my yard. The tractor teetered on the crest of the artificial dune a moment before sliding down towards my house. He didn't make the turn this time, slamming into the fireplace, and shattering the glass doors on either side of it. (Apparently I'd added french doors to the dining room side of the fireplace.) The whole house buckled in slightly and was pushed about six inches off the foundation towards the front of the house. I shouted a loud "What the hell are you doing!" as the tractor climbed back up the hill towards me. The driver then spotted me, and with a maniacal gleam in his overly large, not very human eyes, lifted the cylinder and started it running, steering directly at me. The tractor was surprisingly fast and it was on me before I could dodge to the side, and though I might have been able to jump over the spikes onto the cab of the thing, he'd thought of that, and lifted the spinning cylinder of death just after I launched myself into the air. I knew I was dead. I wondered who would save the cats. I woke in a sweat.

The dream I was having this morning before the Chimester chimed in started out disturbing, the neighbors had dug a pit and were fighting insects and small animals in it. They had amassed a collection of scorpions, spiders, frogs and lizards and a struggling cat. I had to intervene for the sake of the vertebrates in the group, pointing out how sweet they were and how cute. It would be wrong to make them fight one another. Real animals feel pain and there is no Poke Hospital for them. The creatures all escaped, except one little dragon like thing that puffed out it's black and yellow scales, then eyed me sideways, then ran up my arm and dove into my shirt pocket. It cheeped at me and I rubbed the center of its head between its eye bumps, making it cheep some more. I wondered if it would eat cat kibble, or if I needed to make a trip to the store for crickets or mealworms. I needn't have worried, when I opened up my garage door it jumped out and raced over to the litter pan area, like it knew what it was doing, and began digging out the earwigs and snacking on them loudly. I crouched down to get a better look at what it was doing, then felt a cat rubbing on my elbow. It was the little white and black kitten. Marked much like Giles, only with more black than white on her. She ran off under a vehicle parked partly across my driveway. I went out and stretched out on the curb to see what she was up to. She came out with two more cats, a nearly all black cat with a just a white chin and toes, and an all white short haired cat, with beautiful golden brown eyes. The two adult cats had letters wrapped around their collars. The letters had obviously been written by a child. It stated that they had to move, and mommy and daddy said the cats would be okay on their own, but she knew better (I knew it was a she because there was a drawing of a little girl with her three cats, each with a name below them.) "Please take care of them and keep them together, they're family." There was a phone number. "text me."

My little dragon like friend cheeped at the cats, and they all got head bonks and shoulder rubs as they walked over me and then screwing up their courage, dashed across the open driveway and followed it into the house through the cat door. The white cat stayed with me the longest, unsure about the whole thing. I scruffed her up across the shoulders and ears, trying to let her know she would be safe in the house and wouldn't have to come out into the big blue room again. That seemed to satisfy her and she raced across the driveway, pausing only a second to two to figure out the cat door. I was glad I had just stocked up on cat food, and that I hadn't gotten rid of the extra litter pans yet. Giles and Ember would certainly be entertained with four new housemates. I texted the number that the cats were living with me, and they would be kept together. It was only a few seconds before I got an emoji filled text with hearts and kitty faces. I resolved to text pictures of the cats when they settled in.

Dreamlands Zoo an Amusement Park. Dimension Doors.

Night before last I dreamed I was with some friends at the Dreamlands Zoo, which is really as much an amusement park as a zoo. As we were strolling around, we noticed people suddenly convulsing, and then collapsing, then rising again with classic zombie features. Some of them threatened to go into the enclosures after the trapped animals.

We decided that wasn't going to happen, and rather than running away with the rest of the crowd, we went after the zombies, and used ourselves as bait to lure them into one of the ride enclosures. The ride operator helped us out by starting the ride after we got the bulk of them in the loading area. We hopped on a car, and were able to jump off of the roof of it onto the control booth as it went by. It was a rather long jump, about eight feet, easy for me, but for one of our shorter members we ended up grabbing her by the arms as she fell just short of the roof. She lost her shoes to the zombies below. I told her it would be okay, as there were plenty of shoes in the gift shop.

I carried her piggy back to the gift shop, followed by more zombies as we went. In the gift shop I had to tell her to just pick all the ones her size she could carry, as the zombies were getting close and she didn't have time to pick her favorites. I had to toss the shoes out of their boxes into a bag and then pick her up to get out of the store before we closed the zombies in by lowering the security gates. We found ourselves in a little back stage area, going through shoes. She found a pair of sneaker boots that fit, but they weren't a color she liked. Bright red, so I liked them. I told her to grab any that fit which were the color she liked, and we could take them with us. I figured the boot top sneakers would be better at stopping ankle biters. We joined the others with five or six pairs of tan shoes in a large theme park bag.

There were about twenty of us, warily eying one another, waiting for the telltale symptom of impending infection. Victims' heads would pop off, turn over in the air and land back in place, but transformed by a greenish tint. Then the convulsions and collapse would happen. Anyone who was near when a head popped off might get splattered by goo and become infected. Amazingly, no one had been bitten, and the zombies, once they were rounded up, were remarkably docile. I was glad no one had panicked and started killing them. I was pretty sure that there would be some sort of magical cure, eventually.

I climbed out onto the roof of the building and looked out over the theme park and zoo. Several of the keepers waved to let me know they were okay. I asked if there was enough food for the critters for a couple of days. They indicated that there was. Then I took off into the air and headed for the center of Dream City to find out if there were some EMRTs available. (Emergency Mage Response Team) The dream just sort of fell apart at that point.


This morning's dream was suffused with a dark and brooding atmosphere, amber tones and deep purple and blacks in the sky. There was a haze that blocked out any sign of stars or moon, and diffused the pale amber lights from inside the house.

I entered the house, and there was no furniture in the front room. The carpet was threadbare, a path worn between the front door and the kitchen, and, oddly, between the left and right walls of the room.
As I stood there, pondering where I needed to look next, a man, very similar in build and manner to myself, stepped through the wall on my left, running, and into the wall on the right. I checked the walls, they were solid enough. I thought perhaps it was a ghost. Just to be sure, I entered the dining area and turned down the hallway to the right, checking to see if the apparition ended up in the front bedroom. No. There was a musty curved front chest, a ragged shag carpet (dark green from moss or its original color I couldn't tell) and the remains of a bed frame, six slats and two long rust marks between a collapsed footboard and a headboard with rotted fabric and hairlike stuffing on its face. The headboard was leaning back against the wall, where water stains showed it had been in that place a considerable time.

There were no signs of traffic through the room other than myself. I retreated back to the kitchen and began cleaning up the place with brooms and mops that were in much better shape than the rest of the house.

The house was essentially nine squarish rooms:

Bath and Hall to backyard, Kitchen, Master bedroom
dinette and hall, dining room, hall and closet and Master bath
Bedroom, front room, Bedroom with round front chest of drawers.

There were only two exterior doors, one in the front room, and one at the hallway between the kitchen and bathroom. The kitchen was a very '50s looking affair with white and chrome appliances that had rounded corners. Once I had everything cleaned up I moved a table into the front room and covered it with the best tablecloth I could find in the linen closet. I then set out a number of food items and drinks.

The next person who burst through the wall almost crashed into the buffet. They stopped and noticed me, and it was an awkward hemming and hawing. Yes, we had the same name, too. I could feel some sort of connection and he took a snack and excused himself, promising to come back.

Another pair of people shot through the room. They went around or leaped over the table. While both exhibited the same uncanny resemblance to myself, one of them was decidedly female. It occurred to me that I might want to discover why they were running. The last pair had left wet marks on the walls they had passed through. When I touched the water, I noticed that it didn't feel right. I pushed my hand into the wall, and then through it. I looked at the direction they had gone, and decided to go after them, rather than in the direction of whatever was where they were running from. I crossed the room and pushed my way through the wall, a green glow filled my vision as I pushed through. I stepped out into a bloody red sky and blackened ruins. There was a solid chunk of wall behind me, and no indication of where the folks who were ahead of me went. I turned back and pushed myself through the wall and ended up back in my place.

The woman was waiting for me. She was snacking and perched on the end of the table. Her presence was a little unnerving, she was both me and the opposite of me at the same time. Her height was about four inches less than my own, but her hair and eyes were the same, her expressions so very much like my own, just a little softer, and rounder. "You're like a sister, one I never knew I had."

"Closer than that. I'm your X chromosome doubled. We are nearly genetically identical."

"Then the men..."

"Closer that actual twins."

"Clones?"

"Not exactly. Just other...possibilities."

She then took me on a quick tour of the other possibilities, except one because, "things are a little hot there, right now."

There was essentially a path out of each room of the house, except the dining room, as it didn't really have its own walls, the front room passage was the quickest to navigate, and went between their party house and the ruins I'd seen earlier. "We don't know what happened there, and we don't spend any time there, it's even creepier than here."

"Thanks."

"Just calling how we see it, your house just feels wrong."

I have to admit, I felt much the same way about it. I was pretty sure I didn't actually come from this place originally.

"How many of you...us?"

"Eight, though one died, and then there's you, so...nine." She looked around the blue green world we were in. "Odd, we really thought there was just one per room in the hub, your house. But then there's you." All of the homes we'd traveled through, except the ruins, had indeed had eight or nine rooms, not all of them were square, though, some were linear, or two lines, some "u" shaped, and one was two four room apartments connected by a breezeway.

"Maybe I'm not one of your eight," I suggested, but immediately knew that wasn't true. "Or there are nine.

She agreed that nine was probably the right number, but wondered if that meant there was a ninth place we could travel to. I wondered that, too. "That has to be where you are from, though!"

I hadn't thought of that, but I didn't have any idea how to get us there. At least, I didn't until I noticed the round front chest of drawers sitting in an overgrown part of this house's yard. I walked over towards it, and as I did so, it glowed slightly, and made a noise like my cell phone alert. A low whine and then vibration. The glow strengthened and then faded in time with the alert.

"Never seen that before," she said.

Another one of us showed up, sandwich in hand. "Thanks for the grub," He wiped his palm on his pants and we shook hands. There was a nearly electric jolt went through both of us. "Wow, he's like us, only old."

"Thanks," I coughed. I did then note that all of the others had also been mid twenties looking.

It wasn't long before there were half a dozen of us, including another female me, but with long red hair. "She dyes it." the first woman wispered when she noticed me looking at it.

"Interesting, my hair used to be reddish like that when I was in my twenties," I had quite the clear memory of my image in a large vanity mirror, and indeed, the me of the dream, now white haired, had once had reddish brown hair.

"Oh..."

"Told you."

We turned back to the chest of drawers, I could feel it pull at me, and the glow was more pronounced. I gestured towards it, and the drawers started to open, flooding the yard with a greenish light. We all gestured towards the bulky piece of furniture and pulled, until there was a wooden frame filled with a bright green glow.

"So, who's first."

I was, but I just ended up surrounded by cats and staring into the alarm light next to my bed. No other me around. (Probably a good thing, that would have freaked me out.)

Train-ing Day

Super secret agent training, on a train. Lots of dodging bullets and racing through crowded dining cars, climbing outside and across the top of the moving train. Unfortunately I climbed up to the top of the train to evade a couple of pursuers, or I should say, "tried" to climb atop the train. The tunnel the train entered had about eight inches of clearance, not enough to survive, even if I hadn't pulled myself head and shoulders above the roof of the car.

No matter how I rewound the dream the same thing kept happening, or I would get shot, or knocked off the side of the train, or captured in the dining car. I finally decided not to go back after I was dead, so the dream faded away to me sitting in a strange room. Lots of boxes and toys, all of them with strange two inch holes drilled through them. Little John came up to me and got a quick head bonk and a little pet, but was soon distracted by a cardboard box. It was too small for him, really, but somehow he got his paws into the two holes in the lid and pried it off. When he stepped into the box he changed from a big red tabby to a little grey and black tabby. I realized he'd somehow been transformed into Princess Tiger Lily. I did not like this one bit and my anxiety levels were through the roof. She stepped out for a Little John style head bonk and then right back in the box, I was hoping she would turn back into Little John, but no, she just curled up and died.

No, no, no, no, no! I took her/his body out and cradled it.

The dream wouldn't rewind. In fact it kept going. Miranda entered the room and stepped into the box, she turned into the emaciated shadow of her cousin T-Rex, who didn't even step out of the box before he withered and died in front of me. The room began to narrow and I forced myself to get up and find a door, it was at the narrow end of the room and it opened up to a ladder. The ground was rumbling and blurred below me, so I began to climb. Just as I cleared the top of what I realized was a rail car, the tunnel keystone took off my head again.

I woke drenched and shaking, heart racing, no kitties on the bed with me at all.

Photo Opportunity

A photographer friend and I headed out to a grassy hillside just before a huge storm was due. There were a couple of trees near the top of the hill, one of which had a little tree stand in it. There was only room for one person on the stand at a time, so we took turns climbing up the fifteen feet or so to the platform. From that vantage point we both took several pictures, as the rapidly changing light was creating some interesting and moody effects.

While my friend was up in the tree, she spotted something coming out of the clouds. It was heading behind her position, so she shouted down to me to go follow it. I was sitting at the base of the other tree, so grabbed my camera, which was almost out of battery power, and ran to the top of the hill. She was scrambling down out of the tree as fast as she could go, and I managed to crest the hill in time to get a couple of blurry shots of the back end of a huge craft. I could plainly see portholes and a pair of glowing red and blue inset lines about four feet thick that ran around the middle and back of the craft. The whole thing was a slightly elongated ellipsoid with a "bite" taken out of the aft of the disk. The air was highly distorted in the aft of the ship, as though by a heat shimmer.

My friend reached my side just as the ship slipped into the clouds. She managed to take a few shots. I played back the last few shots I had of the airship, and all of them were slightly blurry. "I swear, it didn't look that blurry in person, it was clear and sharp, except for the exhaust ports in the back."

"Maybe I got a better couple of shots, I wasn't prepared for it, though, so the exposure is probably too long." She had been shooting on film, so we'd have to wait to see her images. At least she'd seen the airship coming out of the clouds from the front. I was excited to get home and do some searching for images like ours.

I was sad that my shots hadn't been a little steadier, suggesting that I was right up there in the ranks of amateur UFO photographers. She said we might be able to fix the motion blur in software. Especially since I had her and the tree in the best photographs as reference points. Since I had moved between the shots, she suggested that we might even be able to make a stereogram out of them and have an idea of how far away the airship was.

Even though the craft was very different from any we'd ever seen, neither of us thought it was an alien craft, we were thinking it was a dirigible of some sort we'd never seen before, mostly because of how quiet it had been.

Track Inspector, Sexy Party Guests

Two dreams this morning had memorable elements. In the first I was involved in checking the continuity of a railroad line. I was traveling to the top of a mountain where I set a marble in the indent in the rail. It began to roll down hill, then started picking up speed. 

It had some sort of camera in it that was transmitting back to my iPad. Don't know how that worked, and even wondered about it in the dream. After the marble had rolled several miles, I started down the track after it, a locomotive and a couple of cars not far behind. I knew I would have to get on the train shortly, as it wouldn't be able to keep to just my walking pace on the wet rails further down the mountain.


The second dream featured a lovely dark-haired woman with a navy one-piece leotard with a very sexy tummy and back cutout. She was engaged in a rather pornographic moment with a man who she rubbed to completion, resulting in a jet about six feet long. Her bobbed hair bounced as she turned to me, "still think I'm cute?" She asked.

"Very much so,"  I said as she leaned up against me. That was apparently the right answer.  I had one hand on the smooth tight flesh of her back, and the other on her slightly rounded tummy, where I stroked her through the cutout, following it down to the tops of her soft curly pubic hair. 

Her red full lips made an "Oh," then I bent down and kissed her everywhere her cutout allowed. I could smell her arousal and see the dampness forming between her legs.

"Let's go back to my room," she took my hand and pulled me away from the living room, a long legged, almost too slender woman unfolded herself from where she'd been watching and followed us down the short hallway.  She was in a pink bra and was bottomless, her flushed labia clearly visible through a coppery cloud of pubic fluff. I very much wanted to run my fingers through that hair, but the dream ended all too soon.

I was happy there were no zombies or video game drama for a change.

Volcano Soccer

I dreamed that I was playing soccer at a mountain retreat. The game didn't last very long, as most of the players were even more out of shape than me. 

I spent a lot of time kicking goals from a grassy slope whose downhill run gave me a little advantage approaching the other team's goal. After a bit the other team stopped defending if I got the ball while I was up on that slope. 

As we walked back across the valley, I looked up and noticed that there was smoke and lava coming from the mountain top. The lava was pouring down the slopes and two molten streams were heading right for our little valley, and another stream was headed for a valley across a low ridge where the women's camp was located. 

Since I was in the best shape (and that's pretty sad) I volunteered to run over and warn them. 

The next part of the dream was spent running across the ridge, down across a little ravine, where the bottom was all ready filling with a hot tarry ooze. I worried about there being gasses so took some deep breaths and held my breath as I picked my way down the shallow ravine and stepped over the tar from boulder to boulder. 

I was completely out of breath when I finally jumped up out the other side. I started calling out to the women's camp as I got close, waving up towards the lava flow when I finally managed to get someone's attention. 

I could barely jog the las couple of hundred yards to their camp, and by that time, they had loaded up all their vehicles and left. I stood there in their little valley, wondering how the heck I was going to get out myself, since none of them had waited for me.  

I looked back over in the direction of the men's camp, and there was all ready a tendril of lava headed through the shallow ravine I'd just crossed. There was no way I was going to run back.

I scoured the storage garages, hoping there was some sort of camp vehicle, like a golf cart, anything.  The only thing I found was a rack of kayaks and a bunch of hang gliders, rolled up in their tubes. It was obvious that they hadn't been used in a very long time.

I started putting together one of the hang gliders, figuring that would be the fastest way down the mountain. I called back to the camp to make sure my friends were evacuating and not waiting for me. I needn't have worried, they were all so busy packing and driving out that no one picked up the phone. That was when I wondered why we hadn't just called them in the first place.

I wondered, as I took off with the mountain on fire behind me, if I should try to glide back over to the camp where my car was parked, or if I should just glide strait down the mountain. I hated the idea of leaving my car and camera. I decided as I picked up altitude that I would fly over in that direction and see how close the lava was to the camp. 

It wasn't close, but the road was all ready smoking just a bit further down the hill. There was no way I would be able to drive my car out, and I figured that landing and trying to make a second successful takeoff would be tempting fate just a little bit too much. I whooshed over the camp, out over a stream of lava, the camp looked like it just might survive, as the lava was passing through the valley on one side and another ravine on the other. I could feel the heat rising off of the lava so turned gently down slope into the wind, causing me to suddenly gain altitude. I could see the stream of cars headed down the mountain. Lava poured down into the  ravine that the road snaked around. 

I hoped they would be able to get off the mountain before the lava overflowed onto the road at the bottom.

Found DROG File

DROG20110914

My brother and I were traveling together in a pair of wildly mismatched vehicles. I was in Little Red and he was in a large blue and silver van. We entered a town that looked like someone had beat it about the head and shoulders with a tree trunk.

We stopped in a clear spot in the center of town near what looked like it had been a park. Every manufactured item in the park was broken, burned or bent into unrecognizability. 

As we made our way towards the center of the park I started to get nervous. Turned out there was ahold reason. Three balls of trash and debris began to roll after us, converging as they came.

It looked like we were able to out maneuver them, but each time we did they learned from it and didn't fall for our tricks. 

My brother thought we were close enough to the cars to outrun them, but I knew that while his van would likely drive away from one or two hits, Little Red was unlikely to. 

I did know that my car was going to just start up and go, as I had left the engine on. 

We needed to outsmart them just one more time, so this time we split up, but looped back around, then took off with the three of the now over ten foot high balls crashing into one another. That gave us enough time to get to our vehicles. 

I have no idea why I thought they would stop chasing us after we left the park.  Because if anything, they were faster on the road.

Sparky's Submarine

DROG20110725

I dreamed that I was playing  Axelpyre's youngest child, a somewhat incompetent chemist and engineer. He sat atop a ramshackle submarine, in the middle of an alley, brick building on one side and sandstone on the other. In that regard the game looked a little bit like Minecraft.  The submarine was setting atop a rectangular carriage that was little more than a frame for two electric motors and a slew of batteries. The controls for the cart were at the end of a long ribbon cable that reached up to the edge of the open cockpit.

You're way ahead of me. Yes, open cockpit. Did I mention that Sparky here was an incompetent engineer? Hush now and let me finish telling what little bit of action followed.

A Roc of indeterminate origin croaked out it's hideous warning from high over the buildings of this rather crowded part of the city. For not non-obvious reasons, Gnomes are quite terrified of Rocs flying overhead and squaking  out their names. Now I knew that the Roc would never have fit in this narrow alley, but it seemed that the game would come to a standstill if Sparky didn't have some sort of action creating reaction to the sudden appearance this menace. 

He floored the vehicle, thrusting both control sticks forward. At this point in the dream I stopped playing and began living the part. The motors whined to life and the submarine launched itself out of the alley, in reverse. The motion was so unexpected that I fell forward and the controls slipped out of my hands and fell down onto the floor. The fall caused a bump that momentarily stopped one of the motors, causing the contraption to make a sharp right turn not going in the correct direction, of course, on a oneway street. Other cars honked and swerved to get out of the way. 

The road went down hill towards the shore of the local bay. I scrambled for the controller, but the bouncing caused me to miss it, knocking it, instead, off the ribbon cable! 

I managed to get myself upright and to get the pair of submarine propellors turning. I reversed thrust and that slowed the vehicle down, some. By varying the torque on the submarine's engines I was able to veer a little to the left or right while driving the wrong way though traffic and the signals. For good or I'll, the Roc had spotted me and was flying low over the buildings waiting for a clear shot at me. His presence had scared many of the drivers of open carriage autos off the road all ready, so my path was mostly clear to the bay. 

With a much smaller bump than I expected I drove off the road that ran along the shore and heard the rocky causeway grind away the electric carriage, flinging the sub into the shallow water. I was still driving backwards, with one eye out for the Roc.

The Roc was banking over the cities edge and coming around for another pass at me.

"All hands, dive! Dive! Dive! Dive!"

There was no one else aboard. And as I struggled to empty the buoyancy tanks, I realized that I hadn't installed the dome for the cockpit, yet.

"All hands, prepare for emergency surface!"

Frantic now, I looked at where I was headed, set the motors to full reverse and barely managed to roll the sub over just in time to avoid being plucked out of it by the Roc.

I slewed the craft around just in time to miss a bridge abutment. "All stop!" shouted to my non- existent crew. I put the engines in full forward and brought the craft to a stop under the brick and concrete supports that lifted it up away from the shore to arch gracefully to the far side of the bay. I could hear the Roc high over the bridge squaking out it's frustration. 

I also thought the moldy algae smell was a little overpowering for a game.

Bears, CH Gets New Glasses.

            I dreamed that I had met up with a large number of folks in a heavily wooded area where they had hidden horses in a large cave system. Although I wasn't really sure of the reason, we were evacuating the area. Only one problem, there weren't enough horses for everyone. At least a half dozen people would have to ride double, a couple of them adults. That would slow us down.
            I noticed that there were, however, a couple of very large brown shaggy bears chained in the back of one of the caves. I went over to them and "communicated" the problem with them. I came out of the little side cave riding one and leading the other.
            Everyone backed away from us. "I can take another adult if anyone is willing. We have to leave now, because the bears are going to be slower than the horses."
            "I can't imagine anyone would follow you, though."
            "Those bears are even bigger than I thought," whispered a woman hiding behind her husband.
            "I'll go, but my sister has to come with us," a young woman said. Her sister looked to be about eleven or twelve.
            I turned and asked the female bear if she would take them, and the bear said she could take one, the other would have to ride the male with me.
            "I'm okay with that," the little girl said, apparently able to understand the bears, too. She grabbed up her school backpack and ran over to where I was and I helped her up in front of me. "Don't you have a bag?"
            "No, just what's in my pockets." Which I knew to be a lot, as I was wearing a vest with four pockets and cargo pants.
            We started out immediately, no one else in the group left behind offered anything more than a wave, mostly seeming to be glad to see the bears go.

            I dreamed that CH came over to help clean the house, and she was wearing new glasses, thick dark red frames with a slender rounded rectangle shape. They really drew attention to her blue eyes. I commented on them which made her smile, and that's when I noticed that they were prop glasses, with no actual lenses in them.
            She explained that they were for a costume she was working on, but I couldn't tell now what I thought she said.

All in all these were both a welcome change from the all consuming Zombie dreams I've been having of late.

A Passel of Plagues

              I dreamed that I was about 12 years old, living in a steam-punk universe, very Edwardian but with airships, robots and ray-guns, none of which were particularly reliable. The dream started with me being out on the streets late at night, having snuck out of the barracks like building with AH so that we could visit his girlfriend, in this dream played by his wife. As we made our way across town, the air-raid sirens went off.
              As bombs began to fall on the edge of town, the lights were quickly being turned off or snuffed out. We ran along a narrow river road, taking turns climbing on one another's shoulders to turn off the gas lamps as we ran. Soon we came across a police man doing the same, but from another direction.
              “Thanks, lads, now get yerselves t'cover!” he pointed over to a warehouse like building nearby with a large yellow arrow that pointed to a cellar door.
              “Raid Shelter 104,” was printed in four inch high letters on the base of the arrow and in eight inch high letters on the doors.
              “I have t'see to the Century Street Landing. Mind now!” he hollered as he ran off.
              AH and I looked at one another, “I have to get to C,” he ran off down the nearly pitch black street, “it's only a dozen more blocks.”
              I hesitated, eyes adjusting to the scattered starlight. It was easy enough to pick out the road from the river wherein was reflected the partly cloudy sky and its myriad stars between. Still, I ran carefully, keeping myself away from the river and following AH's uneven sounding footfalls. I lifted my feet a little higher than I would have if it had been daylight, or even if the streetlights were on.
              I heard AH tumble and shout in front of me, so slowed just in time to see him rolling on the street, clutching his foot. “Stubbed my toes on that!”
              Where he pointed was a steel box with several lit grills on its surface. As I approached I realized that the grills were glowing from within, the airship shaped grill was red, fading to amber even as I watched. There were seven stencil like grills in total. Of the three on top, one was the airship, the next one, which was a dark amber but brightening and turning red, looked like a dinosaur, the third grill was no shape I recognized, but was completely dark. There was one in the middle, which I interpreted to be the re-animation ray. The Bottom row of three were also dark, but one was an Orbital Mind Control Laser, the second a Wave and the last one was Fire.
              I wiped my hand across the OMCL grill, which lit bluish green. Lasers cut through the clouds causing them to light up like lightning, and the lasers cut into the dirigibles at the edge of the city, soon the sound of bombs going off faded to nothing. It seems the OMCL was more “Persuasion” than “Control.”
              I was pulled up to my feet, “C'mon, stop fooling with that, you'll get us ki...” AH's hand relaxed as he stopped talking. His other hand pointed towards the mouth of the river. I glanced down at the steel box, the Dinosaur was glowing brightly, as were the Wave and Fire stencils. “Wha...?”
              I looked up. At the mouth of the river a giant Dinosaur, much the size of Godzilla was climbing out of the sea. Water pushed ahead of him, surging up the river, it's crest visible as a line of darkness in the reflected milky way of the otherwise calm river.
              “High ground!” I shouted and grabbed AH's sleeve to pull him back up the street to the last bridge we passed. Our side of the river, and into the warehouse district, was flat and only a dozen feet or so above the height of the river itself. The high ground, what little of it there was, was across the river. The Cemetery, Mortuary and Crematorium were at the end of a long uphill winding road overlooking the town from across the river. We ran.
              Crossing the 98th street bridge I looked out to see a huge wave blocking the Godzilla-like monsters hips and legs, but his head swept across the city, shooting out a ray that hit the ground in a swath about a hundred feet wide, and everything it touched was bathed in flames. We ran harder.
              From half way up the hill, low trees and headstones all around us, I saw that the monster was not lighting the whole city on fire, instead laying out a pattern of stripes that created a sort of maze, the only exit of which, was at his feet.
              “It followed us!” AH blurted, panting.
              I looked at his feet. There was the steel box with it's backlit stencil like cutouts. I'd touched the OMCL grill before, and it had stopped the airship bombardment. (Or was a coincidence, but I wasn't so sure. It had glowed blue green where the others were amber and red.) I tried it again, but it remained dark.
              “Maybe you can only use it once,” I said.
              “Maybe it wasn't you at all,” AH added.
              “Well, here's one that hasn't been used yet.” I swept my fingers over the very odd looking last symbol on the top row. It glowed blue and then green. The Monster, Wave and Fire glyphs began to fade.
              The monstrous roaring stopped. I watched, stunned, as the creature turned and waded back into the ocean.
              I whooped, and turned to see that AH had started up the hill to the mortuary, calling out to C, who for some reason was at the top of the hill near the entrance.
              That didn't add up for me and I hurried after him, barely noting that the Reanimation stencil had begun to glow amber.
              As we made our way up the hill we grew, our youthful stick figures filling out to the size and shape of our current adult hood. There was a part of me that was sad about this. AH reached the top of the hill, and the small robot, which is what I now knew it to be, grabbed him and dragged him into the building, tossing him down some stairs.
              As I crossed the threshold, completely against my will, my instinct was to run, I once again found myself to be a young boy.
              The robot looked at me, its disguise shifting, trying to find something enticing. “Actually, I've always thought robots were pretty cool.” I said.
              The robot stopped in a half woman half robot phase and smiled at me. It was a predatory smile, but it didn't last.
              “What does the Reanimation Stencil do?” I asked.
              The change in demeanor of the robot was instant. “Help me shut all the doors. Now!”
The robot clattered off, closing and barring doors, sliding the ceiling and floor bolts closed, and then starting to slide furniture in front of the large front windows. Outside, the townspeople were making their way up the hill to the building.
              I thought they might want shelter from whatever was coming and asked if I should let them in.
              The robot shouted “No!” and let out a girlish shriek. As the people began to pound on the doors I realized that they were dead, and had pulled themselves out of the ground.
              “What about the people in the cellar,” I asked.
              The robot shrieked again, then ran down the hall to secure the cellar door. I ran upstairs and out onto a balcony. It was a short six foot jump to a nearby tree, and I climbed down the hill behind the mortuary, relying on my speed to avoid the reanimated remains. As I crossed out of the cemetery I noticed that there were machines along the road moving by themselves as well. The Reanimation Ray must also work as an Animation ray. I hoped that AH would be all right, but couldn't think of a way to get back and save him. Interestingly, the undead seemed to have no interest in me, instead it looked like there was sort of a conflict brewing between the robots and the zombies.
              I made it to the fair grounds, where I snuck into a large tent, not yet fully erected, and hid under the tarps along the upper bleachers. I was soon discovered, as people began to fill in the seats and they pulled back the tarps to complete the tent walls. The carnies all leered at me, but didn't say anything to me. I tried to sit as far away from them as possible.
              The show began, instead of animals, though, there were all sorts of animated machines, robots and other constructs. The talk was of dismantling the town to create more, and from there to take over the world....
              And in the middle of the center ring, was the steel box, it's stencils dim save for the one in the center. I knew that if I could get to the thing and wipe my fingers across the stencil I could turn that red to blue and then green, and the animation ray would work for me. The mechanical and one-legged trapeze artist were in the way, though.

Zombie Attack, Carmagedden, Blue Movie

Zombies Attack Jupiter III

              There were about a dozen of us at work when the news came in that Zombies were attacking the city. I was wiring the ship's internal video network, a mix of thin copper and fiber-optic cables. I looked over at the slender brown-haired woman who was one of two women I worked with on this project. We both had the "What did she just say?" look on our faces.
              The other woman was back in the Main Distribution Feed calling out the pair colors for us to terminate at each tap point. She told us over the radio that the city was being attacked by zombies. The infection had just suddenly boiled over and reached the tipping point. "This is a different strain, they're saying, very fast acting." She told us to tune to a certain channel when we hooked up the next station's tap.
              My partner asked me to finish up so she could go to the staging room and pick up the thin panel.
              "I have to see what she's rambling on about now. Sounds like she's watching a horror movie, not the news."
              "Right, because we haven't had zombie attacks in weeks," I stated rather matter of fact.
              "That's right, everyone was cured or rounded up," she raced down the curved hallway, shouting back "and stop calling them zombies!"
              I had forgotten that her own parents and sister had been infected in the last attack. I picked up my cell phone and called N. She didn't pick up, so I left a message; "Get to high ground and lock yourself away from everyone else. I'll figure out how to come get you."
              I then called the construction manager to ask him if the site was securable. Again, no answer. I crawled out of the crawl space and hit the intercom button on my phone. "Hey, has anyone else heard about the zombie attack, like, from security?"
              Both the gals on my installation team called back with "no" but there were no other answers. "I've got a bad feeling about this," the one in the MDF said, and then yelped. "Oh! My god! They're in the building, heading up the access stairs!"
              My partner arrived and began hooking up the panel. "There's some of the engineers running ahead of them, it doesn't look like they're going to make it."
              "Lock yourself in, Clair, don't let anyone else into the MDF, you hear me!" I shouted.
              As I pulled myself out of the crawlspace I looked at my partner, who was standing transfixed and trembling looking at the monitor. I read the crawl and froze.
              "Thousands of recently innoculated display New Terrifying Symptoms. Rapid onset, ravaging hunger. Statewide quarantine imposed. If you've been innoculated, lock yourself in. All National Guard units activated, call..."
              N had insisted on being innoculated, despite the vaccine being inadequately tested.
              The crawl continued running underneath footage of bloody-faced people in packs chasing through the streets, throwing themselves at cars and store front windows. Several buildings were seen where the rooftops were a milling mass of feeders, and those being fed off of. I knew, for some reason, that the zombies would climb after prey, but only rarely would they head back down once they had climbed somewhere. I had a locker on the floor just below us, and in that locker was a gun and about two hundred rounds of ammunition. I had stopped carrying it in my tool harness just a few days ago. My partner started switching through the ship's security cameras. There was no one on board but my construction crew. The locker room leading into the ships access way was empty.
              "Clair, I'm going to close the door to the locker room, I have to get something. Can you see the ship's controls from in there?"
              I heard the alarm sound and the ships internal bulkheads began to close. I told my partner to "Get to the control room and lock the doors, don't let anybody in."
              I didn't hear anything from Clair. I tried to remember if she had been innoculated. I knew that the brown-haired woman hadn't, she'd been terrified that this very thing would happen to her.
              "We have to save them," the woman pointed to the security camera image, a group of engineers and designers was racing towards the locker room and the access ramp of the Jupiter III (which wasn't a space ship, but a dirigible.) I noticed that the group was not panic stricken, like one would expect. I realized that they were all infected, and running towards what they knew was a likely source of nutrition. Us.
              We both ran for the access way. I only had one plan. Beat the much younger woman to the door, close and then lock it down. I grabbed the young woman by the back of her shirt. "Get to the bridge, fire up the hydrogen jets and heat up the lift cells. You were better on the simulator than me."
              She slowed and turned back to head for the control room. I heard thumping from inside the MDF and when I got to the plexiglass windows I dove and slid along the floor under them. I looked back to see Clair hammering against the door with bloody broken hands. I was thankful that she hadn't unlocked it before turning completely. I was a little bit worried that she might damage equipment needed to control the Jupiter III, but saw that all of the cabinets were closed. I was never more glad that Clair was compulsive about keeping things neat.
              I reached the access ramp and the guard station was empty, from what I could see, the locker room was empty. It was really just a long hallway full of lockers for folks to put their street clothes in while working. There was a long partition down the middle and there was a men's side and a woman's side. The door at the end of the access ramp was closed but not latched, and was always locked from the other side. I stepped quietly down the ramp and was just thinking of heading into the locker room when the guard appeared on the womans side. He had a handful of women's clothing held up under his nose.
              We lunged for the door together. I managed to pull it shut with a click just as he grabbed the handle from the other side, and pushed rather than pulled to try to get through. I knew he'd been infected.
              "Clair's locked in the MDF and the guard was also infected. He's outside the ramp room though." I rummaged through the guard's desk. quickly skimming through the security cameras. There was a dead body on the woman's side of the locker room, I hadn't been able to see it through the tiny windows in the doors. It only took me a couple of moments to find the external door locks and I closed off the hanger bay. Too late, it seemed. There were several people running across the hanger floor, followed by other infected ones.
              I grabbed the microphone on the desk. "Get into the secure cargo lockers, one per locker. You should be safe there until we come to get you out!" I shouted at them. Some of them looked around to try to see where the voice was coming from. That was a mistake, their pursuers closed the gap to almost nothing. They wouldn't have a chance to enter the storage unit and close it now.
              There was a shotgun locked to the side of the drawers of the desk. I looked in the top drawer for keys. I found ammunition for it, but no key to unlock it from its mount.
              "The hydrogen is preheated, we can get out of here when you have everyone on board."
              "They're loading themselves into the storage containers now. I'm trying to find the roof release."
              "It's not there, its in the hanger control booth."
              "Oh, shit."
              I thought a moment, that being difficult because of the guard banging on the door. I loaded the shotgun and tipped the desk back. I ripped off the security panel. I turned the desk so the shotgun was pointing at the door, and fired.
              Just as I'd hoped, the zombie ducked down to look at the new hole in the door, and I fired again. The hammering and clawing stopped. I pushed the other door open and discovered that the guard wasn't wearing any pants. So much for getting his keys. I went to my locker and grabbed my bag. I found the guard's pants, gun and keys on the bench and took them, too. I locked the door, but realized it wouldn't take a group of zombies long to worry the door apart, now that it had a hole the size of a fist in it.
              "Fire the jets!" I shouted as I prepared to open the door behind the guard's desk that led into the hanger.
              "What? That'll kill everyone in the hanger!"
              "There's no one left in the hanger but zombies."
              "Stop calling them that!"
              "I need to get to the control room to open the hanger and release the clamps."
              "I can do that from here. Get on board."
              Through the small window I could see dozens of other zombies enter from various doors in the hanger. The people who'd managed to lock themselves into the storage containers weren't going to be safe much longer if we didn't get off the ground.
              "Our passengers need us to be off the ground, soon." I shouted into the intercom as I raced up the ramp. I hit the ramp retract and jammed the joystick into place with a leather something from the guard's belt (Pepper spray holster?) and then leapt across the gap into the dirigible's entry way. Zombies were attracted to the noise and movement and began to move towards the opening. (The opening was only about 8 feet above the ground, very climbable for a zombie.)
              I managed to swing the shotgun around, but held off firing in the hopes that one or more of them might not be infected, "Yet" I mentally added.
              The dirigible suddenly lurched up a few feet, nearly spilling me out into the hanger below. I dropped the guard's belt, losing the extra side arm, radio and ammunition. I scrambled back away from the edge of the entry, then swung the door closed and spun the hatch shut.
              "What are we going to do about the roof?" I asked from where I sat on the floor.
              "They've got it."
              "Who they?"
              "The people in the control booth, they're waving at me, we have to find a way to get them out of there."
              "Get them out of there?"
              "They're trapped. We have to help them."
              "Tell them to open the doors and then you can fly over. We can lower a cargo pod to them."
              I heard her relaying my instructions over the radio. Just as I suspected, there was no response.
              "They won't open the doors. They just keep waving at us."
              "Can you turn us in place so I can see them." I stood up and went to the window of the Embarkation Lounge. "I'm at the window of the lounge."
              "I think so, just a second."
              I felt the ship begin to turn, really though it looked and felt more like the hanger rotated around us it was so smooth.
              Just as I thought. The people in the control room crew were a mix of live and undead zombies. The live ones were faster and clever, with some reasoning abilities as well as the ability to navigate in places they were familiar with in life. The dead ones, pretty much follow noise and movement, hoping for whatever it was they needed to keep going. Oddly, though both types would eagerly chase prey, only the live ones would chase prey down stairs. Deaders wouldn't step down stairs unless you were right ahead of them. City dwellers had sometimes been able to save themselves from undead packs by leaping the rails into subway access stairs or even dropping down into sewer access tunnels. Of course, that didn't work if there were live zombies in the pack.
              I really didn't know how my partner could possibly have thought they were anything else. I realized that we were stuck here unless I could convince her to let me shoot the people in the control room, cook the zombies in the hanger, and then make a dash for the control booth to open the hanger doors.I would need to do this before the power went out. After several hours without food, hungry zombies would begin to chew on electrical cords, even ripping up drywall to get to wires with power in them. I was concerned that after making all that carnage, she would then just leave me stranded there.
              That was when I realized we had a time bomb in the MDF. Clair, in a few hours, would be ripping into the UPS in the MDF for a little snack. The voltage would probably kill her, and then a couple of hours later she would revive to finish ripping out our power network.
              "They're all infected, babe," I said as gently as I could, "some of them are stage two." I resolved to avoid using the word "zombies" in an attempt to bring her back to reality a little bit.
              "Clair, too?"
              "Yes."
              "How about the passengers?"
              "Some of them are probably infected and haven't shown yet. That's why I asked them to take separate containers."
              "Oh god, oh god oh god oh god...."
              "Babe, keep us in the center of the hanger as best you can. I have to shut some more hatches." I had just noticed more infected workers racing up the stairs of the catwalk that surrounded the hanger, and they were jumping for the disk shaped envelope of the dirigible. They were missing, and becoming snacks for their fellows below, but it would only be a matter of time before we drifted too close and they would be able to jump to us. I started racing through the ship, trying to make sure I shut every access hatch I knew of, and every one I could find.
              As I closed the last one I knew of I went by a window and saw that we were floating out over the city. "How'd you get the doors open?"
              "I just kept asking over and over again, one of them finally pulled the handle to open them. I don't know that he really knew what he was doing, though."
              "Maybe there was enough of him left to know to do the right thing." I knew I said it just to be comforting. I remembered reading that none of the research that had been done on the infected from the first outbreak seemed to indicate that anything of an original personality survived. There were still hundreds of them being stored in warehouses around the nation.
              Looking out over the city I saw that many fires had started all ready, this outbreak looked like it was going to be bad. I wanted to ask to head over to the Submarine base to look for N, but knew that if this outbreak really started amongst the innoculated, there wasn't much hope.

Carmagedden
             
              Later, I dreamed that I was with an older woman, she had long white hair, down to her waist, the last few inches was a light blonde color. We were following a pair of vehicles that were racing in a flood control channel. There was a wood-paneled white station wagon like MS used to drive long ago, and a black and green stake bed truck with at least half a dozen people in the back. The station wagon was also full of passengers. They cheered and hurled insults at one another as they dodged the large boulders and parts of houses that littered the channel.
              I was recording the whole thing. Stopping only to interview the woman about what was going on. This was what we in the media were calling an "Apocalypse Club" and this particular one was called "Carmagedden" by its members. They raced with a complete abandon and an apparent disrespect for life. The woman corrected me on that particular. "No, we love life, but have come to understand that the demons come for us all, and you don't know when they will show up, or where, so you might as well live large, every day, it just might be your last."
              I went back to following the action from the dirigible (two dirigible dreams in one night!) and managed to get the camera settled just as the white station wagon tried to dodge a house shaped stone, that I soon realized. as we got closer, was a stone facaded house. It fell into the drainage channel and the truck swerved, two of its passengers falling out and ending up under the crumpled home. The station wagon rolled up onto the sloped side of the channel as the house passed just in front of them. A stone fence work tagged the front passenger side and the station wagon flipped and rolled.
              We looked around, but didn't see any demons. We swooped in to check on the condition of the driver and his passenger. Several of the passengers had climbed out and were all ready rolling the car over. The driver was in bad shape. The woman jumped out of the dirigible, dropping the last ten feet to the ground. She staggered over to the man and injected him with something.
              "Thanks." The drivers eyes almost instantly dilated.
              "Can you drive?" the old woman asked him.
              The driver held up his arms, both were a mass of compound fractures, bone and blood glistened in the hazy light. I imagined my news editor would have to censor that image before it replayed during the dinner hour. (It was going out live, now, though.) "No, Dolly, I don't think I can drive any more. It's time." Before I could wonder what would happen to him in a world in which medical care was nearly unavailable (demons seemed attracted to large groups of humans so hospitals and schools were a thing of the past) Dolly had taken out a gun and shot him in the head.
              Other cars began to arrive. Taking on the passengers and then taking off. "Get out of here, it's too crowded." Dolly started waving them off.
              From the slope above a leathery demon, batlike, swooped down on Dolly, the talons at the forward bend of its wings pierced her shoulders and it ripped her head off with its hands. I handed the camera to my sound guy and brought up a shotgun, blasting the demon. The flaming blast ripped its flesh from its frame, but the skeleton just leered at me and it crouched to jump for me. A second blast shattered its head. I immediately started scanning the sky, "Get back in the lift, before more of them show up."
              The club members of Carmagedden raised their intoxicants to us, beer, wine, pipes and needles of various sorts and sent us off with a cheer as they raced off in different directions. As we climbed out of the flood control channel, I watched as club members restarted the station wagon and drove it off as well.
              I signed off. The sound/camera guy looked at me, terror still written all over his face, "that's got Pulitzer written all over it."
              "That's got luck written all over it. Now I'm going to have religious nuts to deal with all afternoon."
              "Do you need more ammo?"
             
Blue Movie

              I was directing a film about two middle aged women who, in order to fight their depression, join an erotic dance class. They form a fast friendship, and end up in a furious romance that takes the form of them recording one another dancing, initially for their husbands and then eventually realizing they are dancing for one another. Finally they record themselves dancing together, this leads to more (not shown in our film) and that film is found by one of the womans' husbands. He feels that the other husband has to know what is going on. A serious complication, the second husband finds it quite exciting. The relationships, to one another, to their husbands and families explode, some to the breaking point.
              We had just finished a day of shooting on the erotic dance numbers, and the respective actresses found themselves fielding offers to help them "take the heat off." I had to send the crew out, finally.
              "My husband isn't going to know what hit him," one of them quipped.
              "I'm wishing I hadn't gotten rid of mine," smirked the other. She turned to me, "What are you doing tonight," she purred, "this is all your fault, you know."
              "I think you'd better call my wife and ask her," I pulled my cell phone off my belt for her.

Yellow Vial of N

       I dreamed that N and I were in a mouldy old woods, the mud was an ashen gray, and the undergrowth was a sickly yellow green. The trees also seemed diseased, but not enough to prevent them from nearly blocking out the sun. As we made our way over the swampy ground I heard the sounds of footfalls and heavy breathing behind us. Suddenly we were set on by half a dozen large wolf-like creatures.
       We were both badly mauled, but N was so bad that she was certain to die. I couldn't do anything about it there, so held a small square glass vial to her lips. She exhaled and her spirit became trapped in the vial. I patched her body up as well as I could. I then sat a bit and summoned a spirit to animate her body. We raced through the pungent woods and out onto a plain, wherein I found a road, and then to the outskirts of a small village. I left N's body and its animating spirit to find a healer.
       I returned with the healer, who fixed up N's body, and then I opened up the vial under N's nose, while thanking the spirit for helping me get her here. There was a little bit of a struggle, as the summoned spirit didn't really want to leave. I made it clear that there would be no corporal revival while the spirit was in N's place. The spirit returned to my soul bag while the yellowish glow of N's spirit infused her body. The healer revived her and set about fixing her minor wounds.
       When the healer was done, she turned to me and started healing me. The pain was intense, and nearly drove me into oblivion. It seems I had been dead for quite a while, and I was, in fact, animating my own corpse.

Little Red as a Tin Toy

             I dreamed I was escorting a bus full of students to a contest of some sort. When the bus turned down a road that wasn't on the travel plan I became worried. The bus trundled on for several minutes and pulled into a self-storage yard, where a bright light from above shone down on it.
             The bus lifted into the air and was pulled up into the light. I pressed a button the the dash of Little Red and she turned into a little tin toy flying saucer, with us still inside, somehow, and we chased after the escaping UFO. I managed to catch up with the bus, and followed it into the rather cavernous bay of the UFO. I drove/flew us into a dark unused looking corner of the bay and Little Red resumed her normal shape and size.
             "I didn't know your car could do that," a parent who was traveling with me said.
             "I had it installed for emergencies."
             "I's sure like to know where you'd get one of those."
             "Actually, so would I."
             
             In another dream I was up at M and S's place visiting. Again with Little Red in her Tin Toy mode. Only I had put her in that mode with the remote and carried her into the house as there was no where to park on the street. I thought that was because M and S were having a party. They weren't though. It was only me visiting.
             While I was freshening up in the bathroom I found the medical insert for Viagra. I was trying to read all of the possible side effects. but realized that I wouldn't have time as the list was a couple of pages long. The funniest one was that it may "turn you and your twin purple."
             That got me thinking about my twin. I wondered where he'd gotten to, why he never contacted me, whether he was in trouble or not. Which in turn got me thinking, "wait, I don't have a twin." This pretty much kicked me right out of the dream.
             
             I woke with a splitting headache and difficulty breathing, so called in sick and went back to bed. I dreamed that I was sleeping outside and it had begun hailing. The hail thundered down around me. I could hear it cracking through the trees around me and feel it pummeling the sleeping bag, which was getting cold.
             When I woke I had all three kittens, their Uncle T-Rex and their Uncle Giles piled up on me, most of them pitty-pawing. The electric blanket had timed out and it was, except for where the cats were cuddled on me, very cold. Outside it was pouring and water was coming off the roof in sheets, overflowing the gutters. I love when my brain is determined to stay asleep and weaves reality into the dream.

Forest Cruise Ship

       N and I were on a cruise, not sure to where. The destination didn't seem to be important, though, as we were having a great time racing through the forests trying to round up buffalo. The cruise ship was a huge forest from bow to stern. There were a couple of circular stair cases around the ship that allowed you to run down below decks to where the regular cruise ship cabins were located, as well as the dining rooms and shops. The entire upper deck of the ship was a forest, though, green and lush, a mix of pines and eldar, ash, birch and elms. I found a couple of oaks and walnut trees as well. I remember thinking that there should be more nut trees if they wanted to cut down on their food bills.
       I wondered if I could build such a ship, and if it could actually support buffalo and people (though certainly not as many as were aboard the ship in the dream.) Sort of a "bioboat" instead of a "biosphere."

Creepy House Repairs

       I dreamed that I was hired by an elderly woman to fix up her house. I repaired a couple of bannisters, re-hung a couple of interior doors that had been torn from their frames, and even repaired some damaged stairs. It looked like someone had broken in and carried off something very heavy, dropping it at least once on the stairs.
       Mostly I found myself re-hanging shutters, and adding latches so they could be attached and secured from the outside. When I got to the top floor, a single round room with a bed, vanity (sans mirror, the frame was there but there was no mirror) and dressing cabinet in it, I could tell it was a woman's bedroom, but judging by the long dark hair in the hairbrush, not the old woman's room. The door into the room was in the floor, and the room had eight porthole style windows. I put up the shutters, and as I was finishing the last one, the woman who lived in the room entered, or rather was pushed up into the room from below.
       She was lovely, full lipped, long dark hair, dark brown eyes, and a narrow waisted fully rounded traditional hourglass figure. She appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties. I showed her what I was doing, and showed her how the latches worked. She hinted that she was some sort of prisoner in this room.
       I used my drill to drill out the mounting circle for the latch of the last cover all the way through the shutter. I then showed her how to operate the latch from the inside of the shutters. (All it took was a small screw driver or square key.) I left her two keys to the shutters, one I taped to the top of a beam that ran over her vanity, and the other I told her to put in a drawer where her captor could find it. She got all teary eyed and thanked me. I made my way down out of the room and made a show of giving her one of the keys to open the shutters (without pointing out the modifications I had made.)
       I went out onto the roof to finish installing the final shutters, and to make some gutter repairs, I saw the old woman take the key away, and heard the lock being thrown on the trap door in the floor to the upper room. A few minutes later, the shutter I had rigged to open from the inside popped open. The woman waved at me, then closed the shutter and latched it. I went back up to the room and put a card in the shutter with my address and phone number on it. I then eased the shutter open and removed the window stops so the window could be opened far enough for the woman to escape.
       I looked out over the scaffolding that ran around the front and sides of the house. There were crocodiles on the side of the house. On the shore of a little pond there was a wadded up pair of coveralls, muddy, and a couple of chewed up shoes. I had a bad feeling about the rest of the job.
       I made a repair to a gutter that had been damaged by a fallen limb. The tree trimmer was there working also, it was TC. I asked him to leave a couple of thick branches just at the edge of the roof, sort of an escape route for the woman in the tower room. TC agreed and managed to trim the rest of the tree in such a way as to not make them obvious. I taped a few more cards to the roof, making a trail from the window to the tree.
       The two of us tried the tree escape route, found that it worked. We then started jumping across the scaffolding, TC making Sumo Wrestling stamping motions on each level of the scaffolding. Me checking each of my shutters on the second floor. Below the scaffolding, there were crocodiles roaming the back yard, pacing us. I knew they would attack anyone who set foot in the back yard. I found myself wishing we'd started in the back and had worked towards the front.
       The scaffolding that covered the front suddenly collapsed, and the steel pipes that connected it to the scaffolding in the back yard were pulled over the fence. That old lady was stronger than I thought. I heard the front door slam shut and the twisting of metal and creaking of wooden planks continued for a short moment in the front yard. We had to disconnect one of the scaffolding sections and tip it over and use it to make our way out of the back yard. It didn't quite reach to the fence, so I jumped out onto a high backed chair that had been stored outside.
       The chair's fabric had mostly rotted away, so it was pretty light. I was able to hop the chair around the crocodiles, who watched with great interest, but didn't attack. I was glad they were so well trained. I got the chair positioned where TC could reach it, then jumped for the fence.
       I didn't quite make it. As my foot touched the ground the crocodiles reared back to snap at me. I managed to step out after and up on the first one to lunge at me and so launch myself onto the fence by stepping off of its head. The crocodile had been so surprised by my moving towards it that it hadn't even opened its mouth as I approached. I balanced myself and walked along the top of the fence drawing the crocodiles away from TC. He jumped to the chair and then, rather than trying to leap to the fence, hopped the chair over to the fence and climbed out of the back yard.
       "I don't think the old lady is planning on paying us."
       "Shall we go find out?" I asked, more angry now than anything.
       In answer, TC pointed to the now bent and twisted remains of the scaffolding that had been in the front of the house. "Do you think she's going to know we escaped?"
       I hadn't even considered that we might still be in danger. I remembered seeing torn and muddy looking workman's clothing at the edge of the pond in the back yard and had an idea.
       TC was at least wearing a normal shirt and shorts under his coveralls. I was pretty much in a T-shirt and boxer-briefs.
       "I have another couple of overalls in the van," TC offered.
       I took a craft knife off of my belt and Made some shallow cuts on the back of my fore arm. The blood flowed faster than I thought it would, and I soaked it up with TC and my coveralls and shoes, then tossed them over the fence to the snapping crocodiles. There was ripping and growling, that moved away towards the pond in the back, then lots of splashing around.
       "I hope she's not really watching out back there, and that'll be enough to fool her if she is." I knew the house was completely shuttered and there weren't any windows left undone that I knew of.
       We snuck behind the hedge out to where TC's truck was parked. TC grabbed a couple of new coveralls out, and we dressed. I had to roll up the legs, but not the sleeves. A tow truck arrived. The driver was a little confused, he'd been told the van was abandoned. I stopped TC from sending the guy away, and suggested it might be best if the old woman saw the van being towed away. For a couple of extra bucks the tow driver allowed us to stay in the van while he collected his fee from the old woman, and drove us all away.
       I started to wonder if the woman we'd left an escape route for was like the old lady, and then I started to worry that I'd left her my address and phone number....