Five Hundred Miles

According to the song in my head, that's how far I'd walk, then I'd walk five hundred more...
I wonder what part of my brain turns the volume up on the mix tape so loud that it wakes me up from what is (was) a lovely little dream of slipping across dimensions through doors that only I can see in closets and basements that don't seem to exist for anyone else.

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.

Diablo IIID, All Downhill

My first dream (that I can remember) started with me waking up to the "You've died" sound in my headphones. I had nodded off while playing the new Diablo IIID game and my hardcore barbarian/ninja (class mixing was now a thing, apparently) had just been killed. Except what I was seeing wasn't the normal death screen, the center was periodically lightening and opening up and I could hear the chanting of my character's name, "Imhotep, Imhotep, Imhotep, wake up, wake up, breathe, time is running out..."

Sure enough, there was a timer down in the life orb, ticking down from 13 seconds. I reached for the controls, struggling to see what was happening to the red misty "death haze" it didn't look good, I was surrounded and the beasts were still milling about hammering on my ancients, who were going to return to their afterlife in just a few seconds. I didn't remember summoning them, but figured I must be wearing an item that did that, and saved me. I looked at the timer bars on my skills, there was only really one chance, jump over the ravine I'd parked myself at, because it looked like a safe place to take a breather. I just had to survive long enough to get my heroic leap charged up then I should be able to jump away.

The timer hit zero, just after the Ancients vanished. My health rocketed up to 50%, then immediately began falling. I tried to move out of the bad stuff, but I was immediately hemmed in. I switched over to an area of effect melee attack, just for the life steal, it helped, but not enough. The jump skill button lit, and I flicked my cursor over to the shelf on the other side of the ravine, hoping against hope that the rift was jumpable, and not the actual edge of the map.

I jumped out of the mass of attackers, and sailed across the ravine. I gulped down a healing potion and moved as far away from the milling mass as I could. Several of them broke off and flew across the gap, chasing me. At least now it was only four on one and not twelve on one. I discovered that there was a cliff face half a screen away from the ravine, and that was the edge of the map. There was, also a group of about thirty mobs, not elite, fortunately, but so many that I was going to find myself unable to move again if I wasn't careful. I looked at the timer on my Ancients, and realized that if I jumped into the middle of the mobs, I could probably fight long enough for them to act as sort of a meat shield, assuming the flying beasts had to land to attack me, which they did. A few hits and I was down a third of my life. I jumped away into the middle of the regular mobs, and the elite critters bunched up outside the edge of the mobs, apparently not able to launch and land in the midst of the mobs like I could. Lucky break for me. I switched over to single target attacking, only using the AOE when my health dropped down to fifty percent or so. Every time I used the AOE, a ring of mobs would die, and the dangerous ones would grow closer. I felt like I actually had a chance to make it.

All Downhill

This morning's dream (after getting up at the first hint of light to rattle the cats' food around in their bowls) I was more a silent incorporeal observer, though the woman did seem aware of my presence as she was talking to me much of the time. She was dressed for adventure, heavy pants and shirt, lots of pockets, a thin pack on her back and a pair of shoulder satchels, though I'm pretty sure one of them was essentially a purse, just adventure grade. She was also wearing a pith helmet, covered in the same heavy material. Her long dark brown hair was tied back and mostly trapped under her pack. She had a survival knife, which she was using to stop herself from sliding too far.

We were apparently lost.

We had spotted flowing water at the bottom of a steep slope, and rather than follow the edge of the slope, and looking for an easier way down, the woman had decided that she wanted to refill her canteens, and get cleaned up now. So, she immediately began climbing down the slope. I tried to keep her from anything that was really cliff-like, but since I was incorporeal, I really couldn't know how slippery some of the soil was, nor how sturdy the vines were that she was using to climb down. At a couple of points she used a rope looped through a root to lower herself twenty feet or so, then would pull the rope loose and coil it back up in the big pocket on the side of her pack. When we got within about sixty feet of the water, I flew out to see what it looked like.

There was steam coming off of it in places, and there were some pretty big crocodiles lounging down stream. Nothing near the steam vents, though. I tried to get the information to the woman, but couldn't actually communicate to her, so was forced to fly close and then away towards the safer choice whenever she moved towards the crocodiles. She moved her climb to come out at the edge of the water across from a fumarole. She did stop and look, as I placed myself at the edge of the shore and bounced up and down, and she slipped back into the brush quietly when she saw the crocodiles. There were lots of little animal skeletons there, but no sign that the big crocodiles came this close to the hot water. She moved upstream a bit and the water was actually cold, downstream, the water had an odd smell and was nearly boiling (we could see it boiling further out in several placed in the middle of the stream.) She decided to fill her canteens and take a bath in the cold water. She waded in fully clothed, unfortunately. I did notice a lot of dirt came off of her and out of her clothing. I circled around and up the slopes on either side of the stream. There didn't seem to be, with the sixty foot radius I could travel, to be a very clear path out of here, and following the stream down past the crocodiles didn't look like a very good option. I didn't find any signs of the crocodiles upstream as far as I could see.

Other Worldly Fall Through

I had one of those dreams that would take far longer to relate than it did to have. Myself and my cell phone were out for a walk when I crested a low ridge and fell right over the other side onto a different world.

I could tell it was different by how light I was, and the fact that the sky was full of nebulae and stars so close you could see they were small disks. There were no grasses, only broad leafed plants with leaves that turned to follow the brightest parts of the sky. I had no cell reception at all, so I turned off the phone completely to conserve the battery.

I wandered around a bit, coming across a path, whether made intentionally or a game trail of some sort, I couldn't tell. I moved down hill, figuring at least that might lead to water, eventually. The scents in the air were very purple and orange, with a touch of brine every so often. Insects flitted about, but I didn't see or hear any birds. There didn't seem to be any plants over about twelve feet tall, either. Everything had a pretty manicured look to it, though, so I began to think I'd wandered into some sort of garden.

I made my way down to the bottom of the trail, which curved along the edge of a steep slope. I looked over the slope and below me stretched out a nearly endless expanse of land and oceans. I knew in an instant it was a world far larger, and far different than our own little globe. As far as I could tell, it extended into every direction, blending in with the grey black of the sky. I could tell the little world I was currently on rotated slowly about an axis that would make this little trail eventually level or even feel like it was the top of the hill. I headed back away from the edge, hoping to find some signs of habitation.

I came across a camp of about thirty people. As soon as I entered the camp they asked what I was sent up for. It was a language that I had never heard before, so I don't know how I understood the question, nor how they would understand my answer.

I told them that I actually fell down. That was apparently the wrong thing to say as they all drew small makeshift weapons and advanced on me. As they drew close I noticed that they weren't all human, many of them had triangular ears and tails, puffs of fur grew from their cheeks like a lion's mane, and some even had whiskers and small flat noses.

"Look," I said "this is where I came from." I turned on my phone and opened up the photo gallery to show the pictures of myself and the kitties. That actually stopped them. They had never seen anything like it.

I tried to explain that it wasn't magic and the battery was not going to last long if I couldn't get back to my home to charge it.

They conferred a long time, and decided that I was some sort of wizard, and they really didn't want me there messing up their balanced society. Apparently they were all exiled here from the world below, they'd managed to scrape together enough resources to stay alive, but they were stuck as jumping off the world would likely be fatal, and they had received some supplies from below, as occasionally someone had jumped off and survived. The occasional survivor sneaked to the catapult that had put them there and fired up news and goods. The reports were also that survivors who returned to their home area were executed if caught. They knew this because their bodies had been launched up to the rock as a stern warning not to try it. I realized that the only people I could understand, and who understood me were the cat people. They had some sort of limited telepathy, it seemed.

They debated whether to strip me and take my stuff before throwing me off the rock, and during that debate I slipped away, heading to the edge of the rock, again. surveying the world below. Apparently that was not what they were expecting, as they headed for the uplands and the forests and caves to search for me. (At least what I could hear from when they discovered I was missing.) I would guess the whole rock was nor more than six or seven miles around, so a few square miles of fairly verdant territory. I found an area where there was a makeshift "Dock" at the edge of the rock. I guessed that this was the proposed drop-off point. I looked out over the edge and saw a huge water filled crater almost directly below me. I was really thinking a hang glider would come in handy right now. The sun came up, or, more precisely, the rock rotated into a position where the fiery globe in the sky that was this world's sun could reach where I was on the rock. I could see that there was a ladder on the side of the platform, so I climbed down. It turned under the rock and led down to a small ledge. I realized that if I slid down the ladder, and let go before the ledge I would be aimed right at the crater lake below the rock. So, not knowing what possessed me to do so, I let myself slide down below the rock and then let go as I neared the ledge.

Something in the mass above me seemed to counter my weight, and I didn't fall nearly as fast as I thought I would so I realized I was in danger of overshooting the lake below. I opened up my shirt and tried to use it as an air brake. That was partly successful, but wouldn't really have been effective. What was effective, however, was the force holding the rock up in the sky, it seemed to pull me into an orbit, or more accurately, a falling spiral centered on the crater lake below. My only regret now was that I had no way to protect my cell phone from getting wet. I balled it up in my shirt as best I could.

I don't remember hitting the water, but I woke in the bottom of a small boat, my shirt and phone balled up on my chest. I unwrapped it, and the inner folds of cloth were still dry. I couldn't have been in the water long.

"We fished it out first, it seemed really important to you." One of the fishing cats communicated to me quietly.

I thanked her. They dropped me off on the shore outside of a town before heading to their own village.

I looked up the street and realized that most of the signs were just pictures, but the few that contained text were completely unrecognizable.

I wandered up the street, looking at the various shops, realized that my cards and what little money I had were not likely to be worth anything here. I greeted folks as I walked, and they were friendly enough, but it was clear that no one but the cat folk were able to understand me, and even then it only seemed to be a fairly small subset of them.

I came upon what looked like a large town hall. I looked around for a seat, figuring I would just sit and watch for awhile, try to get a sense of the society, the way things work. It was pretty crowded and I eventually found myself in a little rectangular pen like area with several open stools. I sat in one, just to catch my breath and get my bearings a little bit. It was obvious after just a short while of looking around that the more cat-like cat people tended to be the less well off looking. There was a good spectrum of wealth shown among all the peoples there, but there were a couple of obvious trends like that.

I finally decided that I needed to move up to the gallery with the "poorer" folks, in the hopes that I would get some inkling of what was going on. Unfortunately, I had sat down in the "Defendants Paddock" and was no longer allowed to leave. I tried to explain what had happened but folks just laughed at me. A bailiff made me sit back down.

The judge/mayor came in, a red-haired woman who, oddly, I could mostly understand, even though she didn't look much like a cat person. I just assumed her words were so reinforced by the cat folk in the audience that I was getting them as a sort of telepathic overflow effect. There were a half dozen "cases" on the docket, not all of them criminal matters, some were civil matters. The Judge went through all of them, and then looked up to see me sitting there after all her files were done.

"Who are you?" she asked, and I could tell it WAS her that I was understanding.

When she realized that her audience couldn't understand me, and had begun wondering how she could, she had the bailiff remove me from the room.

I ended up in the police station, but not in a cell. It was obvious that I wasn't allowed to leave, but otherwise they brought me lunch and a light blanket when it started to get chilly. The evening shift came in, and one of the officers was a cat woman who was able to talk to me. The Judge arrived shortly after my interview with the officer.

The conversation, and another meal, was quite pleasant, and the Judge was pleasant, but very obviously concerned about my story. I could tell that she wasn't really willing to believe it, until I showed her the pictures on my phone, which sputtered and died after a few moments. It apparently had gotten some water in it after all. I had to convince her it wasn't magic, or at least no more so than the fact that we could understand one another.

After our long conversation about where I was from, she pointed out that she could have me arrested for being a vagrant, as I had no money and no place to stay. I could see she was weighing her options when the feline police officer rescued me, saying she had a spare room and I could stay there and help with the dogs until I found other work.

By the time the officers shift was done, I was bone tired and barely remembered the route to her home. I fell into her too small guest bed, and immediately fell to dreaming. (All I remember from the dream within this dream was sitting next to a busty woman in a blue linen jacket, immaculately tailored and with very shiny silver buttons.)

In the morning I got up and helped prepare the breakfast table and then washed up afterwards. Shortly after that the officer got up and took me out to where the dogs were. They were huge, about the height of a pony or small horse. She explained that the puppies were pretty tame, but their mother was still very feral.

She was indeed, and much larger than her children, the father of the puppies must not have been a particularly large specimen. I looked into the mother's eyes and immediately knew that she was much smarter than her handlers were giving her credit for. I jumped down into her pit. There were calls of alarm from the others, but we approached one another and greeted one another. I rubbed her face and ears and then took off the choke/spike chain from around her neck. She stood up and stretched. Then sat, looking at me. I gave her a roll I'd been saving from breakfast. I started walking her around the pit, stopping when she started to pull. (A lot like when walking J's dog Lucy.) We eventually jumped out of the pit and took a stroll around the grounds. The other handlers followed us with weapons and ropes, ready for her to make a break for it. I could tell she wouldn't as she wanted to stay close to her puppies. She kept looking at me like I was going to try to ride her, but I just ruffled her neck fur, gently rubbing down the injuries where the spikes had dug under her coat. Eventually we made our way back to the pit, and she willingly ran down the ramp and stretched out to nurse her newest litter of puppies.

I made sure I had more treats for her after dinner. As I walked out to the pit to feed her, the Judge fell into step with me. I was surprised to see her. As we walked, I realized that she was a cat person. "Did it hurt when your ears were docked?"

Her hand flew up to her ear, hidden by a tiara/turban sort of headdress, then she dropped it quickly looking around to make sure no one had seen. I also guessed that her bustle hid the fact that she had a tail, or at least the stub of a tail. I immediately felt sad for her. She could tell. I promised I wouldn't say anything, as her people adored her and were obviously prospering under her leadership.

Her conversation with me indicated that she would be much happier if I didn't stay in the area, and after seeing me feeding the "feral bitch" she lit upon the "perfect solution." When the puppies were weaned, I would take the dog and leave for a stint in the wilderness, find a feral mate for her so her puppies would be full sized next time. She also indicated that she would not be broken up if the two of us didn't return. Ever.

I told her that would be difficult, as I too was rather fond of the people of her village. I promised I would consider it, though. That seemed to strike her as true, and I realized than that the telepathy was much stronger between people who shared common passions. I think that very much disturbed her, but she knew I was serious about not being a threat to her village so she was content to let me free, but keep a close eye on me.

The dream continued on for quite some time. One night I went to a dance, like our English Country Dancing, except I had to learn the calls in a different language. I tried to dance with the cat women, as most of them could tell me the right (or left) way to go. It was a lot of fun, and everyone had good humor about my lumbering attempts to be graceful.

Another evening we had a huge bonfire and barbecue with story telling. Again I had to have "translators" for several of the stories. I showed my hippo photograph and described the San Diego Zoo. I tried to draw a picture of a giraffe, and that got everyone laughing.  I worked with the dogs, including the feral mom.

Eventually the dog and I were out working with the police, tracking large animals who'd broken into some chicken coops, or chasing after a lost child, or just patrolling the village after dark with my hostess. However, I never rode her like the police rode her grown puppies. It suited us fine. (It was then that I noticed that I was easily fourteen inches taller than any of the villagers, and bigger than all but the blacksmiths and warrior types.) I had little trouble keeping up with the pack, even when they were running. (They were a little faster, but I could run far longer.)

At some point my hostess actually paid me, and then told me about the kingdom'c bright city center, where there were rumors of magic looking glasses like my own, and people who know how to make them work again. I wasn't sure mine would fully recover from the water damage, but when I powered it up, it did come up, and there was no crackling. Still no signal, though. I agreed that a trip to the capitol was probably in order, so we spent my wages on outfitting me and the dog for travel. I was amazed when she allowed me to put a puppy backpack on her, but she seemed to be excited about the trip, too.

This was the point where I woke. I really didn't want to, as I wanted to find out more about this interesting world.

Dreamlands Park, After Closing

I was visiting the Dreamlands Theme Park, and somehow managed to become separated from the rest of my group. I wandered around for a bit, checking out the shops in the far corners of the park. There was a little hat shop I liked, so was there in the little nook between two knolls when the fireworks began to go off. The fireworks signaled the closing of the park, and most people rushed to the little mock village in the front of the park to get the best view of the fireworks. I figured that would most likely be where my friends had gone. I stayed to talk to the hat shop clerks, and the milliner, who'd stepped out front to view the fireworks.

He commented that though they seemed pretty far away, we did have a good view of the show, because of the alignment of the valley. (Dreamlands Park, while a lot like Disneyland, was on much hillier terrain, more like Legoland California. It was an interesting feature of the Dreamlands part that there were several access tunnels through the hills and knolls of the park, leading from one section to another, and out into the loading docks and warehouses and kitchens in the back areas of the park. We chatted a bit, and he gave me a really nice scholar's/prelate cap to go with my cloak. As I walked to the front of the park, I stopped to talk to several of the craftsmen, as I had gotten to know them over the years.

As I passed through one of the large outdoor stage areas, some of the performers recognized me and invited me to stay a while for their post closing sing along. They sang the various shows' songs, and used the time to learn other shows' songs in case they needed to fill in, or wanted to change parts. I really wanted to get to my friends, but they convinced me to stay and sing a couple of songs. I made it through one song and one of the directors came and took me aside to ask if I would ever think of actually performing at the park. "Only if I don't sing," I laughed.

He laughed as well and said, "Of course not." He'd sent me on my way, having rescued me from the never ending song that had just started up as the performer's second selection.

Each time I stopped to chat, my outfit would change and soon I was dressed in cloak, scholar's cap, white frilled shirt and surplice, breeches that were black like my cape but with red and gold trim (also like the cape and hat.)

As I made my way through the candle and print shops, a group of clergy entered the shop and greeted me as Reverend Malthus.  I decided, after getting the "go for it" signal from the candlestick maker, to go along with the charade. I played the part for a bit, and then one of the clergy noticed my computer bag under my cloak and started going through it to look at all the odd "devilish looking" implements, pens, a watch, etc.  Most of the stuff wasn't mine, but I made it to be a sample of tricky German engineering, or a Spanish tube of ink with a steel nib, etc. It made for an amusing few moments and really stretched my imagination. We moved up to the Print Shop and while there, we picked up some more lost and found items to take to the front of the park. While I was there I noticed the real Reverend Malthus (well, an actor portraying him) making his way across the street with his own group of clergy.

Rather than a confrontation, we greeted each other as brothers, and laughed at the confusion of our "junior" clergymen. We posed together for pictures on each of the lost cell phones and digital cameras, figuring that would be a funny surprise for whoever claimed them. We spent a bit of time adjusting our costumes and primping our ruffles and vestments before each shot, trying to get just the right "serious and pious" expressions. He whispered to me that my friends were waiting at the front of the park, having figured out that they'd lost me. We gripped hands and hugged, sending one another on our way. He suggested (in character) that we should do this more often. We continued our tour, he handing me his group's Lost and Found items to take up to the management office, as he was actually still headed deeper into the park.  Some of my actors were very confused, so some others tried to straighten them out by saying that I was the "real" reverend Malthus and not their actor. I had a very hard time staying in character at that point I wanted to laugh so much.

When we got to the front offices I dropped my "disguise" and was back in my normal clothing, much to the younger actors' amazement. "It's the Old Man on the Hill" they whispered to one another.

"I can still hear you, you know."

Myself and the older actors and the office staff laughed at the blushing and stuttering youths. I smoothed things over by shaking each of their hands and thanking them for a delightful evening. I left a gold coin in each of their palms. (Too bad I can't do that trick for real.) My friends were waiting just outside the park office and we blended in and exited with the last of the happy and exhausted crowd.

Road Trip from Hell

Not to Hell, from Hell, as in, escaping in a little red car, but not my little red car. I was driving, bumping along over broken up roads and through the high grass stalks trying to lay claim to the path. Suddenly, large metal objects barely spotted in time to avoid them, my evasive maneuver caused us to bounce completely off the road and we ended up straddling a ditch. I managed to slow us down to a stop with the vehicle still drivable.

We'd seen no signs of pursuit, but I knew there were plenty of dangers lurking in the harmless looking woods nearby. We needed to find a way to get the car back on the roadway. The ditch ran alongside the road a good number of yards, and there it went into a culvert under a crossroad. We debated between going into the woods for lumber to try to make a bridge, or driving oh so carefully, to the crossroads in hopes that we could just drive up onto the roadway from there.

We decided to head to the crossroads with a couple people sitting on top of the car to let me know when to stop so they could move stones, or build up dirt to get over them.

It took far less time than I thought it would, and there were still no signs of pursuit. The ditch widened as we approached the culvert, and the flows had undercut the roadway a little bit. There were more discussions and while the team was up on the road above the culvert, I saw something moving in the culvert, blocking the entire thing, almost. I slammed the door and steered the car down into the ditch, then built up enough speed to turn it up the bank at the last second. I thumped up onto the roadway with some sort of half scorpion, half snake looking thing hot on my tail. I accelerated down the dirt road, slamming on the brakes and spinning around. I stomped on the accelerator back towards the creature, and then stomped the brakes and slammed into it (using the passenger side rear fender.)

With a sick sounding thunk I bounced up and over it, then raced back to the panic-stricken group. I unlocked all the doors and shouted for them to get in. This works way better in the movies than it does in my dreams. I saw the creature pulling itself back up onto the roadway, "get back!" I stopped short of the group and shifted into reverse, thankful that this little dirt road was both straight, and debris free.

I hit the thing full force and it shattered, smashing in the trunk and shattering the back window. I raced back to the group, who'd managed to arm themselves with sticks and rocks. They pulled the doors open and started shouting at me to get out. I looked in the back seat, and the top half of the creature was chewing its way through the back seat.

After we managed the kill the thing, no one wanted to get back in the car, so we packed out as much stuff as was still untainted by it's highly corrosive blood and started back down the road on foot.

It was then that I noticed that I was the tallest one of the group, and the oldest, and the fattest. There was a twenty something couple, both very clingy on one another and dressed similarly, like a fast food place uniform, and a younger person who I'm not certain was a boy, or a girl disguised as a boy. There was a middle aged man and woman, not really a couple, and of indeterminate relationship to the child, sometimes one or the other was sort of parental, and other times they ignored the kid. I had found the three of them together, so in my head I thought of them as a family, though they really didn't show any sign of that.

As we picked our way carefully along the roadway, I wondered what sort of world produced automobiles, but not firearms. The makeshift spear had me all sorts of worried about our odds of getting safely away from this place and back to some sort of civilization. I think I understood why there was no pursuit.

Travelling Show

I fell in with a travelling show. It started at a log-filled campground, where I pointed out that one of the large carved structures was actually a twenty foot tall doorway, wedged up against a hill lying nearly flat against the ground. We pulled at it a bit, and finally managed to open it up. I just expected to find damp grub-filled compost beneath it, but instead the door opened up onto a sunlit road. The base of the door was on a small dark path that lead through a light forest out to a road.

"That's some backdrop," one  of the show girls said.

"It's not a backdrop, can't you hear the birds, smell the meadow and feel the heat of the sun?" I moved to the base of the door, where the forest path looked like it went down into the hill.

Everyone backed away as I leaned down and reached through. I could feel the change in the pull of gravity on my arm, like a gentle pressure in the wrong direction. One of the strong-men was near the top of the door and started to lean through. "Stop!" I shouted. You'll fall all the way down, that's got to be twenty feet or more.

He looked at me, then nodded. I'm not sure he really understood me, but his sister, a dusky-skinned black haired woman, who couldn't have weighed more than ninety pounds even covered head to toe with her coin-laden dancing outfit was translating what I had said as fast as she could. We gathered at the base of the door and I stepped through, suddenly feeling like I was pushed from behind. I stumbled forward along the leaf covered path, then I looked back at the door.

From this side it was brightly painted and only a little weathered looking. The troupe of the travelling show looked through at me, standing around the opening, seemingly hanging in mid air from my new perspective. The tall trees over their heads pointing away into the light forest.

Curious, I walked around to the other side of the door, but there was no door from that side! Only an open path through what looked like a large tree trunk. I rushed back around to try to describe that, and found the entire troupe was passing their carts and bags through.

"We didn't want you to be alone." The Dusky Sister smiled at me as she hopped through, allowing me to catch her. The other dancers followed, with me helping each of them adjust to their new gravitational orientation.

The brother nodded and spoke, I can only guess it was Romanian, or something similar, some of the words were familiar, some were not. His sister translated for him. They had decided to move on from where they were camped anyway, and this looked like a real adventure.

My friend, GR, stepped through last, he hadn't been part of the troupe, either, but his acting ability and clown training had won us a spot in the troupe's circle of friends several days earlier. I'd made myself useful by repairing their wagons, appliances, computers and props, plus had showed them some new magic tricks I'd picked up along the way. We'd not decided whether to stay with the group when they moved on, or, at least, I hadn't decided to stay with the group.

The door swung closed behind GR as he dragged our packs through. It felt, strangely, like the door had been waiting for that moment, waiting for GR.  I could see no way to open it, as the whole thing now looked like it had been carved from a single large trunk.

The back of the door confirmed that, it too looked like a solid piece of trunk, bark and all. The tree trunk hadn't been solid when I'd walked around behind it just moments before. I pulled out my cell phone. There was no service. GR and several of the troupe did the same.

"I don't think we're in Kansas any more," GR said.

"I thought we were in Escondido," one of the dancer's said, then looked around to the road just a few hundred feed away. "I don't think we're there any more, either."

I set off towards the road, expecting the sun to be significantly warmer, I pulled on my floppy hat. The shadow that fell across my face was wrong, and when I stepped out from under the trees I knew why. There were two suns in the sky. The topography of the place was much flatter than Escondido. I stood there dumbfounded for a long time allowing the differences to sink in. Even the plants along the road bed were different looking. The trees, also, had an oddity about them that was difficult to place.

When I looked back along the trail I watched as the caravan wagons bounced along the trail and then out onto the road. The cars had been left behind, so they were being pulled by the strong men, and teams of dancers. I shouldered my pack, and helped GR lift our generator's tow bar. We joined the troupe, heading across the meadow towards what looked like a town in the distance. There were no signs of smoke, or industrial haze, so I hoped we'd landed somewhere where there was electricity, at least.

Derelict Stowaway, Cute Toes

In the first dream I was on a tugboat being taken out to an abandoned sailboat I had just bought the salvage rights to for four hundred dollars. I was carrying only two bags, one with tools and one with clothes and food. I waved goodbye to the tugboat captain and immediately set to work coiling up the rigging from the broken mast.

The mast still had about half it's height left, so I knew that I would be able to rig enough sail to get back to port. I wondered why the tugboat captain hadn't offered to give me a tow; the water wasn't that rough. I knew that in a storm the lake could be very dangerous, but it was just a little windy.

I made my way to the bridge, and found that there was still power and about thirty gallons of fuel in the generator. I was calculating how far that would get me if I transferred it to the engine, presuming that it was still working. As I was making my plan of action, after turning on the running lights, I heard a noise from the cabin area below.

I made my way below and discovered a small child, between two and five. I offered him some food and drink. He came up to the bridge with me, showing a great deal of fear of the weather. I couldn't get him to tell me his name. It only took me a little bit of work to get my radio working. I contacted the harbor police to let them know that I had found a live passenger on the boat I was salvaging. They advised me to try again in twelve hours, as the weather was too rough to send a helicopter.

The child apologized for hiding on the boat. He'd been playing with friends when the boat had suddenly left the dock. By the time he'd gotten brave enough to come out and tell someone he was on board, there was no one there. Then there was a storm and everything broke and the power went out.

He was pretty smart fo a little guy, he had eaten the refrigerated goods first, and saved the cereals and snack food for last. Judging by what he'd eaten, I guessed he'd been out here for almost a week.

I managed to get a sail up, and we turned towards the harbor, of which I could just make out the lights shining on the bottoms of distant storm clouds. I couldn't find a child's life vest, which verified that he was a stowaway, but managed to get one of the smaller vests on him.


This morning I was in a car being driven by a cute woman with a round face, freckles dusted across her nose, and a very sleek looking pageboy haircut. Her hair was a light coppery color and her eyes were a matching shade of brown.

We were chatting about something inconsequential whe she suddenly pulled her left shoe off, causing the car to drift a bit. I was polite and didn't say anything. She crossed her left leg over her right and curled her toes so I could see her toenail polish.

" I got this really cute pedicure, see?"

Her toenails were painted with peach blossoms on a green and blue background. Her feet and toes were absolutely the cutest I have ever seen. "Your toes are the cutest I have ever seen." As I looked up from her toes my line if sight went up her very shapely calf and across her smooth thigh, under wher her sundress had hiked up to she just the tiniest bit of her yellow panties and a sparse layer of ginger curls escaping the edge.

"Hey! Eyes on the toes!"

I looked up, she was looking directly at me, blushing and pulling her dress down over her lap. The car swerved a bit.

"Eyes on the road." I resisted the urge to grab for the dash as she swerved us back into our lane.

"You owe me now!"

I crossed me left leg over and curled my toes in to show her my toenails. I was just wearing sandals.

"That's not what I mean, and you know it."

"How about we wait until you're not trying to drive?"

I woke up thinking that whoever this was she was the prettiest woman I had ever dreamed up.

Time Lost

              I dreamed that I woke up in a cluttered two bedroom apartment south of Poway. I knew that something was wrong, as I couldn't remember what day it was, or where I worked. I went to find my car, but the only keys I could find had the Plymouth key on it, not the Honda key. I got up and fed the two strange cats. They acted like they knew me, and were very affectionate, but I didn't recognize either of them.
              I brought in the newspaper, and the date was August 24, 1986. The paper itself was new and fresh. I realized that something was very amiss. I drove up to the school district offices, where no one knew me, but a couple of people asked where I'd been, and what I'd been up to. Apparently I hadn't worked for the school district since I'd gone back to school. (Which I, of course had no recollection of doing.)
              Things got fuzzy and things got blurry, and I found myself back on the road, this time not in the Plymouth, and not the Honda either. I pulled over in front of a Seven-Eleven and paid for a paper. The date was still August, 24, but the year was 2010. I drove back over to the school district offices, where they were even more surprised to see me this time. It seems I had died in a boating accident in Wisconsin in 2006 or 7.
              Finding that very awkward, I made my way out to my car, and then realized that I had no idea where I should go. I checked the address on my driver's license and drove home. The problem was, that N wasn't living there any more, and the only familiar thing was a scrawny T-Rex who made his way out of the Juniper Jungle that is in the front of the house to greet me. The current owners came out to ask me what I was doing.
              “Just petting T-Rex, he's the only thing left from when I used to live here.”
              “You used to live here?”
              “N and I, but I don't know what happened. Where are the other cats?”
              “She took them with her, but this one keeps coming back.” They looked at me, suddenly uneasy, “What do you know about an orange toy box in the rafters?”
              “I had one of those when I was a kid. I think there were some badly aged plastic road strips and some other toys, like the old red, white and blue Tupperware building blocks. Probably some of my grade school papers as well.”
              “We thought you were dead. Your wife never came back for that or the suitcases full of D&D stuff.”
              “Do you happen to know where she went?”
              “I think you need to leave now.”
              By this time, T-Rex was quite attached to my neck and purring so loud I'm sure everyone on the block could hear him.
              One of the neighbor 's older boys walked across the street. “Where did you come from? We went to your funeral. Are you D's brother?”
              “No, I think something has come unstuck in time. It's me, but this might not be my time-line.”
              While I was talking to C, the new residents brought out my gaming cases and the orange toy box. They wanted me to take them, and the cat, back to N. I agreed to do so and headed over to a condo address near the college, near our friend J.
              I never got there, but even though the location and time (I presumed) changed, the gaming cases and T-Rex remained with me. I was starting to get very frightened. I didn't want T-Rex to be lost somewhere, but I had no idea what was happening, and how I might have any control of that. The rest of the stuff, I realized, was just stuff, but I didn't want to lose T-Rex as he was my only connection to my right time-line and the possibility of getting back to N. While I was rustling up some cat food and water for T-Rex my cell phone rang. (Not the work phone I currently have, I noted.) The FBI wanted to know where I was currently located, they said I should stay put and they might be able to answer some questions. I told the voice on the phone that I didn't want to go anywhere, especially without my cat.
              The problem was, I didn't know where I was currently located. I was back in the Honda, Little Red, but was parked in a KOA campground with a tarp closed in the windows and stretched out over the back of the hatch and held on the ground by my orange toy box. I had some sort of fold out cot structure that I was using for a bed and the hatch was being propped up by my old costume wizard's staff.
              Out of curiosity I opened up the toy box pushing the tarp up a bit with the lid. The toy chest was full of clothing, including long thick socks and various kilts. There were also a couple of notebooks in the chest. For some reason I found myself describing this as I went through them.
              “Don't read anything!” The voice on the phone warned. “That seems to be what triggers the changes for most people.”
              “You mean this is happening to lots of people?”
              “Not lots, but enough to keep a couple of us busy.”
              “Do you know how to stop this, to get me back to my real home?”
              The voice hesitated, “Uh, we're working on it.”
              I idly flipped open a notebook and immediately recognized the handwriting, it was my own version of the 'Stop' typeface, meticulously lettered around a complex drawing. I felt T-Rex climb into my lap, smelled the cat food on his breath. I flipped a page and read the titles on the next page “Obvious Differences,” and “Similarities,” and written in all caps under neath “D - FILL THIS OUT AS SOON AS YOU/I CAN! IT WILL TRAVEL WITH YOU/ME, IN SOME FORM”
              I saw the words “2012, PDA replaced by paper notebook, Police State! As the last line of the 'Differences' page. And a string of “T-Rex, Orange Toy Box,” under 'Similarities.
              I was about to ask the FBI caller how the Constitution was these days when everything shifted again.
              I was still sitting with T-Rex in my lap, but the world was a gloomy blend of dark purples and deep forest greens. The Journal was my old Leather covered Journal, this time with a thick notebook made of graph paper in it. I quickly penned in some notes for the last place, what little I'd experienced, and the differences I noticed in this place. The Orange Toy Box was not in my range of vision and I knew, somehow, that I would be here a little bit longer. I pulled out my wallet to see where I was living, or at least what was recorded there. I flipped back to the complex drawing, actually several of them, and discovered that the further apart myself, T-Rex and the Orange Toy Box were, the longer I stayed in a place. I found a note page that indicated that when T-Rex was in the box the time in that realm was estimated to be mere seconds. “DO NOT REPEAT THIS EXPERIMENT, ALMOST LOST T-REX!” was written under the illustrations. And “Always keep food and water in the box!”
              It was T-Rex howling that made me realize that we were sitting in the overgrown wreckage of my current home. He was reacting to the presence of another animal. A raccoon was watching us from the thick Wisteria bush. I stood up, frightening the animal off. T-Rex tried to burrow into my armpit. It was chilly, so I looked around for something to throw on. Everything in the place seemed to be covered with a thin layer of dark velvet, mold, I realized, and carefully made our way out into the street. The whole neighborhood was over run with mold. Even the sky seemed tinted by it. I pulled my shirt up over my nose and let T-Rex climb in underneath, using the notebook to give him a place to sit. I started looking for my car, or any way out of this particular place.

Time Door, Sirocco

Time Door

       I dreamed of a duel direction sliding glass door. The dream was interrupted and then continued when I returned to sleep. The early portions of the dream are sketchy now.

       The door was in the back wall of a house like my parent's house. Plain, single level, four bedroom (rather than 3) and a couple of baths. It was on a low rise surrounded by trees and fields (long fallow) when the dream began.

       For several of the jumps, Red Paw was with me. Short jumps into the future, the “Where have you been gone?” sort of jumps. Coming back and finding the furniture dusty and not much else has changed. Finding a child of about eight, who'd been missing for years wandering in the back yard, crying because this was his house, not ours.

       A ferret, but much larger than a modern ferret, and calico. His collar was also a camera and highly futuristic. Red Paw found him wandering on the patio I build outside the door. They became friends in a very short couple of days.

       Jumping to the past, delivering the missing child, changed the future. Pure blind luck we arrived anywhere close to the right time. The kid's parents had abandoned the house, thinking it was haunted, and because of the slight recession and people moving to the big city, the house was empty when we landed. Their contact information was on the front door, though, and we were able to call and leave the kid for them. We were within about a year of when he vanished. Red Paw and I didn't stay around to answer questions.

       I appeared outside the house after dropping the kid off. I had to break into the house to jump again, there was no longer any contact information on the door. The former owners didn't answer their old phone number. Red Paw and I jumped slightly into the future again. The house was completely boarded up and I had to break in to allow us access to the door mechanism. We oversleep and the jump landed us far into our future. The current owners of the house don't even know there is a door there, as it has been covered.        Red Paw and I tiptoed out of the back yard and greet the woman of the house, she was gardening in the front yard. I explain that we were taking a walk and “We've gotten ourselves so lost, we don't know what year it is.”
       The woman tells us the year, enjoying the “joke”. I should've been 99 years old, and Red long dead. We talk a while. The woman invites us in, we meet her father and husband. The husband comes back from the study with a framed photo. It is of Red. “He looks just like this cat!”
       “He is that cat. We used to live here.”
       Everyone laughed.
       “There were more photos upstairs. Just a second. The husband ran up into the attic with a jaunty bounce. He returned with several photos and paintings. Frowning.
       “Just what is going on here!” he demanded, putting the photos and paintings on their table. There was a photo showing me and Red with N and several other cats. I emptied my wallet, credit cards, money everything was from the past.
       “There's a bored time machine under the house. I know it would be more convincing if I was from your future, but it is what it is.”
       He turned over the photograph. “It is what it is” was written on the back in my handwriting.
       We all sat looking at one another in stunned silence.
       We took out the pony wall to reveal the old sliding door frame behind the wall's footer. It was marked in increments about half a centimeter apart all along its length. Numbers on the one side, and numbers with plus and minus on the other. I had trouble figuring out what they might mean. “These weren't here when I jumped. I get the feeling I will eventually figure out how to operate it, and when I do, I'll try to leave instructions. I can't imagine we would sell the house without the instructions, unless that's why this is closed off. I hope I figure it out.
       We became friends, in large part thanks to Red Paw, who was a little charmer. It took a couple of days, but we were able to clear the wall. I set the thing for what seemed like would be a relative jump to my home time, and stepped through after suggesting they wall the thing up when I was gone. I think that is the only time in the dream there were witnesses to us walking out of the door and just vanishing.
       Jumped to a future where there was no house, and we were on the remains of a landfill. The house and its doors were buried beneath a layer of composted trash. And the junkyard dogs were robotic and fortunately a little bit intelligent. I managed to convince them that I needed one of the digging cranes to come and uncover “my property.” They were bored and so arranged to dig me a trench. There were no more glass doors, just the frame with its evenly spaced scratches barely visible below the scratches from being the floor of a dump. I took a bit to reveal the whole thing. I was tempted to have the crane pull the foundation up, but really didn't want to risk being stuck here. I found some strips of metal to drop into the tracks and set them to the reverse of what had brought me to the future. I made note of the company names and logos on the junkyard crane and robotic dogs. I knew I'd be investing if they existed.
       I didn't think it odd that the dogs were so helpful until after a cold night with Red Paw curled unhappily against my chest. He'd not had any dinner and only a little water. The robot dogs had taken turns watching over us during the night. In the morning, I stepped across the threshold and felt a little tug as I crossed over. The yard was still green but browning a bit.
       “N left again, I was gone too long last time.” I heard in my own voice.
       “I think I can figure this out...” and the world shifted radically. Memories of two time lines merged in my head. The two universes collapsed into a common one like soap bubbles. None of the missing alternatives were any the wiser. Only I retained the memories of both worlds. Red Paw was gone. No not gone, he was with N. I called her to make sure he was all right. She was testy about it, not even realizing that he hadn't been with her the whole time. She accused me of running off with the ferret girl. I had no idea what she was talking about.
       I decide to run an organized test. What I discover is that time jumps are determined by how far the door is open and which side governs forward or back, as well as how close and how long a person is in the vicinity of the door when it is open. (Partially why there were so few disappearances, the room had almost always been a study, and when it was a bedroom the door was either never open, or only open a little bit. The real time device was buried beneath the door frame. The controls were missing so the AI used the sliding doors as a sort of “control substitute.” Or at least that was my guess. During the test I borrowed a meter stick from a neighbor and marked the track in either direction every half centimeter. In so doing I found that I seemed to connect to something deep under the slab. I put a door stop on the thing to keep it closed. Oddly, that seemed to work pretty much like an off switch. There were no jumps if the clip was anywhere on the track, inside or out. No matter how long the door was open or how long I was exposed.
       During my testing, the ferret returned. I put a note on his collar about how the door worked and in so doing discovered that he already had a note with the settings that were used to send him through. I reversed those settings, to the best of my understanding, and jumped forward with the ferret.
       There was a ferret girl. She was a very bright teen, and very methodical in testing the door. She had uncovered the slider frame and convinced her parents to put the sliding door back in place. It had motors to control the opening and she'd managed to convince her parents to keep the original track with the markings on it. The numbers were still in my handwriting. She showed me the pictures of Red Paw, N and myself. “I knew you would be there sometime. Tell me how it works.”
       “You caught the wrong one, I'm only just working it out.”
       We spent some time fiddling with the settings and that was when we discovered that exposure to the settings was part of the equation. She'd done a ton or research on missing kids and other anomalies, she'd collected a couple of volumes of my photographs (Flat Memory media that she slipped into a reader on her wall and, well, I recognized many of the photos, but not all of them.) “You should have been a professional, full time.”
       “I was sort of busy...”
       “I suppose so.”
       On a more serious note. She said she found a sort of maximum back end, sometime in 1953. She didn't ever try it, as she was afraid to run into the folks who'd originally installed the time machine and would be just another one of the four vanished kids.
       Her story made me feel a little bit queasy about the possibilities of how the thing might be used by the wrong sort of person. I decided that I would have to go, but to do so would require me to stay in the room near the device with the door on the left all the way open for about a week. Her parents weren't too keen on the idea, but because they knew their parent's story about meeting me, had my photographs, and there I was again, unchanged, over twenty years later, they found the time travel story rather believable..
       The parents were also a little concerned that other kids had gone missing in the past, and that there I was in their house, with their daughter. I explained to them what I wanted to do, how, when I met myself earlier the time lines had collapsed together like a soap bubble. I wanted to fix the missing children and I thought I knew where they all went. To the beginning. They had all vanished before the house had central air, and all from the hottest part of summer. They didn't go all the way to the beginning of the time machine, just close, about a weeks worth of hot days close. Ferret girl lent me her ferret, Chester, and taught me how to operate his GPS, though I reminded her there wasn't any GPS system in 1953.
       I jumped to 1953 and found the local sanitarium was home to three missing children, and two adults who knew enough details of their time to convince me that they were from the actual future. I don't know how I managed to break them all out, but I did, and we made our way onto what was a farm at that time. The house that covered the time machine hadn't been built and the time machine itself was difficult to find. I rolled out a tape measure where the door frame would eventually be, and set metal rods on it in the position to take the first missing child back home. We jumped early the next morning, and reunited the kid with his family. They had completely boarded up the room, so we had to get the family to open the room up for us. The family promised to shutter the thing when we had jumped. I felt several things shift in the multi-verse and once they did I only had two missing folks to return home. One was a child of about 11 or 12 and the other was an old woman who only admitted to being above retirement age. They barely remembered our other travelers.
       Each of the missing one returned also caused a shift in the universe, as we knew it. For good or ill, I couldn't really say. Chester vanished on one of the remaining trips. That made me sad. I was surprised that I remembered him, in fact it seemed I could recall a lot of things that were changed. I wondered what would happen if I never bought the house, how would I have fixed all this, then. Then I was alone, in the boarded up house and I planned my jump home, hoping to make it before N left. I really didn't want that to be over.
       I arrived, and the Ferret Girl and Chester were there. FG was explaining that they were just looking for me, and there wasn't anything going on. That wasn't exactly true. As I stepped into the house the universe shifted, and I suddenly remembered FG from 1978 and changed my personal history by becoming one of my early girlfriends. A girlfriend who introduced me to time travel by sneaking into an abandoned farm house a couple of hours away from home.
       I could feel that the time machine needed my continuity as I was most connected to it, having traveled in time both as an adult and as a teen with FG. Talk about complex. I had memories of both of them in my head. FG was still a teen, though, and I was still old. The universe shifted and N vanished from the picture, as did the cats. FG was also gone. My new continuity was settling in without either of them, but I still owned the house. I jumped back hoping to merge with myself at 25, just before meeting N. Only, the memories didn't go away, I still had three or four time lines worth of memories. I realized it was going to be tough to live through it all again without trying to fix the mistakes and to take advantage of missed opportunities. Turns out I needn't have worried, at least about that. We didn't merge, our time and existence were separate enough not to even meet. I jumped back home and put the slide lock in the door. N didn't know who I was. I had lost FG somewhere in time, a jump where we both ended up in different places, and I hadn't been able to find her, either going forward or back.

Sirocco

       I was in a desert environment, investigating a ruin tucked into a small rocky semicircle of former reef along a desert coastal inlet. The site was a three color high contrast scar in an otherwise vast expanse of sand and sea. As I climbed out over the dunes to get a good vantage point to take some photos of the entire site for an over view, I heard a roaring behind me, like thunder, only it never stopped. I looked back to see a wall of billowing sandy brown clouds bearing down on us. I packed up my camera gear and ran back to the camp, “Dust storm!”
       The lead archaeologist looked up from an old Samsung monitor he was measuring and detailing to ask “How much of the horizon?”
       I ran out of the tent and climbed on top, the tent was apparently some sort of modern electrically stiffened material. The cloud wall was slightly more than half the horizon and closing in. I could feel the heat and wind speed picking up. “We have to get to cover and fast.”
       We ran around, finally deciding to take the pallets of monitors and cover them with our tent material, and then to use the same material to stretch out a roof over us. I undid several battery powered pieces of equipment and rigged them to supply current to the tent fabric surrounding our “artifacts” but the storm got to us before the six of us could rig up a roof and get power applied. We all dove into the lee of the rocks between the ancient black coral and the pallets of equally ancient monitors. (Which I had visions of stacking in a previous life time.) The world became all roaring and dark and gritty and brown. We all had respirators, and we stretched the remaining tent material out over us trying to maintain some breathable space.
       If we don't report in, someone will come for us, we just have to keep enough air around us to survive until the storm passes.
       I was working to try to get to the electrical contacts with the batteries from one of our food processors to stiffen our cover, as I could tell there was going to be more sand on the tent than we could hold up by hand for any length of time.

Holiday Dream, WoW Inspired and Support Your Troops Inspired as well.

       I dreamed I was sitting in the back yard, looking at our tree, (yes, we decorate a tree in the back yard, I'm allergic, so it can't live in the house) when suddenly snowflakes explode around our heads and we are each in our own little private snow storm. Unlike the WoW snowstorm, though, this is freezing cold.
       I started running around trying to keep warm and dry. The snow built up behind where I was running, giving us a racetrack shaped oval of snow with my footprints in it. N was running right behind me for a bit and then decided to run in the other direction so she wouldn't be getting snow in the face.
       I finally realized that we could 'right click' on the snowflake icon and dismiss the effect. At the same time I wondered how I'd gotten inside the video game, and wondered: what in the world was I supposed to use to right click with?
       I had another dream, this one about driving into a strange city, and, after being thoroughly turned around, I drove into a warehouse like office building until I found myself in a hallway too narrow to continue. I got out of the car and wandered on foot until I found myself arriving "just in time" to sign up for a tournament.
       The tournament involved creating a character and advancing through the levels until you were high enough to participate in a sort of arena match which took place on a real miniature stage, with real terrain and holographic projections of your character for the audience to watch. The terrain was made up of a sort of plaster hilly country with electronic components for the buildings and towers. It was very impressive, and a little bit confusing as I seemed to be in FPS, watching in what I call Over the Shoulder mode, and then you could look over into the tank and see the entire battlefield at once.
       I then had another dream in which I was being interviewed and made a speach about how important it was to make sure that we were a team, all fighting for each other, and making sure we took the fewest casualties and that no one was left behind. I don't remember the exact words, but the emotional content was intense. I was sad that the interviewer seemed hostile to us, and not to the policies that had led us into conflict in the first place.

Lost in Little Red, Lost Back Stage

       Last night's dream escapade involved driving through a neighborhood in search of the way out of the neighborhood. I found myself driving in circles, always ending up in the same cul-de-sac. No path seemed to take me out of the neighborhood. Finally I asked and someone pointed me to an overgrown path that went between two houses.
       Little Red was small enough to fit. I pulled her tires up onto the two worn tire tracks and followed the path between the houses until I came to a shiny new stretch of wire fence (the rectangular grid type not chain link.) I got out and looked at the stretch of wire across the path. It was much newer than the wooden fence posts it was stapled to on either side.
       A woman came out of one of the houses. "Get away from there!" she shouted at me.
       "I was told this was the way out of this neighborhood."
       "Who would want to leave?"
       "I'm lost, and trying to get back to the freeway."
       "Well, you'll just have to..." she paused and then looked around. I couldn't see what she was looking at, she followed the invisible something for a bit and then turned back to me. "You want to make love to my daughters!"
       I had no idea where that came from. I looked around again. This time I did see a tuft of red hair and a little summer dress scoot back behind her house.
       "Too young for me, if they grow up to look like you, call me then." The woman was also red-haired, well rounded and only a little thick, still very attractive.
       This seemed to snap her out of her dangerous seeming weirdness and back into her normal weirdness. "I should call the cops on you."
       "How would they get in to get me?" I asked.
       The dream ended before I could get an answer.

       In another dream I was in full Japanese Kimono and mask, I had to go to the bathroom so made my way to the bathrooms back stage, but you had to go outside to get to them. As I was adjusting my costume to make water, I heard a child-like noise behind me. I turned around. A little girl was looking at the urinals, pointing. "What's that."
       "A Urinal, this is the men's room." I stated.
       She looked like she was about to panic. It was obvious she'd been surprised by my voice. I hushed her and ran to the door, pulling it open a little bit and looking out.
       "No one there, the women's room is just across the walk, go for it." I held the door open for her.
       "Thanks," she muttered and shot across the walkway to the other rest room.
       I was laughing so hard I couldn't pee.
       Later, I was on stage, and I heard her in the audience tell her parents that's the woman who was in the men's room. (So I guess she didn't figure out I was a man beneath my kimono and mask after all.)
       The play was going quite well, despite the fact that they'd put me in the wrong costume and I didn't know any of the lines for this character. The two of us they'd mixed up in wardrobe just quietly fed one another our lines, and since most of the performance was dance and pantomime, we weren't too bad off.
       We did change into our proper roles at the first opportunity. After the show the Stage Manager came back to give us notes, not knowing what had happened. Unfortunately one of the notes was that the first act was the best he'd seen for dance and pantomime, just a little slow on the line pickup. We decided to change roles, but this time to learn the other's lines first.