A Minor Variation

Dream I had tonight:

I went out for a walk in t-rex country. Ignoring all sorts of helpful advice on where t-rexes are most likely to be found and how to avoid running into one, I went scrambling along the steep bank of a lake, and look up, and find myself eye-to-eye with a t-rex that was coming down to the lake to drink.

Since everyone knows from Jurassic Park that t-rexes won't see you if you don't move, I froze. And had to cling to the bank and listen for several minutes while the t-rex and a couple other t-rexes behind it debated as to whether I was a person (and therefore food) or a tree.

Finally I took a risk and jumped down from the bank into the lake and tried to make my escape underwater while still keeping an eye on where the t-rexes were and hoping that they weren't big swimmers. Then one of my cats brushed against my legs and I flailed myself awake.

I don't even know.

Weirdo dream last night.

I had to go to... I think Florida... to help run some kind of function which my grandmother and mother were into but which they couldn't be there for. Only I don't think I was me; I'm not sure who I was. So I drove down and checked in at this incredibly swanky hotel and got this unbelieveably cushy suite. But before I got done exploring it, some hotel employee brought this whole passel of people through on a tour.

I wound up following them around because I wanted to see the rest of the suite too. It had stairs, and at least three bathtubs and a shower set way up in the wall, and a bunch of beds including one for kids that they could write stuff on, and this old-fashioned study - I think I saw a Victrola - and library, and this dark wood-paneled room with nothing in it except a closet for dirty shoes and stuff, and a door to the outside which turned out to not even latch, which made me unhappy. By this time the tour group had dwindled down to just me and a couple of guys, and the guys got busy trying to figure out how to barricade the way into the room from that non-latching door, so I went downstairs and found this really beautiful women in expensive clothes, going through my room. I think her name was Nina or Eva.

I don't remember what she said to me; I was busy trying to get her out of my room. She wound up attacking me, and then I think I had a premonition about how she'd pull the phone cord out of the wall and hit me over the head with the phone, then kill me. So when she went for the phone, I held onto it and didn't let her get it. She wound up cutting the cord instead, and we had this huge struggle. It didn't end until I grabbed a vase and she grabbed a matching pitcher, and I kept hitting her in the head with the vase while she made fun of my technique. She went after me with the pitcher, but I hit it with the vase and shattered it, then clubbed her in the temple. She made a comment about how that would work, and I'd be fine as long as she didn't go into convulsions, and then she fell unconscious and started twitching a little.

I couldn't call for help because the phone cord was severed, so I grabbed her and my room key-card and hauled them both out into the hall, trying to get back down to the lobby. I ran into these two old ladies, who let me onto the elevator they'd just called. The elevator turned out to be open to the outside at one end, and after some chit-chat about how I'd never stayed in a hotel this nice except once in Florida - things got a little confused here; we were talking like we were someplace other than Florida, although that's where I'd thought we were - one of the old ladies grabbed the unconscious girl from me and threw her out, falling out herself in the process. The other old lady talked to me for a while about how it was possible to survive that kind of jump down to the water, even though nobody ever had, and that the two could survive, and I started panicking because I'd just created a supervillain origin. Then these tendrils of water reached up and grabbed the other old lady, who assured me that she was a strong swimmer before we both got yanked out of the elevator and I landed on the beach. The water tried to come up out of the sea and grab me, but I ran back to the hotel.

Flash to a few years later. I was still in Florida, doing the same kind of function as before; apparently I had married some kind of prince with a really dippy name, and I was now a very classy babe, very remote and mysterious. I was staying in the same hotel as before.

I tried to go up to my room after the event, but the hallways were dark and twisty and I kept taking wrong turns and thinking I could see things coming after me. Once I blundered into a dance class and some of the dancers looked like figures made of water. I made it to the right hall, and got held up by a kid with a gun, which turned out to be a water gun. Then I got held up by a guy with a real gun. Then I got attacked by water.

I ran from the water, and at some point acquired a whole team of people running with me. I think they were like the League, but I don't think they were the League; I remember there being a sort of a John Rhys-Davies figure amongst them. It might have been the Fellowship of the Ring, now that I think of it. Anyhow, we made it out of the hotel, and into some kind of third-world mining or logging operation, and we wound up having to climb this incredibly steep slope - more like a bluff than a hill - while everything around kept getting darker and more overgrown and wetter, until we made it to the top and we were in Surrey.

Yes, England. I though distinctly of Pete Wisdom, but what I thought about him, I don't remember.

We kept running, and saw a rainbow overhead, which for some reason I was convinced would make the water-thing stop chasing me if it shone on me, but the rainbow got messed up because some huge wooden structure, like a giant barn or something, was on fire, and filling the air with smoke. So we all ran over there to help put it out, but the water nearly drowned me, so I was put on the children's bucket brigade, the most inefficient bucket brigade ever. The kids just kind of wandered around this very claustrophobic little track dug into the hillside, dumping their buckets down into a hole that I think fed the water supply the more industrious firefighters were using.

That's when I woke up, very stiff and groggy. Still kind of out of it.