Batch

11-02-2013 -- Out visiting a friend or a relative somewhere, and sitting in a room petting a cat which may or may not be one of my cats from somewhere in the past. The mother in the place decides to make me something to eat, and is cooking a couple of 'hamburgers' made of sausage for me. Since she is cooking, anyway, she decides to make a few more, both regular burgers and sausage burgers. Soon I am preparing a couple of buns, and am thinking about preparing a couple more, and asking if I can take a couple more burgers with me when I leave.

Soon I am standing in front of the Hickory house with Dave D., and we get news somehow that there is somebody bad wandering through the neighborhood. I decide to walk Dave home (two doors down) to let Don and Rachel know about the problem. Thing is, as we're just entering the door, we hear someone behind us and turn to see someone walking up behind us that looks like one of the 'Gentlemen' from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We slam the door, and he eventually goes away.

Don comes around and sees I am shaking and starts to comment that I probably have my gun locked away in a filing cabinet, and never even touch it. [I have dreamed that I own one or more guns several times over the last couple of years. In this particular dream, Don probably helped my mom pick it out for me.] I explain to him that it is actually in my desk drawer, and I take it out every couple of months and take a shot at the tree across the street, just to make sure it still works. For some odd reason, I then start lecturing him on every detail I think I know about carry laws and how I am and am not allowed to carry it [almost certainly based on a discussion in a Harry Potter Yahoo group I read recently]. When I run down, he suggests some sort of clip which would prevent a crook from grabbing the gun and using it, and I am trying to figure out how it would work, until I figure out that it is an odd cross between a rubber band and a paper clip that would somehow fit on a file folder and make it more difficult to open.

I fiddle with the thing for a bit, then decide it is time to go home. I rush down two doors and get inside, then go hunting for my gun. I hope it is here, because I have been moving around so much, a lot of my stuff is in storage. [Since the Hickory house and mom being alive predates my moving around a lot, this doesn't make a lot of sense.] I don't find my gun in the desk where I expect it, but then I decide to check in the filing cabinet, and lo and behold, there it is, right where Don suggested it would be. I also manage to find two bullets and load them. Unfortunately the rest of my ammunition is in storage, along with my other guns. The one I do have is a decent sized hand gun, but I know I also have a smaller hand gun and a rifle somewhere.

Meanwhile, I hear my sister yelling at my mom. It turns out I have an older half brother (even older than Ron) that I had never heard of, and the fellow was violent. He has a habit of attacking family members, and Melody has heard that he has some kind of marriage contract on me. (Say what?!?) She's mad at mom, because mom has invited him to come by for a visit. I hear the door bell ring, and glance out the window, and he is here. He looks like Mark Henry (huge black professional wrestler), and just in case, I have him in my gun-sight. Mom and Melody are at the door, and he either kills them, or somehow knocks them out, and knocks the door down and storms in. He has a machine gun in his hands, and is hunting me.

I dodge around the two doors in my second bedroom, trying to stay out of sight until I can manage to get a good shot at him, but he's firing that machine gun all over the place. Eventually I pop out at just the right moment, and manage to get him with two shots right in the chest, but he manages to catch me with 20 or 30 shots all over my body. He falls to the ground, while I stagger toward the back of the house. I hear him get to his feet and stomp out the front door, and I call out to ask him why he has done this. He doesn't seem to have an answer for me. I lock the door, to try and keep him out, and then stagger to the telephone in mom's room to try and call Don for help. Problem is, I can't manage to remember his phone number. [Oddly enough, I think the places I got shot in the dream match up with the couple dozen mosquito bites I got on Halloween at my balloon gig.]

01-22-2013 -- I find myself standing in the side yard at the Hickory house, between the garage and the neighbor's garage at the Conrad place. Somehow there is a very sort of haunted house kind of feel, with monsters running around the side yard and the Conrads' house, and I am trying to save people. There are hideous creature-style monsters, and a Michael Myers-style serial killer both to contend with, while I run back and forth, trying to keep myself well and help others. It is very long, and involved, with lots of chasing and the like, but the details don't come through, so it seems like a much shorter bit when written down. Maybe slight hints of a tie-in to the spooky park scenario in roller coaster tycoon which I was playing a day or two ago.

So soon I walk into the Hickory house through the side garage door, and I am feeling kind of hungry, so I am thinking about preparing some food, but instead I just walk into my second bedroom, thinking about relaxing. Hard to do, though, as the room is an absolute mess. The desk is covered with dozens and dozens of pieces of silverware that have been sitting around for weeks, encrusted in dust and old, dried food. I start gathering maybe fifteen pieces at a time, and carrying them to the kitchen sink to soak.

Oddly, though my second bedroom has a door opening right on to the kitchen, in this dream it is never used, and every time I exit the bedroom and walk to the kitchen, it is through the other door, walking through the living room and dining room each and every time. When I reach the kitchen and try to add the silverware to the sink, it is so full that it causes the water to start to overflow, so I quickly remove the drain plug so some of the water can drain out.

Somehow at the same time I am gathering more of the silverware to take to the sink, there are also silver push pins holding letters on to a sewing project sitting on the love seat, and I seem to be removing the pins, and some of them are falling on the carpet, where I am afraid I will step on them and hurt my feet. But I continue to remove the silverware from my room in large handfuls.

Meanwhile, there is a young couple sitting in the living room making some sort of comments about there not being enough silverware in the house, and as I am placing ever more of it to soak in the sink, and going back for more, I am hinting they might want to try and wash some of it. I wander back to my room. The desk is finally silverware-free, but I find I am still finding more and more silverware on the floor in old, empty frozen food containers lying around the floor, and I keep gathering it up.

But soon I find myself out driving somewhere in Europe. It might be England, but it might not be. There is a sort of speed bump that has been laid in the road, but instead of stretching horizontally across the road, it is running vertically, maybe a foot from the curb, and it seems to be causing all kinds of drivers problems, as they keep getting too close and running up on it. It isn't causing me all that much trouble, though. I just stay a little further to the left in the lane, and I'm fine.

There are some police here that seem to be writing tickets for some people, and just helping others out, and I ask why they seem to be having so much trouble with this. The cop explains the speed bump is very new, and people just aren't used to it, yet. He tells me that I really ought to speak to the people at Prudential Insurance about it, and point me at a building. They tell me the company is located on the 8th floor, but the building only looks like it is four floors tall.

I walk inside, and find the building has four floors above ground, and maybe 16 or so underground, and so the floor labeled as 8 is actually something like 12 floors underground or something. I'm trying to work out the math in my head, but we forget to press any of the buttons, and end up on what is probably the wrong floor, perhaps either seven or nine. My friend (who is turning into Kevin B.) thinks we have the right floor, and I am almost sure we don't, but I walk off to check.

Nope. Different company, entirely. We have to go one more floor. Kevin was supposed to hold the elevator, but he stepped off it, so actually we now need to wait for it again, so we can get the final floor we need. Soon it comes, and we step back on and push the button.

So the elevator opens again, and I find myself walking into a sort of lounge or bar, and I find that the Claim Jumpers Band from Preston's is about to play. Trapper John is trading some quips with people, and as is often the case, he seems to be kind of negative about it. Somehow he ends up quipping with Kevin B. who is with me, and he ends up annoying Kevin, who bends down and opens up a case, and pulls out his trombone. He is annoyed enough that he is going to play along with the band, hoping to annoy John.

Meanwhile, the Preston's band just finished playing one of the introductory bits that the Good Time Band at Rosie's actually used to play, and a slightly hippie-looking guy is walking away from John, who announces "we have a request to play a song that goes kind of like bum, bum bum, bum bum, bum bum. Hey, we know a song that kind of starts bum, bum bum, bum bum, bum bum!" And they launch into Old Time Rock and Roll. Kevin hears the first few notes, recognizes the song, and promptly fits an odd sort of attachment onto his trombone that lets it power a set of bag pipes, and starts to play along. Very strange.

There's somebody passing around some advertising flyers, and they are annoying me, so I just crumple mine up to toss it away, but it makes a huge amount of noise, drawing attention to me. Meanwhile, Kevin has stopped playing, and is just sort of wandering around, kind of distracted. But when I ask him, he says he is fine. Meanwhile, I find myself remembering a Victor story that I got a good five or six chapters into (in another dream, I think), and wondering why I haven't found the time and energy to finish writing it yet. About this time, I wake up.