Batch

10-27-2013 -- Earlier bits, but I can't remember them. First thing I can actually remember, I am in Longs Drugstore at the Buena Park Mall, but as I am glancing around it is slowly morphing into a book store, probably somewhere else. It is near closing time, and I am there at just the right time to learn they are about to start a very special sale. For 10 minutes, everything in the store (everything!) will be on sale for 10 cents. I rush over to the kids section, about 1/3rd of the way into the store, and am amazed to find about 20 hardcover Three Investigators mysteries. Even more amazing, several of them are new titles I have never seen before, even though they have been assigned old numbers. I start grabbing them and stacking them up, but by the time I am ready to move on, all but one or two of them have vanished, and one of the store employees is trying to take a couple of them away from me, which really ticks me off.

I move toward the back of the store, where I am expecting to find the comic strip collections (stuff like Calvin and Hobbes, Foxtrot, Dilbert) but as I am walking, both the building and the sale are stretching and expanding. Now the sale is going on for 10 hours, and the bookstore reminds me of a college campus, with at least three or four separate buildings, and I am walking on an outdoor path to the next building, where I hope to find some of the comic strip collections. I spot the humor section, but as I approach it, it vanishes. Instead, I walk across to another building where they seem to have books on sports and biographies and non-fiction, and a sports figure (or maybe a politician) is going to give a speech, and is trying to draw people in for that.

At some point, I find myself walking with Martin Crane (Frasier), who is probably my grand dad [I shudder, wondering who my dad would be], and who is kind of pushing me around and really annoying me. There is a reporter who is trying to interview him for some reason, and he is giving them all kinds of hassles, and telling them to go interview a hardware store, and making a lot of fuss. He's been annoying me enough, that I give the reporter some dirt that will irritate him and maybe get him to say something, and just ask for a copy of the tape, because I want to see him get annoyed.

Soon I find myself wandering around a building that seems to be undergoing repairs, and half the windows are boarded up, but in that area, I find some great stuff. Some of the Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkorsigan books, the superhero books I was always looking for as a kid (encyclopedias on Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and/or the Flash, though in the dream I also saw one on Spider-Man) seasons of Babylon 5 and other television shows on DVD, all for ten cents, but again, every time I go to grab something, it seems to fade away, so that even after all this great shopping, I only have 1 or 2 items!

05-20-2013 -- [Hints of lots of stuff at the edge of my memory, which might be in the same dream, or from different ones in the night. Might have been bits with Harry Potter, Runescape, and/or Roller Coaster Tycoon.]

I find myself delivering a package to some place that seems to be a bit of a cross between a hotel or maybe an Orlando Paving plant. I make the delivery, then call in, but dispatch doesn't seem to have anything else for me. It seems to be kind of blending between a courier job, and hints of driving for Mears. I find myself considering exiting the parking lot through the proper exit, which would force me to turn east, where I would have to drive a little way to a place I could make a u-turn, while somebody leaving in a truck or a bus takes a side road they aren't supposed to, but it will allow them to head west immediately, and I am wondering which way will be faster.

But then I get a call from dispatch telling me to just wait patiently, and soon they'll have something else for me. I remind them that I've been doing this for a while, and I know it is all part of the job. I glance around the parking lot, and notice they seem to be almost setting up a flea market or something, and as I find myself near a stall of used books, I decide to go take a look.

I find myself carrying my worn paperback of Jordan's Eye of the World, and as I find myself glancing at several other Wheel of Time books on their shelves, I am hoping they won't think it is their book. I am glancing at the titles and see a few Dick Francis novels, a few Gordon Korman books, and several shelves of old Choose Your Own Adventure books, but I find I have no interest in that series, anymore, so I ignore them. I find a bunch of the really early Wodehouse novels, and then, oddly, a 3 Investigators book that I have never seen before, which seems to have the 3 Investigators solving a case at Blandings with Emsworth and Galahad and the rest. Very interesting.

One of the people who works at the shop is considering getting some of the Korman Macdonald Hall books, and I am putting in a good recommendation for them, then as I try and look at the lowest books on the bookcase I am looking at, I start to sink a couple of feet into the floor, which makes it much easier to look at the lower titles.

As I am looking at some of the books, the flea market is suddenly attacked by several dementors, and everybody starts screaming and panicking. But it seems a lot of the dementors are finding they aren't as effective as they might be. One dementor has grabbed a young child, and is trying to torture her, but she says the dementor is less painful and horrifying than the cancers she had been fighting, and she sacrifices herself to destroy the dementor.

[A friend of mine yesterday was explaining something called Live Like Bella, which is about a young girl who, as a baby, had a cancer, and the doctors said she was going to die. She had a miraculous healing. Since then, she has come down with two or three other kinds of cancers, and each time, the doctors say she is doomed, and then she receives another miraculous healing. Through it all, she has remained upbeat, and tried to live her life to the fullest. I expect being told about this brought about the above scene.]

Another dementor is coming right for me, but a kind of dopey (but very loyal) friend of mine throws himself in the way, and in some way through his sacrifice, manages to half take over the dementor, before they both explode. He seems like one of the Wodehouse male romantic interests, loyal, not too bright, a nice, ineffectual guy. But he sure managed to take out one of the dementors.

I find myself making the comment that these dementors must be from the movies, not the books, because they seem a lot weaker than the book dementors that can only be scared away by a Patronus. By this point, the vehicle I am driving is a cab, not my own car or a shuttle van, and I somehow kind of see the future, and realize I am just about to be attacked by another dementor, and instead open the trunk of my car just in time for the dementor to fly in, then I shut it again, trapping the thing!