boils, bugs, bird

A rare "dream inside a dream" event: We found ourselves in an upscale senior center on another planet. I couldn't sleep, because I kept dreaming that I had a horrible rash and all my skin was falling off. Not in the red, soupy radiation-sickness way, no -- that would be too normal. Instead, it started as white spots, which became white rings, then turned into hard cake frosting and flaked off. So I'd wake up screaming, with that alien world beyond the window. So they'd drug me back to sleep. My dream-dreaming mind got revenge by giving everyone the cake frosting boils one time, but then I woke up and there was nobody left on the planet to get drugs from.

So I woke up and walked around the dark house a bit, to clear my head.

Fell asleep, and dreamed that I was helping a park ranger turn an abandoned gas station into a tourist info house. It was in a rocky place, with a small town like Quartzite visible in the distance, and the ground had just as many antique bottlecaps as pebbles. I knew something was up when she handed me a six-foot pole before we went inside. The place was overrun with giant bugs. There was a knee-high praying mantis guarding the garden, chasing mice under the house. Inside, it looked like a Halloween spiderweb store, except that the webs were real, the spiders were chattering and covered with a pink jelly of baby spiders. After a while, leeches started appearing out of thin air, and that was it for me. I almost ran away, but ended up chasing a 12-pack-sized grasshopper across the desert.

Carmen woke me up then, because there was a bird in the house, and the cats were going nuts trying to kill it. So she herded the carnivores into the sun room, and I chased the bird as it bounced and flitted all over the house. Finally, I threw a washcloth on it and it calmed down. It weighed about half an ounce, was about three inches long, and had a nectar beak. Don't know why critters can't tell when we're trying to help them...