I have terribly vivid dreams, especially when I am sick or have taken medicine before bed. The night before last, I woke up in a daze and could still remember parts of my dream. At the time, I thought it was a super-fantastic dream with a lot of cosmic meaning, so I wrote it down.
A Strange Little Dream Story
(This is the tail end of some larger, more complicated dream, but I can’t remember the whole thing.)
The first thing that I remember, I was in a large grocery store like Costco clutching a large package of single-serving yogurts. Next to me there was a short, fat little man with a red Fu-Manchu moustache, trembling violently. When I asked who he was, he told me that he was Shasta of Archenland (the country between Narnia and Calormen), and that the enemies were coming and we had to go warn the others!
Before we could go warn the others, however, we saw an old hag on a bony horse slink around the corner of the dairy aisle. She stopped and looked at us with a creepy grin. Trying to be brave, I said “Hello” to her and threw her one of my single-serving yogurt cups. She caught it, but stayed there grinning, so I threw her another. Because creepy hags lurking in grocery stores love yogurt. And then she slunk away again, to the snack food aisle.
Shasta told me that she was one of the enemies, an evil supernatural scientist who had been researching the downfall of human beings by taking small pieces of skin from everyone she met. And sure enough, when I looked down, I could see she had taken a piece of my skin!
So Shasta and I went to my old high school, to warn the others that the enemies were coming. We found them all in the gym, dressed in white robes, chanting. Mr. Terza was there, but he was chanting too loudly and couldn’t hear me. Finally they listened to me, but it was too late! The enemy was coming already!
I stood behind the door, trying to keep it shut, while the others prepared for battle. I think at this point I transformed into a rubberband person of some sort. When the enemies tried to open the door, I’d peek through the door jamb and tell the other defenders what sort of enemy it was, so they could prepare the correct potion to thwart it. Then I would hold the door closed as best I could with my little weak rubberband person strength. I was not very strong, or very brave. One by one, enemies broke through the door and were defeated.
One enemy, however, had a blue flaming ball which incinerated three defenders while I cowered behind the door. I got out from behind the door and ran into a back room, where the other good guys were. They were consulting about how to defeat the enemies, and watching a film on an overhead projector about a long-lived topiary, which had existed since the beginning of time, although it changed its shape quite frequently—from dog to deer to lion to orca, etc. I think they thought that if they could awaken the topiary creature, it could save the world, or something like that.
Anyway, while we were all watching this documentary, a big evil enemy Viking guy came charging into the room. I panicked and started to ask him questions. To my surprise, he stopped mid-axe-swing and answered every question quite politely. I asked him why he was answering my questions instead of slaughtering us. He said that I was, in fact, a magical creature called a Blarney, which meant that everyone had to answer politely every question I asked. Although I was a weak rubberband person, if I was captured by the enemy, they could extract my power and turn me into an evil weapon, in which my soul would be stuck forever. That’s why, he said, rubberband people like to hide behind doors, so that they will more likely just get smashed by the door than captured and turned into an evil weapon. The only way to escape being turned into an evil weapon for good would be to shout “Haloo!” in a very loud voice after a rooster crowed two times. If I did that, my power would return back into the universe, and my soul would go to Heaven.
When the big evil enemy Viking guy finished talking, so he resumed lifting his axe to slaughter everybody, so I quickly asked him to repeat everything. He immediately sat down again and pleasantly started repeating everything. I took that opportunity to run out the door.
I flew out into the garden/maze/videogame castle and hid behind piles of toys and random stuff. Two evil rubberband girls were chasing me. They kept finding me because I was bright pink and I had to keep moving to different toy piles. I heard a rooster crow one time, but I was afraid to shout “Haloo!” because if I did, and the rooster didn’t crow again, I would have just given away my position for nothing.
I was hiding behind a pile of toy snails when the evil rubberband girls caught me and stuck me in a clear plastic baton case with suction cups at the ends. (I think this was the evil weapon.) Luckily I had an out-of-body experience and rescued myself from the plastic baton case and was flying away just a few scant yards in front of them.
Then I woke up.
The Aftermath
I was dazed and disoriented, to say the least, so I went to take a shower. Half-way through my shower, while mulling over my spectacular dream heroics and thinking about the evil enemies, the bathroom lights went out. It was pitch-black. There was just a tiny strip of light coming in from under the bathroom door. At first I thought, Karolina must have turned off the light! Why would she do that? Karolina wouldn’t turn off the lights when she could obviously hear the shower running! Oh…
maybe
it
was
the
evil
enemy!
While thoroughly creeping myself out, I finished my shower in the dark, and emerged to find that not only were the bathroom lights not working, there was no electricity in the whole apartment!!! Which meant, of course, no laptop (my battery is completely dead), no toaster, and no refrigerator. Our refrigerator is a pathetic dwarf, but pathetically coolish food is better than room-temperature food. I got a bit angry, and Karolina despaired a bit. First we thought maybe our electric switches had flipped down on their own (which they have been known to do), so I climbed on the ladder (which is terrifying), took down the box of właściciel’s stupid old musty blankets that was blocking the electrical switches, and switched them all up and down several times. No luck.
Then Karolina suggested that perhaps the evil electrical company had turned off our power as a punishment because they hate us. But the electrical company lady checked our account and said we were all paid up. Finally, we determined that the entire building had lost power, because the corridor light was out too. So I stopped worrying quite so much, and Karolina sat morosely in the kitchen.
All this happened at 8:30 in the morning.
At 9:15 am, the light in my room lit up with an extraordinarily welcome brilliance. The power! The Power! THE POWER WAS BACK!
I love electricity so much.
The End.
Delphina Rose 