[One time I was talking in my sleep and told Shawn "If I were making a face out of fruit, I would use a banana as the nose."]

I dreamt about Laura…she and Con had made a magazine…it had orange and pink ink on newsprint type paper. I read it, thought it was great and felt proud that I knew her.

I was in a candy store. I bought a bag of gummy bears. I was eating all the “good” ones (there were black licorice ones, bleh) and was worried when Susan [played in the dream by former classmate, Susie Davis] declared that half the bag was hers. But said she like the licorice ones a lot and was happy there were so many.

Then, either I was Todd or someone else was but I was supposed to get”Todd’s half of the candy” [Susan and Todd are real-life friends of Laura's].  Apparently, I got “Susie’s half” by accident and it triggered some kind of Event.  If you ate her half, the Event happened to you.

The Event was a professional service that a person could order, like kidnapping your kid to scare him straight or arresting your friend as a gag, except it was a scary service, and involved a man/monster coming at night. I pretended I was asleep, because I knew there was a hired monster in my room. I felt his mouth on the front of my neck, loosely, the way hunting dogs delicately mouth a bird.  I made a screaming noise, trying to alert other people to what was happening, but the noise was too small and too soft. [It was truly scary, because I felt a real pressure on my neck. I woke up after that.]

There were subversive aristocrats selling high-end items to fund a revolution. Some woman had a box of silk scarves that an authority figure was dumping on the ground. He didn’t know that she had substituted counterfeits, sold the real ones and hidden the profits.

A gardener or some other service person was going to be arrested or taken away. He felt it was important to tell a child something to be proud of. He woke the little boy up and pointed to a white wooden fence like you see at the races. He said, “Do you see that? Your grandmother built that.”

[I think I got this last one from Harry Potter. The surname was reminiscent of Longbottom.]

I think the whole dream had kids from my high school in it, and Alvaro Demarzi. There was a report card with the grade and the place to write comments. I was trying to explain to someone how the grades worked but I kept forgetting what I was saying.  So I wrote down everything I intended to say, while the other person just sat there in silence.  When I was finished, I apologized and told him, “It’s like my mind is a tilting table. If I don’t secure the thoughts on paper, they slide off onto the floor and get lost.”