I wish I could rememer poetry in dreams, because what you gave me this time was amazing. A king (presumably played by me, but rather unimaginatively called George) who was given a wooden box with three cakes and a prophecy, making him travel the world to find three people to share the cakes with, one with the innocence of a child, one with the vigor of a grown man (I think) and one with the wisdom of an old man. In the end it turned out, of course, that these people were all himself at various stages of life. But the entourage! If I could write it up as a story it might even be publishable.

(But would three cakes stay fresh that long? Ah well, must have been a magical box.)

There was much more, ordering chocolate sprinkles that when they arrived were more like Spätzle and carrying lots of groceries into a house I’ve never seen, but presumably mine, helped by random passers-by, but it pales beside the box with the cakes.

Well done in view of current affairs, that floating mosque. You might have weighted it better, though, because every new person inside made it list and lurch like a row-boat. We (I don’t remember who else apart from me, but a good handful of people) didn’t want to enter at first, but the imam (or whoever, with a long robe and a longish beard) did a very good job convincing us that we were welcome. Strangely, we had to stand with our backs to the action; I thought at the time that it was because we weren’t Muslims, but perhaps it was just that the action was at the back of the room. There was singing, which we had a textbook for: doggerel in short lines, which I don’t remember as being particularly religious, without any mention of God or Allah. All the same it was so Protestant in flavour that I half expected a Gospel reading to follow, but we got a tour of the building vessel instead (making it lurch again), a talk with the imam, and another song on the quay, with longer lines this time but just as much doggerel.

(I realise now that the details were probably so fuzzy, and presumably completely wrong, because I’ve never been in an actual mosque let alone to the service.)

The bike ride after that would have been uneventful if it hadn’t been for the steep and winding roads and the darts and cannonballs flying at us at every turn; probably from playing too much Bloons Tower Defense 3 last night.

You greatly pleased me when you made one of the nicest people I know a professor —of physics, I suppose, that’s her thing— and me her secretary. The only sour note was that her other secretary was the woman who was the proximate cause of my burnout when I worked with her in waking life, but as this time she worked mornings and I afternoons we only met coming and going and didn’t have to interact much. It also meant that opening and registering the mail fell to her, and composing letters and sending packages to me. And helping the professor dress for a function, which revealed that she not only had the perfect middle-aged figure that I aspire to (but may never attain) by swimming, but also lingerie to die for. I want my next bra to be dove-grey lace, too, with matching panties.

I didn’t get to see any actual evidence of physics, unless it was the decorated circle five inches across, kept in a flat tin like a film canister, that looked like solid gold and felt heavy enough for that as well. The other women who came in from time to time to talk to the professor —one of whom said of a man both of them apparently knew, “He keeps throwing lovers at me”— looked very much like middle-aged academics too, but vague as to branch of academia. The room was a dead giveaway, though: the long and extremely narrow room I worked in when I was the secretary of a professor of physics in waking life in the summer of 1980 or 1981.

Later we were at the function, which suddenly turned out to be a parish meal. Because I was the only person standing when everybody else was already seated, someone asked me to fill a water jug. I spent a lot of time filling all the water jugs; I especially liked the four-foot-high one in the shape of a trumpet flower that had a wheel at the bottom of the stem because it was too heavy to carry when full. Eventually I sat down and said “I haven’t had anything to eat yet,” but all that was left was a platter with two pieces of bread. Deeply symbolic, I suppose, but I wouldn’t know of what.

Those were splendid military planes and airships, especially the huge one that came very low in the centre (possibly of Roermond, I sort of recognised the city hall) to disgorge small red one-person aircraft. They were coming from several directions so you had me worried for a while until I realised that they were all just flying in patterns, not trying to fight each other or even get in each other’s way. My cousin the nun was right, though, when she said “it’s a pity those beautiful things are designed for killing people”.

Also, I’ll have you know that this is a Linzer torte, not this; that’s a slice of cheesecake. The coffee shop in the covered mall where my cousin and I fled the rain and the noise didn’t know either. My cousin did like it, fortunately, and I loved the sugared puff-pastry things I had— must make that!

Now I’m at it I must commend your offering of the night before, when you put a bit of lawn edged with flowers in the church so people who aren’t in the choir in waking life —mostly because they don’t sing, and even if they did sing they’d be unlikely to be in the choir: one is an acolyte and two others live too far away to come to choir practice— could start the Liturgy an hour before the normal time, because they were in church an hour early on account of forgetting the end of summer time. Fr T was so angry that he locked the connecting doors, conveniently situated about three meters closer to the altar than they normally are. I was left on the choir platform alone and confused, but somehow found myself outside a moment later. Naturally, I didn’t want to get in past the rogue choir, and I couldn’t get into my own house because I had church keys but no house keys, so I had to wait until Secunda and Tertia came out of the house, dressed to the nines (Secunda in a short green dress and thigh-high boots) and, more importantly, with keys.

Nice of you to subvert a standard “railway station and getting lost” dream by having the train to Paris take only about half an hour, and letting me find the church easily, close to the station. But it was strange to find a lay service in progress in a church that’s so riddled with priests in waking life. And the study session afterwards in French (it was Paris after all) was so daunting that I preferred to go into town and look around until it was time to meet my other half and go to the notary.

I did indeed pass the notary’s office, but it was closed, saying “it’s not here” and specifying where it was instead; but when we got there in the evening it turned out to be in the original place after all. The notary’s wife-cum-secretary spoke excellent Dutch with a charming accent, a very good thing because even in my dreams I can’t handle French legalese. I think I got a legacy of about fifty euros— probably enough to pay for the train ticket as it was only half an hour.

Closure, please. I admit that it was clever of me, if I may say so, to kick the burning spray-cans right out of the dream and wake myself up by that before they went BOOM!, but I’m still wondering whether they went off in the dream after all, and how big a BOOM! it was, and what happened to all the people.

After a night with a series of small but annoying nightmares (in which various people did things to me they would never do in real life, but oh so convincing) the dream engine served me an idea that I’d like to put into practice sometime. Well, after trying to get into an already overcrowded lobby with keys that didn’t fit, fully expecting to get lost because the building was called “Labyrinth”.

It’s a sort of treasure hunt, perhaps inspired by the Quest Box (themed puzzle/educational town walk) that the local masonic order rents out. It needs a place of manageable size— all of a largish village, the centre of a provincial town, one section of a city with different facilities. Participants get a booklet with all available locations: shops, institutions, offices, art studios, museums, churches: any place with people who can cooperate. They also get a slip of paper with the numbers of three random locations. Mine went up to 300 at least, though I’m sure there were no more than fifty or so in all, so perhaps the numbering was a bit haphazard (or, I realise now, locations were numbered according to type: shops 1 to 99, […], health institutions 201 to 299). The idea is to go to each of your assigned locations and do something appropriate: solve a puzzle, lend a hand, find out something, play a game, paint a picture, depending on what the place is for. After completing the task you get a small object (that you can keep, I think; though there was a puzzling instruction in the booklet saying that if you wanted to keep the objects you paid proportionately less than the 11 euros the treasure hunt cost).

After that I woke up and resolved to finish the dream, so the rest is not very clear: for one thing I don’t really know what happened after you had all three of your objects. Perhaps the point was to make sense of them in combination. I do know that I got a painted styrofoam claw at the game shop, which was number 26, but not what I did for it. At the maternity hospital (number 293) I got a thick bright blue booklet with lots of facts about the hospital and a bookmark on the page I needed for the task, but I didn’t get round to the actual task because they offered me a job editing their documentation (including the booklet; possibly because I spotted mistakes).

I think it’s a game for a specific day, the Nth annniversary of the town, something like that. At least, there were dozens of people doing it on their own or in little groups, and I can’t imagine that it would be so popular that so many would be doing it at once on a random day if it’s always on. The man in the game shop told me that he liked the idea, because almost everybody who had number 26 bought something from him as well as doing the get-the-claw thing.

You are serving me far too many Russians lately. My other half is completely right about that.

I wouldn’t have minded the two Russian women who were so eager to do the dishes at my party, though, if they hadn’t gone on to wash every object in the kitchen, and in the kitchen cupboards, and to put them back all wrong, some still dripping with soapy water. It was so convincing that I almost got up (in real life) at 5:25 to restore everything to order. I realised just in time that I don’t have such a big kitchen, and I don’t keep all my glasses and cups in the kitchen cupboards at that. Also, they apparently took most of the money from my froggy bank (to buy cleaning supplies?) and that was so convincing that I weighed it in my hand on coming down.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have left the two women unsupervised if I hadn’t had to take a bus to to to the metal concert with Prima (and possibly Secunda and Tertia) which the paper listed as being at 7:30. They meant 7:30pm, apparently. We got there in the morning and all we found was a village empty of metal bands, which was a great disappointment but it dawned (almost literally) on us soon enough.

I don’t know whether the bent art dealer (in that village, it seems) was also Russian: a big ruddy-faced red-haired youngish man wearing an open shirt that showed off his red chest hair. He only wanted paintings of ‘chicks’, which he later admitted was a mistake, but only after there had been a veritable flood of rather good paintings of young men with blowing-in-the-wind hair clearly made by tanaudel, though the only artist featured in the dream was a bearded man with two young sons who were running wild on the beach.

It was a bit disconcerting to find that the Machynlleth Fencing Club had its annual general meeting in a swimming-pool; on the other hand it does explain some of the questions in the questionnaire. Also, “Machynlleth” explains why the questionnaire was in Welsh, though it mercifully turned to English when I started to fill it in.

The herbs in the swimming-pool garden were awesome, growing from barely poking out of the ground to knee-high in half a day. Tasted properly of mint and dill and fennel, too. But the tabby kitten the size of a mouse —literally!— wasn’t there, and the large vet surgery that had suddenly materialised on the site of the web-design company to the left of our favourite pub had never heard of it. Neither could it do anything about the tabby-and-white cat motionlessly suspended above the basket of a delivery bike in front of their entrance (which didn’t seem to hurt it, though it looked very angry).

Now I know why the bicycle I was riding to the comics shop made me feel free and awkward at the same time: it didn’t have any handlebars. I did get there in one piece, and it was a really nice comics shop, at the site of the small town-centre supermarket. I especially liked the half-text, half-pictures historical thing that Tertia bought while the rest of us were picking out colours for the shop’s new house-style. (Though I still think a shade called ‘lead’ shouldn’t have any yellow in it.) That all those people were shouting at us for being wizards didn’t matter much, because we could just ride away to the conference-with-music at the hotel where I was leading the singing group consisting of my own daughters and the Swedish middle-school teacher with the cute baby and all her students. Only it was a pity that when I wanted to answer the girl called Esma’s question whether she’d remembered everything right, the alarm clock blasted the noisy kind of classical music at me instead.

All of this came at the end of a night of tossing and turning, not because of any worry of my own, but because of Aidan’s; every time it made me wake up I realised it wasn’t me but him and I fell asleep again, only to be caught in it again. Perhaps I should have read some more Trent Intervenes before bed, after all.