Movies: The Secret Lives of Dentists. Ever since I saw The Spanish Prisoner I've enjoyed watching Campbell Scott. This was no exception - he and Hope Davis were a suitably incommunicado suburban couple struggling to find ways to breech each other's defenses. Some of the characters' reactions to extreme events didn't seem true to me. The middle daughter is rushed to the hospital, essentially comatose from a fever, and the mother looks worried, but not fearful. The wife disappears one day and doesn't come home til the next day. The husband is angry because he suspects she is leaving him for another man, but he's not worried that something has happened to her. All-in-all, however, the story worked well and the actors helped you through the more complicated fantasy parts that could have been an enormous distraction. Denis Leary, another actor I'll watch in almost anything, was appropriately harsh and goading in his role as a active voice Greek chorus.

Dreams: I was on a beach in Los Angeles with someone else - my sister, or maybe Rebecca. The sand was brown, just like in New Jersey and there were no shells, only a few small, smooth black stones scattered about. The waves were breaking just offshore and the water was a deep blue. There was a town down the beach from us, but it was at least a couple of miles away. At one point there was a line of small boats riding the crest of the waves - I couldn't figure out whether they were trying to get out to sea. My sister/daughter brought a gigantic blanket of bright green sod and threw it onto the breaking waves. There was some point to this - she was attempting to stop the waves from breaking, or the water from reaching shore, or something. The grass on top of the waves rolled up and down but didn't seem to have much impact. The sod disappeared and was replaced by a pale pink quilt, which had even less effect on the waves. Yesterday I was looking at a website for the Cayman Islands (for vacation, not laundering my money), and there were many pictures of pink sand beaches, so perhaps my mind conjured these images from that source.