Dreams: Lots and lots of very strange ones over the past month. The most frightening was one of being on a plane (a consistent theme) that was going to crash into a building. I was sitting about 2/3 of the way back on the left hand side of the plane. As is often described by accident survivors, it all happened in slow motion. I could see the building (or maybe it was a mountain, the image is pretty fuzzy) coming up and knew we were going to crash. I had a moment of panic that this was it – death was coming and it was going to consist of nothingness (as described by a genie in the Christopher Moore book, rather like being in a doctor’s waiting room for a really long time). Then I could feel the heat of the fire as it swept back from the front of the plane. At that point I woke up with the pounding heart and jumbled thoughts of an adrenaline rush. There was no more sleep that night.

A few nights ago I had a dream that consisted of a conversation with a well-dressed woman regarding getting a baby hippo to come live with me. As I told her this (and I knew in the dream that I was lying to impress her (what sort of woman is impressed by someone who owns an infant of an endangered species?)), I realized all the work I was going to have to do to the backyard to build a pool for the hippo, complete with the appropriate aquatic plants. And then I realized that the mother hippo would have to come along too. And who was going to clean up all that hippo poop?!

The dream continued to a neighbor’s raised bed garden that was on a structure about waist high. He was growing blueberries in straw. The berries were not on bushes but each one grew at the end of an individual short stem that pushed up through the straw. I started to pick some, which were as big around as a quarter, but couldn’t them all in my hand and some started to roll away. There’s something Freudian in there about a berry in the bush, but I wouldn’t even attempt to tease that one out. So to speak.