It was night and I was looking out the front window of my childhood home. My house was also my place of work and I was ensconced in a cubicle, idly looking out the window for distraction. The white fence that guarded the front of the house was luminously visible in the darkness. Behind it stood a woman seven or eight feet tall. She was shaped like an ostrich, but her feathers were the color of flamingos. In a blink she moved from the front yard to the street, and then noticed me watching her. With that she disappeared, leaving behind a trail of tiny fireworks that extinguished themselves in moments. I attempted to convey to one of my co-workers my amazement at having seen such a creature, but his only reaction was that perhaps I had seen an emu instead of an ostrich.

The next stop was a work event - a field trip of some sort that took me to a luncheon in a crowded restaurant. All the tables were filled, and though friends waved at me there was no room for me to sit with them. I was assigned to a two-person table with a tiny smiling Asian woman, and went to the buffet line to be served. By the time I got back, my table had been combined with another larger one and there was once again no room for me to sit. Skipping the meal, I returned to the bus that would take us home and realized I had forgotten my olive green purse back in the restaurant. In pursuit of the bag, I missed the bus and wandered among darkened buildings looking for the dream equivalent of the ruby slippers that would guide me home.

Moral of the story - if you eat Ben and Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk shortly before bed, your dreams will be littered with the detritus of a mind that is helping the stomach digest chocolate when it should be doing its own mental housekeeping.