wings sprout from my back (illus.)

 There’s a horrible family fight with my right-wing, conservative cousins condemning me viciously for my liberal beliefs. I’m staying very calm and quiet and look at them with sadness. Suddenly I fly up into the sky backwards while majestic wings sprout from my back and arc dramatically to either side. Orange and yellow lightning envelops me; but I somehow know this is not to exact any kind of revenge on them. It’s just to get away from them very rapidly and send a message to them to leave me alone. They disappear quickly out of sight, but I did see shocked expressions on their faces. I fly so fast and so high that I start to see the curve in the earth’s horizon. And my cousins are far away, and out of sight.

rock garden with turquoise (illus.)

 I'm in someone's back yard near the ocean and am looking at someone's beautiful rock garden that has a sprinkling of turquoise stones.

The cohesion of the dream is very high and nothing changes as I look at it, which makes me not even have the slightest clue that I'm dreaming.

seeing the mountains of the moon (illus.)

 I'm watching a total solar eclipse. But somehow I zoom WAY in on a small edge of the moon, so close that I can see individual mountains on its horizon. Just then the sun peeks out from behind them as the eclipse continues, but instead of the overwhelmingly brilliant "Bailey's Beads" phenomena occurring, the sun is somehow dimmed so that I can even more clearly see the mountains in front of it.

For some reason I excitedly tell the person next to me that the ability to see the moon mountains during an eclipse is called a "Moon Meel."

Mt. Shasta and Mt. Rainier (illus.)

 I'm standing in a spot where the peaks of Mount Shasta and Mount Rainier almost line up. I'm very excited about this, not suspecting for a second that it's a dream (in real life, they're over 500 miles apart and not even visible from each other). I move my head back and forth to try to get them to line up perfectly.

I wake up, surprised that I didn't suspect it was a dream while I was in it.

strange dream about a cross mosaic (illus.)

 I'm in a Catholic church courtyard. I've never been Catholic, but in the dream I'm strangely drawn to a mosaic in the floor of the courtyard that's of a simple cross.

I start doing some ritual (that seems strange to me now that I'm awake) where I'm running my finger back and forth over the cross part.

My mother appears briefly in one of the arched doorways along the side, and the look on her face seems to indicate approval of what I'm doing (she did grow up a Catholic). But she's in a hurry and has to leave.

I wake up.

door has been moved up too high (illus.)

I'm at some kind of art function in the gymnasium my family used to go to church in back in 1978. I dash out for a bathroom break, having the (false) memory in my head that the bathroom is on a route that includes going outside, through a fence door, and around to the back of the building. I almost run to get there, sort of only half-noticing that the fence door locks itself behind me after I go through it. Then I get around to the back, still in the fenced-in area, and discover that the door to the restroom has been moved so that it's high on the brick wall, and the doorknob on it has been cemented in place to the door jamb.

Not only am I suddenly afraid that I won't get to the bathroom in time, but also worried that the fence gate may have locked me into this caged area that I won't be able to get out of until someone notices I'm missing late in the night.

brain surgery (illus.)

I'm in the operating room about to have brain surgery. The doctor explains that no anesthetic is necessary because they want me to be conscious. 

I glibly reply, "OK."

He takes out a construction power saw and starts cutting into my skull. He shouts above the noise that the skull doesn't have any nerves in it.

I reply again, "OK!" 

I don't question the fact that it's not hurting at all, and could probably kill me. It's true it doesn't hurt at all, but I can feel the saw grinding into my head.

"do you mean like hypnosis?" I ask (illus.)

 My brother, B__, and I are at a large church (in the religion we grew up in, which I left in real life years ago). I have a brand new suit on, and someone tells me that I dress up nice. I'm pleased since it's been a long time since I've heard a compliment like that. 

However, I find a couch in the lobby and lay back on it lazily, not caring what people might think of that. My brother comes along with a diagram. "This is what the minister is speaking about," he says, and shows it to me:

He runs his index finger down each of the columns while explaining how it helps a person. I can't understand him, though, and say, "Do you mean like hypnosis?"

baby's mcv is 20 femtoliters

I'm a lab tech again (in real life, I haven't worked in the lab for five years). I'm the one preparing an emergency transfusion for a baby whose MCV (mean corpuscular volume) is too high; in the dream, the value is 20 femtoliters [bizarrely, that's way too LOW for a newborn; should be between 88-123]. This means the baby's red blood cells can't get through its capillaries.

Suddenly, though, the baby starts to code. The doctors are very busy, but I insist that they tell me what to do with the bag of specially selected blood, or else it will spoil. They yell at me to heat seal off the bag and freeze it for when the baby's stable.

One of the doctors shifts into being my older brother, who is a doctor in real life. He leaves with a resident to discuss the case, and I follow them to the cafeteria. Which oddly is now in the main part of a church sanctuary, instead of in a hospital. They quietly discuss the case at a crowded bar in the cafeteria, but I can hear everything they say and understand the medical terms they use [there were quite a few, and I can't remember now what they were].

I become very slightly lucid and think, Maybe in real life I should go back to working in the lab. There were things that I didn't like about it, but I really loved the science.

wicking gasoline with a string (illus.)

Mom is driving too fast on a snow and ice-covered street. The wheels keep getting stuck in ruts that pull us too close to houses and cars parked along the sides. I keep trying to suggest that she slow down, but I’m afraid she’ll get mad at me for criticizing her driving (in real life, she would have lived close to 100...but because of her stubbornness about giving up driving, she got in an accident and then died at age 87). We finally skid to a stop at a dead end. There’s a gas pump right there, and we do need gas, so I get out and start operating a very strange pump. The gas comes out via a string that wicks it into the gas tank. The dream changes, though. I don’t notice the transition; but now we’re out in a field and I’m “wicking” the gas from the distant pump into the tailpipe. Nothing seems amiss…