Mushroom Pictures

I've been busy.

Here, last week we went on a mushroom hike.  Have some photos:

 Mushrooms were thick along the path.

 We called these "Ghost Chanterelles."

We called these "Hedgehog Mushrooms."








We didn't eat any of these.  Mark did find some real chanterelles, and we cooked them up with rice and ate them.  And lived.

Dream: Cave of the Hero's Junk Quest

Lots of wandering around dreams last night.

I was carting a lot of objects for a (I think) Neo-Pagan display in an indoor-outdoor museum.  I don't recall if I was loaning my harp or some other object.  But the display wasn't quite where we thought it was supposed to be, and where we were going to set up would be in the rain.

Something about a new house which was our old house.  Or vise-versa.

The part I remember well was that I had followed Mark into a cave.  I think we were at the zoo, but we might have been at some sort of park rented for seminars.  The opening of the cave was in a hallway -- very Alice in Wonderland, and it just opened up off of the corridor.  The cave was rocky, tubular, and about eight feet in diameter.  A quick brook flowed through the cave (it sprung up where the cave met the corridor).  The rough walls were damp.  The light was dim, but not particularly dark.

Graying lumber spanned rocks set in the brook to make a path.  Mark was farther along the bend in the tunnel.  There were objects in the water along the way.  Mark made a comment like it was a scavenger hunt.  I remember one of the planks had fallen off the rocks and was in the water, and my feet got wet.

I came along a part of the path that had a lot of objects strewn around it.  There was a book with a locked cover, a worked metal chaffing dish cover, a small key, and some other stuff.  I wanted to look at the book, and the key looked like it would fit, but the largish square lock on the front of the book looked like it contained hidden blades in it and I didn't want to be poked.  The shaft of the key looked like it was made out of a rolled up piece of paper with writing on it.

In the end, though, it looked like all this stuff belonged to someone else.  The chaffing dish lid looked like it was there by mistake, so I brought it back out of the cave.

Some other dream things happened, and I returned to the cave entrance.  It was flooded with spotlights, and Enya-like music played over a stereo system.  Right next to it was a convention hall (it's as if this part of the dream was set in a Marriott or something).  There was a standing cloth curtain with a big white paper sign with the words "Waiting Area" in big black Papyrus-typeface.  I was tapping the lid and noticed it made an impressive gong sound.

A five-foot-something man was in charge of the display.  He was bald on top.  He wore dark slacks, a white opera shirt, and a dark wool vest with lighter threads making a raged basket-weave pattern running down in two wide stripes along his front.  It turned out he had put all the stuff in the cave, and it was a part of some sort of New Age vision quest.  He kept speaking in pronouncements, and said something about The Hero's Quest.  I gave him his lid back.

Then there was some more wandering... this time in Astoria, and I rehashed the previous evening's conversation by taking some tap-dance lessons and then meeting my Fairy Godmother... and also being in a huge dance routine with Jerry and Kathy Oltion, who had developed the ability to freeze scenes, make everything fuzzy around the edges, and surround their hands with saturated color. All while dancing in time with the music.


Crazy dream.  I like the book and key, and I'll have to figure out a way to use it in a story.

Sunday Dragonflies

Yesterday it got up to eighty degrees.  A little too warm for me, but mostly nice.

Sometime in the late morning, a huge dragonfly came into our yard and patrolled around.  I'll have to look up what kind it was.  The body was blue, and its head and eyes were enormous.  It hovered around the glass table on our back deck, then slowly navigated around the patio furniture.   It nipped after a gnat, looped around the yard, and then navigated through the chairs again.  I was wearing my dragonfly T-shirt, so its appearance seemed meaningful.

I hoped it would stick around, and I put out a plate of water for it, but it was really one of those pond dragonflies and after a few more minutes it flew away.  I'm hoping maybe we will see it or another like it -- dragonflies are one of my favorite things, and this one was spectacular.   

Mark did notice our usual red dragonflies in the neighbor's dead forsythia.  By then it was afternoon, and they were holding still--I think so the birds wouldn't notice them.  I like them, too; sometimes on the right day, you can lie down on the back lawn and look up into the sky and see a whole fleet of them zipping around eathing mosquitoes or gnats or whatever it is they eat.  

I'll have to find my dragonfly guide and see if there are any plant suggestions in it.

Dream: Room of Prophesy

Lots of "Back to School" motifs; the standard "The homework assigned last week that I forgot about is due now!" sort of stuff.  I'm still trying to figure out what giving M.C. a massage on a school bus means (man, her left scapula was really tight).

Anyway, we join the dream in progress...

Two mean seventy-something sorceresses ruled the area... think Dame Maggie Smith only sterner and less fun.  I was somehow indentured to them... or at least they were my landladies.

I was in a house or a large Reed College Old Dorm Block style building.  I have a vague sense that this was a Doctor Who episode -- in the dream I wasn't quite me, and I wasn't quite The Doctor.   The layout of the house was short halls and suites of smallish rooms.   The floors were wood and the walls were brick.  As the dream progressed the setting changed from slapped-together 60's decor to Edwardian.

One of the rooms in the house was The Room of Prophesy.  I entered the room, and presently was joined by an older man (who was probably Doctor Who).  In the room was a day-bed with a dark brown quilt on it, decorated with a goldenrod colored fine vine filigree pattern.  The Edwardian decor kicked in very strongly at this point.  

Sitting on the day-bed in Edwardian dress was a twenty-something woman.  Her dress and bonnet were mostly brown, with darker brown piping.  Sitting next to her, or on her lap, was a eight-year-old boy.  He was sucking his thumb, and tied to his thumb was a white string that floated out of his mouth and disappeared into the dark recesses of an open closet.  

At some point, I made the mistake of closing the door to the Room, trapping myself and my older guide in the room.  We were stuck there.  Also in the room were tokens representing the Twelve Days of Christmas (yes, I'm still working on that particular Art Project), which we tried to use to open the door, but it remained fast.  

At last the door opened and a female companion poked her head in.  She wanted the Room of Prophesy to show her the father of her child, which is why she opened the door.  We gratefully exited and the dream went on to other things.

When I woke up enough to remember the dream, but not enough to actually rise, I tried to figure out how to make this a story.  The Room of Prophesy is fun, but as story characters, I wasn't able to solve the problem (getting out of the room) by myself.   And plot-wise, it's the dreaded, "two characters in a room talking" pitfall.

The string leading into darkness was very much like the string leading to darkness image I got once while skydiving, which in turn I first saw on a creepy "Alive from Off-Center" show involving marionettes.  In the show, the strings connected the puppet to the puppeteer, but the puppet only saw them disappearing into darkness.  During the skydive, I couldn't remember how to do a back-flip, and the image of a string leading into a dark hole superimposed itself over my vision (I think it was my brain trying to tell me, "Look, I have no idea what this 'backflip' thing is you keep repeating at me as we're falling 80 mph 5000 feet above the ground.")