Post Greasy Food Dream

I don't know if it was the Sprite, the sweet potato fries or the ranch dressing, but I didn't sleep so well Tuesday night and dreamed a lot of jumbled dreams.

I did a lot of wandering.  I'm pretty sure I had the "family reunion in a large confusing house" dream (featuring a conversation with my Dad and Aunt Margot about something--hmm, usually it's my Mom's side of the family...), and I did a lot of walking around the mid Willamette Valley.

Near the end of the dream, I walked to a party being held in an old barn.  The paint had long ago flaked off and the wood was weathered to a silver-grey.  It was close to sunset.  I want to say the party was hosted by some Albany friends, but what really struck me was that Jay Lake had come back from the dead and was at the party.

I was really glad to see him.  He looked pretty good; he was restored to how I remembered him from 2007.  I very much wanted to ask him what it had been like being dead because, Writing Research!  But I didn't want to be all awkward with the sorts of "so, what was it like being dead?" questions he probably got all the time.

It turned out he was entertaining everyone with post-mortem stories.  "So I walk into the DMV to get a driver's license, and they ask me for some ID, so I pull out my death certificate...."  I got the sense that Jay was driving without a license, but that there was this whole, "So what are you going to do, officer?  I'm dead." vibe.

Then the party was over and everyone was leaving.  Jay gave me a ride in the GENRE mobile (which was painted red) and we traveled along a curving mid-Willamette Valley off-shoot of highway 99.  I discovered that I hadn't put on my seat-belt and fixed that.  At some point in our conversation, I said, "Wow, I can hardly wait to see the look on my kid's face when I tell him I got a car ride from a formerly dead man."

There were flares along the side of the road, and the landscape was suddenly under construction, and then the dream went on its wandering-dream way, and I wandered into a battle with devils and angles who were dressed as 1980 New-Wave rockers (slacks, lose blouses, narrow neckties, retro-fifties' buzz cuts).  Everyone was walking around in a dimly-lit, orthogonal, blocky kind of indoor mall.  The devils wore red and grey and had electric torches that shot flames; the angels wore white and grey and I had to help them by invoking The Power of Christ's name, and as the flames whooshed around us and the devils were cringing back I was thinking, "Wait, how does it even work that a NeoPagan like me can do this ... ?"