In narrative terms, this is three separate dreams, but I remember them sequentially, all in the same night.


I was helping set things up for the first day of a large conference. I had a team I was supposed to escort to a list of rooms, in which they were doing whatever work was involved with the setup. I was helping them find the rooms, because the conference was being held at the university I attended, and I was familiar with the campus. Someone had given me a set of about six little placards with the room numbers printed on them. They all had a number, a dash, and then a letter, like "14-J," but the rooms were actually organized by letter and then by number, which was confusing for people not familiar with the layout.

We started in a gigantic auditorium, not similar to anyplace actually on the campus. After getting the list of rooms from my mom, who was a coordinator for the conference, I took them through a side door and up some stairs, and then we were in a hallway on the third floor of the Physical Sciences building, which is the Mathematics Department. The first room was my old office. The door was locked. The team I was helping said they'd been told I would have keys to all the rooms. So we went back to the auditorium to find my mom, and told her I hadn't been issued the keys. She said that there weren't enough keys to go around, so she'd have to come with us and unlock doors. She was annoyed that all the doors hadn't already been unlocked. We unlocked the one to my old office, although inside it was much larger than that office is in real life, and set up like a conference room.

At this point, the group stopped following me, possibly because they were doing setup in that first room. But the dream shifted, and the list of rooms was now offices instead of conference rooms, and it was no longer clear why I needed my mom to unlock them. The second office, based on the letter grouping, was going to be adjoining the main office. We got in there, and the first thing we noticed was that the name on the office leading to the right (in real life, that door actually goes to the mail room) had the name of my friend Greg on it. He's going to be teaching at the university next fall, so this actually made sense, aside from his office being where the mail room is. That was not the office we were looking for, though.

We looked to the left, and the office for the department chair was the correct one. But the name on that office was Greg's brother Steve, and the correct name placard was sitting on the floor. I was absolutely sure that Steve was not the new chair of the mathematics department, although the name on the floor was the name of some movie character (who I can't remember) and not the name of the actual department chair. I didn't have a problem with the department being chaired by a movie character, but I knew Steve wasn't supposed to be there.

[scene break]

I had a winning ticket for some promotional the McDonald's in the town where I grew up was running. The prize was a free small hamburger, like they put in a Happy Meal. It came in a Happy Meal box, but with the rest of what's normally in there missing. I was eating the hamburger, but disappointed that there were no fries.

[scene break]

I was in my parents' house, talking with an ancient Egyptian prince, trying to calm him down but knowing his anger was justified. How he ended up in modern America wasn't revealed in the dream; it was just assumed background. But it was clear that he'd been here long enough to learn (heavily accented) English. He was unhappy about various ways artifacts from his culture had been handled by museums, in particular some religious desecrations. My repeated argument that it was all from a long-dead culture and we had no idea he'd end up being around to complain was getting harder and harder to support, especially since he had the full backing of the modern Egyptian government.

We'd been walking from someplace else in town and had just entered the house. I said something in passing about a pharaoh's death mask, meaning the one for King Tut. He looked shocked that we had this, and demanded to see it. This lead to the awkward detail that the museum it was stored in was located in the flower bed on the west side of my parents' house, and was mostly overgrown by the plants there.

We walked along the flower bed, looking for the mask display. He asked how I could even find anything with all the plants hiding the display pieces, and I showed him the shelf running along the top of the house wall, with pictures of the artifacts sitting on it. I found the one with the picture of the death mask. I tried to remember how to say the name "Tut-Ankh-Amun," but started out "Amun-Ankh," then couldn't remember the rest. The prince corrected me, saying the full name was "Amun-Ankh-En-Arem."  We then looked around to find the actual display. The mask was sitting face down, to the right of where it should have been, and partially buried in leaves. The prince was not happy.

Lemmings Trivia

My roommate had a new board game he was showing me, based on the original Lemmings game. He'd laid out the board, which looked like a Lemmings level, divided into squares, and there were tiles to put on it to change things. I have no clue how the rules worked in terms of assigning tasks to the lemmings.

The part he was explaining to me involved a stack of trivia cards. Each card had some sort of trivia question and an answer. The answers all sounded correct, but if you looked them up online, most of them were not right. Point value for each card was determined by how accurate the answers were, and there was some sort of trading mechanic, where you tried to get bad cards into your neighbor's pile and good ones into yours. There were different rules for how to assign point values, depending on whether you had internet access while playing the game. I don't know how all this related to the game board with the lemmings.

Rincewind

Rincewind the wizard was working at a retail store. The front end of the store looked like a small wooden market stall, but inside it was much bigger, and looked more like a Costco-style warehouse. A customer, whose face was obscured inside a hood, brought a magical item to the counter and accused Rincewind of stealing it. Rincewind expressed surprise at this accusation, then went into the back and retrieved a matching item from a shelf. When he brought it to the counter, the manager was there and said that the item was unique, so one was a temporal copy of the other. He then demanded to know why Rincewind had stolen one of them. Suddenly the two items glowed, white electricity crackled between them, and a temporal rift opened behind the customer.

Rincewind, realizing he was going to lose his job no matter what, grabbed one of the items and jumped into the rift, which closed behind him. Then a second copy of Rincewind, who was hiding in the shadows nearby, jumped out and grabbed the other item and ran down an alley with it. The customer then pulled back his hood and revealed that he was an older Rincewind from the future. He asked the manager for a job, seeing how he was short an employee.

Vicus Discarp

The Evil Overlord was dressed in traditional costume, including a helmet and black armor with a black cape. He stood in a large room in his fortress. The room was so large and so poorly lit, it was not possible to see its full extent. Several feet behind him was a dividing wall, and on the other side of the wall were steps leading up. Rows of soldiers stood on the steps.

Suddenly the princess, who was supposed to be in a holding cell, appeared next to the Overlord, pointing a large knife at his head. He was shocked that she had escaped, and more shocked that she had gotten past all the guards without anyone noticing. He glared at the knife and asked, "Is this a treacherous discarp, Princess?"

She vanished as quickly as she had appeared, but he turned to his left and saw that she was now standing on his side of the wall, within reach of the nearest minions who had still not noticed her. She was now wearing a dark cloak that she didn't have before, and holding the knife in front of her. She replied to his question. "No, it is a vicus discarp."

The Overlord noticed that the knife blade was too thick, and not even sharp, and realized that it was a control device of some sort, with buttons on the hilt.

Kittens and Trolls

A set of four kittens, all from the same litter, were playing Follow the Leader. Tom was in the front, and let the troupe out of the back porch, down the steps, and across the yard. They passed a lawn chair where a Troll was sleeping. The Troll was invisible to humans during the day, and in fact a human could sit in the same lawn chair and occupy the same space without noticing, but the kittens could see him. Not that they were paying attention.

Tom was now stalking through the grass, and the other kittens were stalking behind him. There was something large, heavy and cylindrical sitting in the lawn, and the grass was taller right up against it since the mower couldn't get in that close. Tom thought this taller grass would make for better stalking, and moved into it, then continued stalking in a circular path hugging the wall, with his siblings stalking right behind him.

Sarah, the fifth kitten, was watching all this from the roof of the porch, and she saw what Tom didn't: there was a hole in the lawn, and if he kept following the curve of the taller grass, he was going to walk right into it without noticing until he fell. She quickly jumped from the porch roof onto a tree branch and ran over to the other side of the tree. There wasn't time to climb down, so she jumped all the way to the ground, spraining one ankle when she landed. She called out to Tom, who paid no attention to her as usual. She looked around for someone else to help. There was One Eye, an old grizzly cat, who was napping. If she woke him up, he'd scratch her half to death before she could explain the situation. The only other option was the Troll.

Limping over to the lawn chair, Sarah meowed loudly and woke the Troll. He sat up and watched with a bemused expression as the kitten limped over to the tall grass and started meowing. He walked over to see what she was looking at, realized the other kitten was just about to stalk into a hole, and pulled him out.

* * *

That evening, the Trolls and the humans feasted together, as was customary. There were about fifty Trolls, and a family of only five humans; the Trolls couldn't understand why humans had such small families. The human family had been shocked at first to learn that there were large numbers of Trolls living in their back yard who became visible at twilight, but after a while they had become used to them. The Trolls had a huge feast every night, and loved company, so after a while the humans started eating with them every night. The human mother helped with some of the cooking, and she could get certain ingredients from the grocery store that the Trolls found hard to come by.

These Trolls actually looked like large humans; Vikings, maybe, or since they had a mythological aspect, residents of Valhalla. Their king wore a hat with a huge set of antlers on it. They dined at a long table, which really shouldn't have been able to fit in the back yard. The humans sat at the end closest to the house. The opposite end was not visible, because the table was so long, and because when the Trolls were there, there was a mist obscuring everything more than a few feet away.

Dinner that night included a roast goose. The Troll hunters had shot a lot of geese, and offered the humans some, since they had plenty to spare.

Battering Camel

I was following behind a guy who was riding down the sidewalk on his camel. He had a sidekick who was riding on the camel with him. The driver looked like he was drunk, and the camel was swerving a bit.

They got to a house and he started running the camel into the door at full speed. The door was showing no signs of breaking down. Finally the camel got knocked out from repeated impact, so he picked up his sidekick and started ramming his head into the door. I was getting concerned, and pulled out my cell phone to dial 911. He looked over and saw me, dropped the sidekick, pulled out a gun and came after me.

I started running away down the sidewalk, running backwards so I could see him. He started shooting at me, so stretched my hand out and tried to use the Force to generate a Star Trek-style shield in front of me to deflect the bullets, just in case I could do that and didn't know it. I was surprised to discover that it worked. I finally managed to dial 911 on my phone and got an operator error message.

Harry Potter in America

Please, no spoilers for the last book in the comments on this one.

For part of the dream I was Harry Potter, and for part I was observing him from above and behind his head. It also kept flashing forward or flashing back, so that I didn't really have it in chronological order. I think I'll type it in order, though.

Most of it happened in the Shrieking Shack. Not the one from the books, though; this was a large haunted house in a ghost town somewhere in the U.S. A lot of people were trapped inside, and Harry had to go in and get them out. But they had to wait to actually come out for a while, because a bunch of other wizards were dealing with some sort of threat in the town first.

The problem was that the house had bad effects on people who stayed in it. The biggest one seemed to be lethargy; some of the people had been in there for days or weeks and had no concept of how much time had passed. They just sat huddled in the rooms in a stupor. Another effect was a poisoning of the mind, which could lead to the people being taken over by evil spirits or something, but that seemed to need strong thoughts and emotions to fuel it, and the lethargy counteracted such things. Stirring the people up to move them out of the house was dangerous in this regard.

There were dozens of people, maybe as many as 100 in all. They were all muggles I think. There were families. I had to get them all to wake up and move into the front room, so we could make sure everyone was accounted for and be ready to go out the front doors when it was safe. The other wizards came in and out briefly to give and receive updates, but they didn't want to stay inside for too long. There were problems with people hallucinating and wandering off while in dream worlds, and the ones who were made fully alert couldn't understand what was going on. It was dangerous if they became angry, because the house could harness that energy for evil. It was equally dangerous if the children became frightened, and how was I supposed to prevent that? The really dangerous thing, though, was magic. I could not under any circumstances use magic in there.

I remember trying to coax a teenage girl out of a small room where she was sitting by herself. When she started coming around, she thought I was a monster, and the evil in the house converged on and through her, and I nearly used magic in self-defense, which would have made it vastly more powerful. Somehow I got her to calm down and come out. Later she was herself again, but had picked up a lot extra knowledge from the encounter, mostly about the history of the house and the thousands of people it had killed over the years.

I have no memories of coming out or leaving the village, but afterwards we had to get away quickly. For some reason I was riding with a British witch who had never driven outside of England before. We were the only ones driving; everyone else had planes and helicopters. We had radio contact with them. She kept driving on the left side of the road. She would move over to the right when a car was oncoming, then move back to the left after it had passed. Someone in a helicopter kept telling her to drive on the right side, reminding her that this was how the rules worked for "peasants". I repeatedly offered to drive.

Later, I was in a treehouse with an older wizard talking about my experience in the house. At one point I started sobbing vehemently, and saying "Don't you understand? I saw my father in there! I almost stayed, because it made me think he was in there, but it wasn't really him."