Advice from a small town girl

I have dreams, you know.

Not dreams of the future or what I would like to accomplish.

Night-time dreams.

When I was a kid, we were frequently entertained at the breakfast table by my father’s descriptions of the previous night’s dreams. They were always colorful, detailed and fantastic.

Well, I seem to have inherited my father’s dreams.

The other night I dreamed I was visiting the family farm in the company of my older sister. We discovered a stray cat in the front yard, twining himself around the flowers in the rock garden. He was very sweet and quite friendly.

He was also more than a little unrealistic – the only thing in the dream (so far, anyway) that was. The yard was as it is in reality. My sister was my sister. I was me.

The cat was a gray tiger-striped creature with a very puffy tail. Not so unrealistic, you say? His stripes were very vivid, almost black and white. Wait! They were black and white! They were alternating widths.

We named him Barcode and decided that I would take him to the vet to get checked out.

Barcode was very well behaved in the car. The vet, realistically, was about 30 miles away. Then things start to get just a little strange.

The vet, it turns out, has a mobile unit which is parked in a sort of gravelly area in a grassy field just at the end of a dead-end street. Slightly up the hill is a barn-like structure that appears to be empty.

For some reason, I have approached the van from the grassy field side, and parked my car in front of the barn, walking down the hill with the cat in a carrier.

The van has a sort of haphazard arrangement of concrete blocks set up around it and I spend some time wondering if it’s a permanent setup or not.

Barcode gets his checkup, and it’s decided that he will stay at the van for a while.

When I walk back up the hill to where my car was parked, I discover that it is gone! I stand on the hillside, trying to figure out what happened, when a door opens on the downhill side of the barn. It’s a feed-store-cum gift shop, and appears to be full of a woman and her children, along with pot-bellied pigs and miniature mules.

The miniature mules really like me.

When I explain my missing car, the woman calls her husband, who is very tall and has earlobe-length dark curly hair. (That’s apropos of nothing, just the way I dream.)

He gets a funny look on his face when I describe my missing Subaru (I have never owned a Subaru), and says he’ll be right back.

It turns out that his brother, a felon on parole, runs an auto repair shop out of the uphill side of the building. He has broken into the passenger side of my car and driven it into his shop, where he is busy preparing it to be sold to someone else.

The tall curly haired guy convinces him to return the car to me, and I am understandably upset when I discover the passenger side door and window are ruined. The culprit then tries to convince me that we are even since he has completely repaired the braking system, to which I reply no repairs were needed since the car was barely a month old.

We finally settle our dispute to my satisfaction, and I hike back down the hill to retrieve Barcode, only to discover that the van, concrete blocks and all, is gone. It’s past closing time and they have departed for home, taking my cat with them.

That’s when I wake up.

Is it any wonder I’m tired?