Last night I went to pole dance class for the first time. It was fun and probably deserves it's own entry. I came home and pretty much just fell right into bed.

And I dreamed.

The earliest bit I remember involved being in an awkward pit behind some stairs. I had to jump – very slowly and driftily – high enough to catch myself at the top and pull myself up onto the stair landing; this was complicated by there being a two-dimensional neon-glowing cobra wandering around. I caught it, threw it into the little pit I'd been in, and clambered out. The stairs looped around strangely, bringing me back where I'd been in short order; I jumped back down into that little pit, stomped the cobra, then wandered off through a hidden passage, talking to the cobra in a suddenly friendly manner.

I can't remember how I got here from there, but after a bit I was in a car with my mother, talking a nighttime drive through a semi-ruralish area. In the sky, I showed her some of my plans for the next bits of Rita: a scene in a kitchen between Rita1 and Carol1. Rita was glowing; the lights went out and she disintegrated into an angular line drawing, as if she was in a vector game, then those lines simplified and broke up and rearranged themselves into a really complicated array of sine waves plotted in slight 3d perspective. The waves overlapped and flowed (and I winced at the shortcuts I'd taken here and there in animating this). Then the waves shifted from a horizontal flow to one going up and to the right, and coalesced into a multicolored line. Every few color changes, a sub-line would branch off briefly, taking a little 45° turn, then another one back to parallel the main line. Some of them went backwards; they all ended after a very short time. But as the line scrolled by, some of the branches started getting longer and longer, growing little sub-branches of their own, splitting and spreading until there was too much to fit in the frame at once. The view scrolled back and forth some, examining the whole width of this design.

I felt like this sequence went on a bit too long, and needed to be cut down before it actually went into the comic. (I have a climax planned that sort of touches on some of the same themes I felt this was abstractly discussing, by the way.)

Then we were at an earlier point in the drive, before I showed off this sequence. Instead of taking a left turn to a long looping detour, we jinked right into a military base, and drove into a tight little tunnel. The car was now a little off-road four-wheeler, and I was hanging on the back; I had to duck my head lest it be brushed against the bright yellow plastic of the tunnel.

We came out into an office and got off the four-wheeler. I was presented with a check I'd given the clerks the last time I'd been here, that hadn't gone through. Probably because I'd signed it “Katie Rice” instead of with my own name. It was also an oversized one of my business cards but that seemed to be perfectly acceptable. So I dug in my bag and found another card – I had to awkwardly tear it off of a set of three, that were I perfectly cut – and wrote a new check for $20 (covering both that bad check and this passage) and handed it over. We were free to proceed.

Which we did on foot, instead of on that vehicle. There were several large rooms, connected by tight little tunnels I could barely get through. Eventually I ended up by myself in a dark, vast arcade, full of huge versions of games. And lots of people wandering around. Nobody was playing the games, the y'all seemed to have places to be. I paused before a reinterpretation of Dig-Dug that had you zooming through space, following chains of fruit bonus pickups at high speed, then diving into giant space gourds full of dirt for what I assume would have been some form of more digging-oriented game play, but I wandered off around that point in the demo.

I wandered to a different part of that room, organized like a bookstore. As I went up and down the aisles, I dug a handful of change out of my right pocket, and started filtering out the quarters. I am pretty sure I ended up with more quarters than I had coins of any kind at first; dream money is weird I guess. I put the quarters in my right pocket, and the other coins in the left, without at all remarking on the fact that I was wearing jeans – something I haven't really done since before I transitioned.

Now that I had quarters, I wanted to go try some of these games. But instead of going directly back, I went through another tight tunnel to an area I'd been in before, I think it was some kind of spa? I can't remember. Whatever it was, the tunnel got tighter, until I had to turn around and start climbing down through its close embrace of loose cloth.

And then suddenly I was awake.

I lay there for a bit, deciding if I wanted to get up. And then the ipad beside my bed emitted a gentle chime. I picked it up to see what it wanted me to do. The lock screen merely told me it was 7:00, so I unlocked it, and found myself in the Kindle app looking at “The Oversoul 7 Trilogy”, which I'd been reading the night before. It's a weird book about an “Oversoul” being examined, and having to jump between the various humans it's connected to. Interesting synchronicity.

It turned out the chime was a notification for the now-cancelled appointment for a Comcast tech to poke at my net (it went down yesterday, I made an appointment, then a tech showed up to fix the net for a different apartment in my building, and fixed mine while he was at it). I rolled over and decided to go back too sleep, but couldn't. Eventually I picked up the ipad and started writing this. When I got to the point of writing about it going ding, another notification for the same appointment popped up and went ding again.

I'm never sure if synchronicity happens because some part of my brain is looking for patterns, or if there's something actually there. Who knows.

Anyway, that's the dream I had this morning.