I was in a cottage with high ceilings, in remote Marin County. My mom’s cottage, I think. I kept coming up on strange objects.

A huge, square lucite vase overflowing with giant yellow daffodils.

A wooden Venetian blind as long and narrow as a table runner; I kept pulling the string to make it retract up towards the ceiling, ten or more feet above me, among bare wooden ski-chalet beams.

A cabinet full of small objects that people made to show their personalities and attract others to them, the 3D equivalent of a personals ad. A young woman made a little, clear-glazed tan clay box, tall and rectangular like a paperclip holder but with portholes around it edged in blue-green. Her handwriting beside it was in cursive, revealing.

Flowers outside the door and up the path, and a feeling of loneliness.

It had rained overnight. I woke up and looked out in the backyard. We had six or eight cars parked side by side on the empty dirt lot; with the rain, the backyard had become a deep, puddinglike mass of mud and one or two cars had sunk completely under the surface. I called Rahul and showed him. We saw a pickup truck sink slowly into the mud. Somehow this scene was so relaxing that when my alarm clock went off and woke me up, I slammed the snooze button and tried to close my eyes and bring up the sea of drowning cars in our backyard instead. Now, of course, in real life, the cottage is going up and the backyard is full of boards and concrete and wheelbarrows.

In another part of my dream, Bryan was telling me he’d heard really good feedback about me from F5. I was puzzled by this and asked him about it. “No, really!” he said. “Did you mostly talk to them on the phone or over email?” continuing an opinion that phone conversations were completely different.

I met Ewan McGregor at some sort of dinner party taking place at a long table in a room open on one side to rocks and the ocean. I climbed up on the rocks and a wave crashed in, the water rising up to the soles of my shoes. I was concerned at first about getting wet–then I looked over at a group of three or four preteen girls wearing white dresses. They were completely wet, standing out where the fourth wall of the room should have been, with the waves washing over them. They were all laughing.

I went back to the table. Ewan and I had a good conversation. He kept looking at me as though I really amused him. I kept hoping he would want to be friends and agonizing as he would get distracted and turn away while talking.

I could transform into a bright green parrot when I put socks on my hands and willed it. A group of people were after me in my human form; they didn’t know about my parrot form. I worked in a big warehouse with cubicles in it. A woman was coming after me (in my parrot form) through the cubicles; I flew with some effort up to a door, and then out the door and across town to a wall ledge where I changed back to a person, clutching my wrinkled socks and thinking about why they might be after me and who might know me. The scenery looked a bit like Boston. I’d guess the season to be autumn except for the underwhelming drabness of the leaves.

Molly was invited to a picnic by Tabby and I tagged along. We were all sitting at a wooden picnic bench and we found out that she and Brett were actually married but pretended to be brother and sister at work, White Stripes-style. I got up and went across a little stream and through a doorway into a garden area. At first it seemed magical, like Spirited Away, but became a bit sinister. There was a huge trench dug along the middle of the area, and skulls and bones were embedded in the dirt.

Rahul was there and said something about it. I said it was bad that so many ghosts were there. Then it turned out that he was a ghost himself, a wicked spirit in disguise. He said Bedhead was angry at me for not paying enough attention to her, and said he would give me a test to see if she would forgive me. He gave me a choice of four cups of poison and I chose one. It was covered in fine green grass when I chose it, but when I took a drink it looked like water and tasted sweet. But immediately, after two gulps of it, I started throwing up everywhere.