Meeting People

I dream that my sister came back home and we fight fight fight. I’m in town sitting on a bench, talking about it with my dad, when the Queen of England sits on my other sides. She thanks me for helping her the last time, and I absolutely don’t remember ever meeting her before. She needs my help now because she wants to show Hercules, the Disney cartoon, to Prince Louis and doesn’t know if it’s appropriate for his age. I assure her I used to love Hercules as a child. We speak in different languages and she compliments me on my pronunciation. She notices I’m looking dejected, she learns about my sister and nods gravely. Okay, she says, early tomorrow morning we leave from Bangkok and you’re coming with us. I say no, absolutely no, I can’t travel, I don’t even have a swimsuit. It’s out of the question. The next morning I’m on a Thai beach.

Then I dream that I’m Lady Gaga trying to infiltrate a Nazi stronghold. Hitler himself is there and he’s looking for me, but thankfully with a surgical mask on my face, no eye makeup and a fake accent he doesn’t recognize me.

Mazes and Prisons

I’m part of a group of female warriors, we need to navigate an underground maze rigged with deadly puzzles.

We sneak inside and I go ahead to scout. There are long corridors with technological contraptions all over the walls – wires, tubes, buttons. A giant rock encrusted with green and blue gems rolls towards me, I swerve to the side and yell for my companions to watch out. I notice there are now more people in the maze, two older women running wildly to avoid the giant rock. I move faster, I can’t allow them to arrive to the treasure before me.

We reach a chamber at the center of the maze, inside there are two metal pods surrounded by futuristic machinery, they probably contain people important enough to justify all this protection. As I caress the cold surface of a pod, our enemy arrives: he’s a Nazi officer with his soldiers. I need to find an excuse, fast! I tell him I’m working for the “Professor”, and I point to one of the older women, who is wearing a lab coat.

She is brought forward. I can now see that her face is covered with a wooden mask: it’s expressionless, like a dead-eyed Pinocchio. Interrogated, she doesn’t speak a single word. The Nazi furiously rips off her mask, but the face underneath is identical, made of wood, the eyes vacant and lifeless, the mouth a black gaping hole. The man screams, and we run away in the confusion.

It was all a flashback, as told by one of my warrior companions. She looks like an older Kirby Howell-Baptiste, she’s in the Orange is The New Black prison telling the story to the other inmates. Yoga Jones calls them outside to look for food, and so the inmates happily get out of prison and into a forest, where they look for edible plants through the sunny patches, laughing and squealing at each other. It looks quite nice.