incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

I dreamt last night that I was visiting some kind of government cafeteria. All the employees were wearing big i.d. badges on their shoulders, but not with their faces, with the faces of their spouse or kid or whatever and text saying something like, "This is the person who will be angry if I'm home after six." [1]

There was a woman there, who may have been the heir to Faerie [2], who was grabbed by a very intimidating-looking man with a knife. I was supposed to be protecting her, but was seriously disheartened when I couldn't get past the guy on the first few tries. I knew he wasn't trying to kill her, so I stopped for a while, and then when I turned back to re-enter the fray, he'd turned into a couple-foot-long lizardy-thing which leapt up at me—so I slashed it into pieces with the knife I had. And then I woke up.

When I woke up this morning, the only things I thought were, "I have weird dreams" (which is what I always think), and "hey, those were the knives my parents gave us for Christmas!" (They worked really well.) It wasn't until the drive home, contemplating my day and my week, that it occured to me that I could probably put a name to the lizardy-thing that I sliced up. In fact, I could put several names to it, both specific and metaphorical—starting with the muscle that seized up in my shoulder on the drive home, and going outward from there.

I guess I should just be glad that it didn't eat me.

[1] I didn't realize until after dinner that this was probably from feeling guilty about coming home late from work a lot recently.

[2] I gave Chad's dad our spare copies of Will Shetterly's Elsewhere and Nevernever, and flipped through Nevernever briefly over Christmas, so I think that's where that came from.

In happier news, I've updated the booklog with comments on Kate Ross's novels, thanks to athenais's query. Anyone else want to remark on books in the queue (further up that post), maybe jumpstart the juices?