I dreamed an XF casefile last night.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you - it was a deeply adorable XF casefile that hung together suprisingly well for a dream, with a beautiful New England town in the fall, an evil monk, mushroom-hunting, a lake monster, a werewolf love triangle, Scully playing baseball, our Agents stuck staying at a very frilly B&B and Mulder being very smug.

I just don't know *why* I was suddenly dreaming XF. It's not like I've done anything particularly XF related for, like, *months*.

I had a dream about you guys last night.

Only it turned out that f_w was actually just the visible part and publicity/recruiting arm of a secret cabal that was working to expose some sort of vast multinational evil conspiracy which was centered out of an immigrants' enclave in San Francisco, controlled by men from this tiny, obscure oil-rich Eastern European country where they still forced their women to dress like it was the Victorian era.

(I had to get a proper corset made before I could go undercover there. That was the only fun part of the dream!)

Anyway, we finally uncovered enough evidence to go public, and our glorious leader Mrs. Larimer called a press conference where she revealed the whole thing, including the U.s. Government's complicity. But the first question in the question period was some asshole male reporter asking "Yeah, but where's the actual proof of all this?" And Mrs. Larimer said, "I'm confident something will come up," at which point black helicopters flew out of the clouds and bombed the whole press conference into a thin layer of slime, leaving no survivors but the dozen people on the speakers' platform (they hadn't been willing to target it, because there were some high-ranking officials there to speak too) and kadath's pet cat, who was busy having kittens under the podium. So our new secret catchphrase became "The kittens are the truth," and there were many very cute pictures posted everywhere.

...then it turned out it was all just a graphic novel anyway, and I woke up.

I dreamed last night that I had built a boat.

..well, no, I dreamed last night that I had *dreamed* I built a boat. It was one of those little plywood-and-fancy-glue designs that are meant to be buildable by a beginner in one weekend, and I'd downloaded the plans and been thinking really hard about it, so when (in the dream) I woke up from the dream, I for a minute thought I'd really built it, until I realized that I couldn't've. And then I looked out the window and it was *there*, and people were congratulating me on having done such a good job for a beginner, and the pirates from Coot Club were putting together a rigging for me, and I'd *never actually built the thing*. It had somehow *appeared* just because I thought I'd built it, and I didn't even know where the heck the *plywood* had come from, much less the labor, but I didn't want to say anything because it was clearly my fault the thing was there but wasn't quite real, and I wasn't sure what would happen if it the word got around that it wasn't.

This is probably a metaphor for a lot of things in my life.

Anyway, that explains why the first thing I did after *actually* waking up was to find this page. And OMG, do you know how long I've wanted my own 12-15 ft, clinker-built, single-masted gaff-rigged keeled sailing boat? At *least* since the first time I ever read A Wizard of Earthsea. And now that I've realized that Lookfar and Swallow are essentially the same boat, I want one *even more*.

...Maybe that's all I'll put on my Christmas list this year. A 12-15' gaff-rigged clinker-built keeled sailboat and a place to learn to sail it in.

This morning, I dreamed that our only President announced on national television that he was planning to initiate a first nuclear strike against the people of Iran sometime in the next week. I don't remember what had happened in the dream before that, but the rest of the dream was spent packing in a panic in order to run off and hide in the wilderness for the next ten years or so. (We were planning to head toward the Southwest, because in the dream, I had recently read an old paperback book by someone who claimed that he had discovered the long-lost directions to find the way to a secret stronghold that had been constructed in a canyon there in the 1920s by some foreign potentate who was executed before he ever had a chance to use it. We figured that even if the book was bunk, sandstone canyons are pretty radiation-proof, and the Sonoran's great for subsistence living.)

Damn it! I was six when the Wall came down; I'm supposed to belong to the generation that grew up *not* constantly suffering from nuclear anxiety dreams. We're supposed to be *past* that, my dear Human Race. (And yes, I'm allowed to cuss while talking about nuclear annihilation. Actually, the neatest bit of the dream was probably when the speech went out over CNN - it was the "Oh shit*" heard round the world! The POV even zoomed out, so I got to hear six billion voices cursing in unison, and then a shocked silence...)

So anyway, I'm off to re-pack my "in case of sudden end of civilization" emergency bag, and then I'm going to call enemy_anime and see if he wants any sewing help, unless he replies to this entry first.

Early this morning I was visited by a bogeyman. I heard him in the living room - I heard him come stalking down the hall - I heard him crunching through the mess of papers on my bedroom floor - I heard him make deep, irritable growly noises like nothing I had ever heard before - and I knew, I just knew, that if I pulled my head out from under my covers, I would see him on the floor below my bed, see his glowing red eyes afloat in a mass of darkness - and he would know I was there - and then - no, I don't even want to think about and then.

I had no other option but to stay all the way under the blankets, to try to make my breathing quieter, and go into the accepted method of getting rid of bogeymen (that being, keep your eyes closed and your head under the blankets and try your best to convince yourself that he couldn't possibly exist, and when you no longer believe he has to go away.) It worked. Eventually.

When I woke up for the final time this morning, I could have sworn that the clothes hanging on my closet door had a pale, dead face and were watching me...

I've never been bothered with monsters under the bed before, or anything like that (except for the days when occasionally the sweet-gum tree by my window would get restless and come walking, but that was only that one autumn before it settled down.) I wonder what attracted that one last night. I wonder if I can remember never to do that again. Yesterday in church I started to say the Abracadabra diminishing chant, but was interrupted before I got to the end of the spell ... I'm tempted to say something about psychic energy leaking out of the unbound ends, or attracting demons by saying their names lightly, or tiger repellant and the day it stops working ... but it's noon and broad daylight, and I don't really believe in any of that stuff. Really.

Where's my blanket?