I had one seriously messed up dream last night.

It was somewhere between Harry Potter and the X-Files. James and I were at this school for magic, and appeared to be on the staff there, attempting to teach shapeshifting to a bunch of students. It didn’t go terribly well, and I recall one kid turned into a squirrel, went nuts, ran away, got frostbitten ears, and left us all chasing a black and white squirrel with bald ears around the school, which for some reason was next to an old theatre in a decaying downtown.

That wasn’t the weird part.

At some point in this peculiar saga, I was in my room, surrounded by cats (and one bald-eared squirrel) listening to a voice from outside the window, which was sort’ve hypnotic and quite disturbing. Realizing that no one who talks in a calm, reasonable monotone is to be trusted, I got James, and we were thus prepared with some older gent (whom I evidentally knew, although I have no idea who it was once I woke up) busted through the window and tried to kill me.

There ensued one of those complicated protean battles where everyone’s changing shape in a game of one-upmanship to try and defeat the other one, and yet for some reason no one ever thinks “Hey, being a porcupine would end this problem right off!” It’s the sort of thing that makes me wish I was into were-stuff at all, because I’m sure I would have found it a deeply moving experience, but as it was, it was just squishy. There was a lengthy ariel dogfight component, which appeared to be mostly footage ripped from “Blade Runner,” (my subconscious respects no copyright!) with a lot of flying around and James, who conveniently seemed to have me on radio, despite the fact that I wasn’t wearing one, shouting directions. About the only bits I remember clearly were diving very very fast at a building, in an effort to ditch him into the side, and then fleeing from a giant helicopter with an enormous owl skull in the cockpit, through a Fifth-Element style pile-up of rush-hour traffic in three dimensions, and thinking “I’m turning into a gnat, damnit, ‘cos if he can’t see me, he can’t kill me.”

Which appears to have worked, since the next thing I knew, the guy was nowhere in sight, and I was in a department store trying to order pizza at the perfume counter. Go figure.

Obviously this means that my spirit animal is the gnat. Or, since we’ve suspected the wombat all along, the mystical hybrid gnat-winged-wombat and I must invent a pseduo-native spirituality to drape over it immediately.

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