Good morning!

Only a little more than three hours of sleep last night, because I decided to be dedicated to wordcount rather than health, and I have to be up early this morning to make certain the apartment is in good shape for its final batch of yearly inspections -- the city's coming around to make sure everything is up to code, now that the landlords have done the same thing.  No big worries, but I want to at least do a circuit of the hallways and vacuum up any mess, if there is any.

More alarming is the fact that there was a drug bust in the building yesterday -- one of the newest tenants was apparently dealing pot, and for some reason thought it was safe to be less than subtle about it.  I had already remarked that someone upstairs had a lot of poorly-dressed teenage visitors, but I hadn't quite twigged to the significance when some tenants came to us complaining of pot smell, and late-night smoke-ups in the parking lot (which I live on the wrong side of the building to see).  Megan and I consulted the property owners, and were getting ready to take written witness accounts before going to the police... but someone beat us to the punch, and several units showed up with a drug dog, arrested the residents (and some guests they had, I believe), and carted off several very large containers (took four or five guys to carry them all out... though I guess some may have been full of forensics equipment?). 

Yikes.  I'm glad they were caught so soon after moving in, at any rate -- this is a good building, with good tenants, and especially with young kids living here there's definitely a crowd we don't want to be attracting.  On a personal level, I have no objection to people smoking marijuana, though I don't myself, and I favor decriminilization... but that's not really relevant.  Having a dealer in the building (and I have no idea if that was all they were dealing) is a whole different story, and I'm glad to have that sorted out.

In other news, thanks to the advice of sagacious commenters yesterday, Chapter Sixteen of The Hellion Prince is back on track.  Hopefully next week I will have time to compile, type, and edit all of Fourteen and Fifteen.  It's been hectic.  But then, when isn't it?

I should really make a 'dream diary' tag.

So, a couple nights ago, I had a prolonged dream, one that lasted through several cycles of crankily waking up and drifting off again with surprisingly few continuity shifts.  In the beginning, I was working in some minor role (intern?  reporter?  jedi apprentice?) in what appeared to the the Old Republic Galactic Senate in the Star Wars universe.  I was investigating something that had to do with political corruption and the misappropriation of clones (I think.  Certainly there's some degree of confabulation making this more coherent.), and I believe the clones in question may have been Rei and Kaworu from Neon Genesis Evangelion.  Also, the Galactic senate was definitely located in Washington, DC, rather than Coruscant.

In any case, when I tried to expose this cover-up, I and my colleagues (three or four of them?  Still no clue exactly what my job description was) were summarily, brutally, and bloodily murdered, shot with a high-caliber handgun in a senator's office.  It was... pretty graphic and disturbing for a dream death, actually, complete with pain, numbness, fuzzy consciousness as I started to bleed out and was then shot again to finish me off... but it was quick.  Shockingly quick, so that it had no time to become a full-blown nightmare.  And I never had that sense of intrinsic helplessness that makes nightmares so distinctly terrifying.

Anyway.  Then... I was dead.  We were dead, my colleagues and me.  At which point... the Archangel Michael came to hang out with our disembodied spirits, and explain that we could not move on until we received some form of closure or justice regarding our deaths... which would be difficult, as our murderer had successfully covered up even the fact of our deaths.  And, of course, we could in no way affect the physical world.  Archangel Michael in tow, we roamed the Capitol (which at this point looked an awful lot like the Twin Cities.  Also, from the moment we were shot onward, I am pretty sure the Star Wars elements of the dream were retconned away, as we never dealt with anything alien or unearthly again, except, you know, the whole ghosts and angels shtick.).  Our search was largely ineffectual, until we discovered that someone connected with this mess (I don't remember who; I don't think it was the killer) ran a public Minecraft server.  Our ghosts promptly entered the computer and manifested as players in the game... and discovered that the electronic world, apparently, we could affect, much to Michael's chagrin. 

Then I woke up.

Very curious about how that would have continued, had I not.