In my dream, I was playing World of Warcraft and suddenly decided I needed to buy a strategy guide for instances and raids. I was unimpressed with the wealth of information online, and wanted to be able to page through a book. I hopped in the car and headed to my local game store where I found the shelves completely bare except for the book I wanted.

"What's going on here?" I asked the clerk, surprised. I gestured to the empty store. "Are you guys moving?"

"All the game stores in Washington are closing down," he told me forlornly. "The economy is so bad, no one's buying video games."

I was struck speechless, horrified, imagining not being able to wander into the store and browse the used section, looking for a good deal. It was too heart wrenching to comtemplate, so I turned to the one item left on the shelf, the World of Warcraft Instance and Raid strategy guide.

"Two hundred fifty dollars?!" I cried.

"Sorry," the clerk said, and started playing with his PSP.

I stared at the book, trying desperately to figure out how to work that two hundred into my budget when I - woke up.

It's funny how sometimes when you have a dream you know exactly why you had it. I live down a couple of side roads off a main thoroughfare that was once lined with businesses. The RV dealer is long gone, and one by one parking lots that were once packed full of shiny new cars have been emptying as the dealerships declare bankruptcy. The movie theater parking lot is sparsely populated, even on a Friday night. The coffee stand looks sad and alone without the usual stream of cars going through.

Small restaurants, coffee shops, car dealerships, tiny local stores.... all disappearing. It's one thing to read about the suffering economy in the news. It seems alarming in the abstract, yet clearly someone else's problem. After all, no matter what the news says, things are fine. Yes, I will stick my head in the sand, thank you. Then people you know start losing their jobs.

I've been thinking about it a lot as I work my way out of a hole I dug for myself with my finances. I'm extremely fortunate in the fact that my grandmother, who had a career in the banking industry, has been willing to act as my financial advisor and help me climb back up. I'm becoming acutely aware of how important money management is, and how imperative it is that we live within our means.

I'm not really sure where I originally intended to go with this post. All I can think about right now is how grateful I am that I don't have much debt and that I still have a job. And the fact that I'm profoundly grateful it's not up to me to fix everything. So that secret movement to take over the government and install me as Supreme Dictator... yeah, let's hold off for a little while on that, okay?

I was a crazy bad ass special agent who had the power to turn back time by several minutes at will. I had an important mission to save the Dalai Lama from something dire, but I needed the help of an old friend of mine, a female mercenary.

I found her house looking fairly ominous. Before I could walk up to the door and knock, the mercenary and a second woman came leaping out of second floor windows, landing to my right and left, while a man appeared in the front doorway. They all started shooting me. I pulled my guns and started to shoot back, then stopped. Faintly irritated, I thought 'well THIS isn't going to work' and turned back time.

I finally got the mercenary to join me, and we went to visit a Haitian soothsayer who could see the future. We reached her house and walked in without knocking. She had hundreds of tiny snakes held in jars of embalming fluid all over the house. I immediately got the creeps and told the mercenary that we had to leave. She told me not to be stupid, and we wandered around until we found the Haitian. As soon as she saw me, she threw a handful of tiny venomous snakes into my face, and I turned back time.

We decided to forget about the Haitian.

I finally reached were I was supposed to be and found that I had to impersonate the Dalai Lama. This sort of seemed somewhat blasphemous, but I was doing it to save his life. I disguised myself by putting on some robes.... and that was it. Prepared and clearly looking exactly like the Dalai Lama, I went out to sit cross legged on the roof of a car for some kind of procession. I was openly armed with two swords, two guns in shoulder holsters, and a Rambo knife. Everyone was fooled by my ingenious disguise. At the end of the procession, the bad guys finally saw through my charade, and I was forced to engage in an epic action movie battle that would have made an action hero you could name proud.


It was awesome.

Last night for some reason I fell asleep as soon as I got home at 6:10PM and didn't wake up again for more than five minutes until 7:45 this morning. I must have needed the sleep, but it still felt absolutely bizarre to waste an entire evening sleeping. I didn't even go to the gym or clean up my living room like I had planned, just got home, sat down on the sofa to play with my kitty for a few minutes before I headed out again, and BAM. Consciousness lost.

As unproductive as this was, it did result in an extremely vivid, extremely odd dream in which I found myself on a quest to find two large (and very tacky) pendants, a blue one and an orange one. I had been sent on this quest by Liam Neeson. I don't really remember too much detail now, but I discovered when I got the two pendants that if I held the blue one over my right eye I could see what Liam Neeson was seeing, and if I held the orange one over my left eye I could see what some other random person was seeing. Sneaky Neeson decided to betray me and take the pendants for himself (although why he wanted them I'm not too sure, they didn't seem to have much practical purpose), and I was forced to hide in an alley in some sci-fi city that literally had a carpet of garbage. My brilliant idea was to burrow under the garbage and wait for Neeson to go away. I was found, Neeson tried to take the pendants, and we ended up in an epic hand-to-hand battle. Which I won, naturally.

I realize that I'm probably the only one who cares about this, but it still cracks me up. ^_^

In other news, this is the second day my home computer has been in the shop - I'm really hoping I get it back this afternoon. >_<

Last night I had a crazy dream:

Normal evening at home, except Spike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Spike, that is) came over to hang out with me. We talked, had a drink, and I was fully intending to fulfill my long-held fantasy of having intimate relations with Spike when he had to leave. Damnit.

Next I found myself in an Umbrella Corporation headquarters. I was in a huge room with several scientists observing an infected zombie hammerhead shark. The aquarium was one of those giant floor to ceiling wall of glass aquariums, the better to observe the zombie shark's behaviour. The shark began pounding its head against the glass, and the glass began to crack. I turned and fled from the room, telling all Umbrella Corporation employees that I came across that the headquarters was about to be flooded and the zombie shark was about to escape. I made it to the elevator and got away.

Safely (or not) back at home, I became aware that a group of people were coming to raid my home and kill me. I had a perfect hiding place, but for it to be perfect there was a series of actions I had to take, including closing a certain window in the room I was going to hide in. I completed everything but closing that window, and by the time I remembered it was too late. The villains had invaded my home and captured me. I told them that before they killed me, I had to visit my sister. Being the kindly sort of murderers they were inclined to grant my last request, and took me to see Caroline.

I told Caroline what was going on, and asked for her help. She gravely informed me that she had aromatherapy time travel. With painstaking care, she laid out four gauze pads and four tiny vials. From each vial she poured exactly four drops onto each of the four gauze pads. I sniffed each one (they all smelled really good), and....

...went about my business until I realized that I had traveled back in time! I rushed about the house completing all my hiding preparations, and this time I remembered to close the window. Success!

When I woke up at one o'clock in the morning I immediately woke Bob up to tell him my dream. He was not as interested as I had expected him to be, and kept mumbling something about me waking him up, and it being one o'clock in the morning....