A Weekend of the Virtual Bank Line

Friday night: I only remember the end of this dream. I had a vegetarian frog. It looked like a tree frog - a big head in relation to its body, but the whole thing was enormous. The size of a dinner plate. Its skin, rather than being smooth like a regular frog, was covered with fine green hair that looked like moss.

As a treat, I had smeared some avocado on a piece of cucumber. I threw it to the frog, who was sitting on a patch of sandy ground. It landed about 8 inches to the frog's left, so when it landed he tilted his big head and looked at it. Then he moved himself to the left to be closer to it.

Re-situated, he looked to the left, but it wasn't there anymore. He looked to the right, and it wasn't there either. He picked up his little froggy hands and didn't see it under them. He picked up his little froggy feet and didn't see it under them either. Because it was under his little froggy butt. I was getting really frustrated because vegetarian frogs are SO DUMB.

Saturday night: I was driving my truck. I don't drive it very often, because it's big and sucks up a prohibitive amount of gas, but on this occasion I needed it. I was coming through a neighborhood and trying to figure out how to from where I was to where I needed to be, and the only way I could figure it out was to drive through the lobby of car wash, then the wrong way down and alley. The alley let out onto a little residential street with gingerbread-looking houses in fabulous colors - mauve with brilliant blue trim or apricot with lavender. The houses themselves were all alike, but the paint jobs were spectacular.

The street was really steep, though, and I had come out onto it going a little faster than I had intended. It ended in a T-intersection, and I was heading right for someone's front yard. I was standing up on the brake, but still going too fast. I swerved left, hit my right-side tires on the curb, and rolled the truck into the yard.

The truck was on its side, and I realized that, while the houses were lovely and the grounds looked well-kept, they were actually quite soft and swampy. My truck was sinking. I jumped up and pushed the driver's side door open so that I could climb out, then stood on the front porch of the house and watched my truck sink out of sight in the lawn, which closed over it with nary a ripple.

A woman, hearing the commotion, opened the front door and saw me standing there in shock.

"My car is in your yard," I told her, staring at the lawn where the truck had been sucked in.

She looked over my shoulder and saw nothing.

"No, it isn't," she said right back. And I realized that it was useless to argue.

Sunday night: I was at a school. Or perhaps it was my job. Either way, there were a lot of people I saw every day, and a lot of them lived near me. There was one house that we had to visit because something awful was happening there. Not law enforcement kind of awful, but the place was neglected and the mail was piling up, even though we knew that someone still lived there.

My companion (whom I never saw clearly, so I couldn't even say whether it was a man or a woman) and I went to the house, and when we walked up to the door, we saw the most extraordinary thing: as we walked up, something that looked like a giant hand retreated through the doorway. The four fingers took up almost the entire doorway, and it was as though the hand were reaching through the doorway as we walked up and was snatched back.

My companion and I left in a hurry and did a little more research. Then, the POV of my dream shifted. I could see another woman, a neighbor of mine, writing a note and taking some things - a pair of glasses, some letters - over to this house. She let herself in with a key and put the things onto a sofa. The house was clean and tidy, and she left because she didn't want to disturb the occupant. It had been her husband, and when they broke up, the woman had left alone, leaving her young daughter with the husband.

But now, something was happening to the husband. One minute he would be a normal man, the next he would be a giant so huge that he filled the entire floor of the place, which was by no means small. His daughter, no more than 10, was doing her best to keep some semblance of normalcy in the house because she loved her father and he wasn't abusive or neglectful. He loved his daughter very much and took excellent care of her when he was his right size, but he never knew when the change would come over him or how long it would last.

It was hard to know the right thing to do.