[Kitsa]

I had many, many very vivid and bizarre dreams last night, but the one that took the cake was the one where I was incarcerated in a reform school/mental hospital/orphanage. The dream started as I was being admitted and processed, with them allowing me to keep my trike and converting it to a hammock. I roomed with this one crazy chick I really, really disliked, and then somehow stepped up responsibility to be one of the people policing the floor I was on.

At one point a small boy was found dead in his bed with stab wounds. I somehow knew who'd done it, a teenage boy in another ward, and when I went there sure enough he'd tried to hide the boy's bloody shirt and sheets under his cot. The teenager told me nonchalantly that he'd found a bottle, broken it, and stabbed the boy with the pieces. For some reason, I wasn't scared of the guy. I just said, "You've really screwed up this time, now you're going to the maximum-security mental ward." He didn't seem to care.

As punishment or a way to spend our days, we were all told to move only forward down this eternal stone staircase. This was difficult because the staircase was literally piled with the children's books and toys that were familiar to all of us- somehow they'd gotten all our childhood toys and thrown them in there. If anyone stopped to examine one instead of promptly hopping one step forward when the command issued, they'd be sent back to the mental ward for some sort of further punishment.

One girl was Scottish and had six brothers who were made to constantly march past the building's grounds in their kilts and not acknowledge her. She'd be standing out there trying to get one to look at her and they'd just march past, over and over again, every day.

Beyond that, all I remember is people attacking me for whatever opinion I'd held, and me having to defend it, them threatening to send me to some worse level of punishment, and for some reason I was periodically wrapping chux (absorbent underpads for hospital bedding) around me as if they afforded some sort of defense.

Who needs drugs? Not me. Sometimes these dreams are so strange that I wonder if I've somehow crossed wires with someone else's dream, and that they're getting some sort of boring thing about my cats.