A long and chaotic dream won the morning memory. There was another dream about having sex with a French woman in a desert after being accused of some crime, but it’s not a sharply recalled.

First I was with a group of friends, all males. We’d been out having a good time in the outdoors and were now filthy. Many of these people were real life familiars from across my stretch of existence and life stages. I was young and it was sunny. Many more groups of similiar people were out there on a large, dusty, gold-sun plain, like knots of bison congregating around a larger herd.

A sudden call to go get a beer put us in motion. We ran along, laughing and eager. We were going to have a beer! “Don’t worry, I have chits from last night,” I shouted, holding up discolored pieces of white paper. I reached a table and sat, still outside, but now on a plateau. My friends were coming but were behind. I pulled out the chits and discovered, they were chits; they were just torn pieces of paper. Some fluttered out of my hand and dropped into the mud as my friends arrived and I explained, “I don’t have chits after all.”

We all set out to go somewhere and were now downtown in what looked like a small city. Without preamble, I decided that I’d had enough and started in another direction. I was soon running in the streets alone but as I turned a corner, I saw ‘my crowd’ running in parallel in the other direction. They saw and recognized me and called out, but I’d kept going in the other direction, alone.

I arrived at my wife’s mother’s house. I knew that’s what it was even though it was nothing like any of her places in real life. My wife was there, along with my sister-in-law. She was sitting crossed-legged on the ground. As I see her in that scene after awakening, she looks as she did as a young pregnant woman in a photo taken of her when she lived in New Mexico. Giving no warning, she pulled her breast to feed an infant. I was a little surprised but then went, okay, she’s comfortable with it, and my wife, beside me, showed no reaction, so I should be okay, too.

I went off because I noticed my mother-in-law was busy digging. In real life, she passed away about six years ago. She was about the age she was when I first met her, mid-forties, in my dream. I spoke with her briefly but don’t remember what we said, and then wandered around the yard to see what she was doing. She’d dug a moat around her house. Then, I thought, she expanded an existing moat. It wasn’t large as moats go, about a yard wide, and didn’t seem deep. Water lilies floated in places. I discovered little tiles. Two inches square, I realized that she was going to ourline her moat with them.

The first one I turned over was scarlet. I put it in place on the moat to see what it looked like. Next, I found one that was yellow. I took out the red one and put the the yellow one in. It was a soft yellow, not as bright as a lemon. Next, I found a sage green tile. As I was going to put it in, I heard a man calling. A tall male stranger, dressed in a tie with a rust colored corduroy and tan pants and large, handlebar mustache was walking up, telling me how much he liked the yellow tile because it was a bold and striking color, and he approved my choice. I was just beginning to explain to him what was going on when another man in a charcoal business suit came up, urging me to go with the first color, the red, because it looked sharp against the water and grass. As these two began talking about the tiles, I turned over a third one, which was sage green. That was my preference, but I also thought that a pattern using all three colors could be made.

I went back to tell my MIL that, which is where the dream ended.