#1: The dominant portion of tonight's dream has to do with how I spent a portion of Monday night/Tuesday morning: gazing at this year's Leonid meteor shower. Instead of being off by myself on a deserted road between two barbed-wire-fenced orange groves in a part of Irvine Donald Bren hadn't gotten around to ruining yet, I found myself in the driveway of my grandma's house in Green Bay, WI. The meteors were the standard fare at first, until I started seeing some that were red and had a diffuse glow that lasted much longer than normal. The celestial weirdness was interrupted by a very low flying two-seater airplane. The plane apparently was owned by the police, and was flying so low that it barely cleared the top of the neighboring houses. It kept circling as though it was looking for someone, and this erratic behavior caught the attention of my grandma's 'neighbor' Dora (who is actually my mom's cousin, and who never lived next door to my grandma) who came out to watch it with me. Eventually, the low-flying acrobatics catch up with the pilot when he passes overhead and gets snagged on the top of my grandma's garage, bending his tail fins all to hell as a result. Dora walks over to examine the damaged aircraft on the roof and appears fairly unconcerned by the events; meanwhile I'm freaking out and run inside to call 911.

Flash forward to another scene, I'm sitting with Dora in a room somewhere, eating homemade salt water taffy or somesuch that she keeps shoveling at me. Turns out this was no ordinary plane crash: Dora tells me she has been abducted by extraterrestrials her whole life, and that this was another of their visits. That's why she was so calm about seeing the plane stuck on the roof, she knew it was them and that in a moment they'd bring her up for examination. In fact, she told me that it's likely there was no plane crash at all: that the airplane scenario was probably a 'cover' memory they implanted in my head so that I wouldn't remember what I really saw.

Commentary: I'm actually a little freaked when I see owls around at night, since according to Whitley Strieber - an author who wrote a book of his own experiences with entities that may have been extraterrestrials - remembering encounters with owls is a common 'screen memory' used to block what actually happened. What made it more believable is that he was able to tie the owl imagery, as well as other aspects of the 'visitor experience' in with world mythology. If you need a good mindfuck before bedtime, I highly recommend reading "Communion". He clearly took the lessons he learned as an author of horror novels and kicked everything up a notch with that one!