dream connection

I dreamed.
It was one of those fever dreams, noisy and bright and disjointed. I don’t remember many of the details—just that I could never keep up with what was happening, and I felt as though as soon as my eyes would focus on something, everything would change, and as soon as I caught up to the action that was happening in the dream, it would roar off in a different direction, leaving me struggling to reorient myself, trying to keep up the pace with my feet dragging in the mud. The whole while, I was conscious of several other Harry Dresdens in the dream, all of them operating a little ways off from me, doing their own confusion dance in parallel to mine, and we occasionally paused to wave at one another and exchange polite complaints.
Toward the end of it, I found myself driving along some random section of road in my old multicolored Volkswagen Bug, the Blue Beetle, scowling ahead through heavy rain. My apprentice, Molly, sat next to me.
Molly was in her midtwenties and gorgeous, though she still looked a little too lean to my eyes. Her hair, which had seemed to be colored at random ever since she was a teenager, was now long and white-blond. She wore old designer jeans, a blue T-shirt with a faded recycling symbol on it, and sandals.
“I hate dreams like this,” I said. “There’s no plot—just random weird things happening. I get enough of that when I’m awake.”
She looked at me as if startled and blinked several times. “Harry?”
“Obviously,” I said. “It’s my dream.”
“No,” she said, “it kind of isn’t. How are you doing this?”
I took my hands off the steering wheel long enough to waggle my fingers and say, in a dramatic voice, “Wizard.”
Molly burst out into a warm laugh. “Oh, good Lord, it’s an accident, isn’t it? Are you finally off the island, then? How’s your head?”
At that, I blinked. “Wait. Molly?”
“Me,” she said, smiling, and leaned across the car. She snaked an arm around my neck for a second and leaned her head against my shoulder in a quick hug. There was a sense of warmth to the touch that went beyond the normal sense of a dream, a sense of another’s presence that was too absolute to question. “Wow, it’s good to hear from you, boss.”
“Wow,” I said. “How is this happening?”
“Good question,” she said. “I’ve been attacked in my dreams, like, fifty times since the New Year. I thought I had my defenses locked up pretty tight.”


Skin Game Chapter 14, Page 95