Dream

I had a curious dream last night that I'm not sure I can even make sense of, but it included bits influenced by Mythcon, Harry Potter, Susan Palwick's book Flying in Place (I just read the book after meeting the author), New England Conservatory and my voice teacher there, dragons and prophecies, and a place that was possibly somewhere between St. Anselm's College, the site of Odyssey, and Hogwarts.I was at some school (St. Anselm's/Hogwarts?), perhaps as a teacher, and there was a prophecy about some sort of doom of the school that everyone just accepted was going to happen someday. A little girl was leaving her body to talk with ghosts (this is the part influenced by the Palwick book), even though she wasn't supposed to. She would come back babbling parts of the prophecy. I know that Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman were there (echoes of Mythcon). At one point I believe they were sitting on the floor in a circle with this little girl trying to bring her back to her body.I was playing some bizarre sort of hide and seek game outside the school with a couple of my voice students. I was hiding on the side of a rocky cliff when I realized I had been cornered and was about to lose the game. But instead of tagging me, my student K. told me that my voice teacher from New England Conservatory had called, and "it was starting" there.I knew that this meant that since we were not that much further north, "it" would start at our school shortly (this is why I guess I had St. Anselm's at least partially in mind). I had to run around and convince people that the prophecy was about to come true, and find this little girl prophet to see if this matched what she knew. I had to face this fiery dragon (I think it was made out of flame instead of a physical dragon) and say some sort of important truth to it to defeat it, or I think maybe it turned into something else. But there was no way to stop the "doom" of the school, only mitigate it and keep people safe.So we were evacuating, and my husband and I had to be somewhere else, but I told him that we should put the emergency travel backs we had packed into the car, because we might not be able to return.I'm not sure that really captures the dream, but that is the best I can describe at the moment. I suppose people who never read fantasy wouldn't have such fantasy-cliche-ridden dreams. Susan Palwick's Flying in Place is an awesome book, by the way.In other news, I started back with my college students at Earlham yesterday and am looking forward to another fun and interesting semester.