I dreamed that I was taking a Greyhound bus to visit my family in Chicago. I boarded the bus, but soon realized that (a) the bus was being pulled by horses like a stagecoach, and (b) the driver was Weird Al Yankovic. Weird Al handed me the reins and insisted that I drive the bus, which scared and upset me — I didn’t know how to drive a stagecoach, and the horses were going really fast, careening around corners and nearly tipping the bus over. I kept screaming at Weird Al to take the reins back, but he just laughed like a maniac, and kept insisting that everything was fine.

I eventually managed to stop the horses. I screamed at Weird Al for a while and then stormed off the bus. But I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, in a bad neighborhood, and I had no idea where I was (although I was pretty sure I was still in San Francisco). Eventually another Greyhound bus pulled up, also going to Chicago; but the driver was very cranky, and since my ticket had already been torn, he didn’t want to let me on the bus. He eventually did, but there were no seats left, and as the bus pulled off, I wondered if I’d have to stand all the way to Chicago.

(P.S. I really wish I could have found an image of a bus being pulled by horses, or that my Photoshop skills were up to the task of making one. That was a truly vivid and frightening image, one which no simple picture of a bus could ever convery.)

I dreamed that Ingrid and I were going away for a while, and had left careful instructions for a housesitter. I woke up in an incoherent, terrified panic because we had neglected to tell the housesitter about the bees. There was an enormous beehive under the building, and we had meant to warn the housesitter not to disturb it, but had forgotten. It was all mixed up with comics somehow: we’d written our housesitting instructions in comic-book form, and I had a vivid image of the comic I’d intended to write about the bees but had forgotten about.

This was a genuine night terror (although somewhat less intense than others I’ve had). I woke up petrified and struggling to speak, and tried for some time to explain to Ingrid that I was frightened because of the bees and the comic book.

I dreamed that I was going to an Oakland A’s baseball game, and was just finding my seat when an usher told me I had to move. They were setting aside the section I was in for the hearing-impaired, and were shuffling people around to make that happen. I was irritated — I had a good seat, and I thought they could have handled this better in advance — but agreed to move as long as I moved to an equally good seat.

On the way to my new seat, I ran into the actress Illeana Douglas, who was doing some sort of charity work connected with the game, and was helping arrange the hearing-impaired section. We started chatting — I’d never met her before, but she was very smart and sweet and interesting, and asked me lots of questions about my tattoos and my new book project. We hit it off really well, and I decided I should Google her after the game to see if I could get in touch with her again.

When I found my new seat, though, I was really annoyed. They had seated me in a section that was facing away from the baseball field, where you couldn’t watch the game live — you had to watch it on a bank of televisions. The seats were filled with kids — it was clearly the “kids’ table” of the stadium, where people stuck their kids so they wouldn’t have to sit with them at the game — and the fact that I’d been stuck there was almost as insulting as the fact that they’d made me leave my good seat and expected me to be happy watching the game on TV. I left the stadium in a state of high dudgeon, vowing to never go back.

I dreamed that my friend and upstairs neighbor Laura had two pet dolphins in a swimming pool in our backyard, one of which was very sick. We could tell it was sick because it was filling up with gas and gradually blowing up like a large balloon. We (me, Laura, Ingrid, and the other people who live in the building) spent the rest of the dream trying to find either a vet or a marine biologist who was open on a weekend.

I dreamed that I woke up in bed with Ingrid, and there were all these balloons on the pillow next to Ingrid’s head. (The long balloon-animal kind, not the round kind.) The balloons were in a strange configuration: they were very menacing, and seemed to be spelling out some sort of magical runes. I was quite upset, and struggled for a while to figure out what the runes were saying. Then I suddenly realized they were in the form of a magical spell that was threatening Ingrid and might kill her.

This was a genuine night terror (although not as bad as ones I’ve had in the past). I woke in a wordless panic, and frantically shook Ingrid awake to get her away from the death balloons — but I wasn’t able to speak and tell her what was wrong. I didn’t realize it was a dream until Ingrid said, “Greta, are you dreaming?” and even then I stayed upset for some time. It wasn’t until I woke up again several hours later that morning that I was able to see the humor in having a full-blown, “waking in the night unable to scream” night terror about evil balloon animals trying to kill my girlfriend.