During an early morning thunderstorm, I had the following dream:

My mother (who suffers from dementia) and I were having a long, involved but coherent conversation. As a thunderstorm started, she got scared, broke off in mid-sentence, turned to me and said, "You need to call your family." She wouldn't tell me why, but insisted upon it. She even started dialing for me but didn't know the number. For some reason, I told her to dial615/859 (the first few digits of my father-in-law’s number in Tennessee), and that was enough to get through. My sister-in-law answered the phone but didn't say hello; it was just her voice listing all the people who were there, including my other in-laws. I could hear them all talking to each other over the phone, but no one seemed to know I was on the other end. I kept trying to tell her why I was calling, but she didn't act like she could hear me.

Eventually, one of my sisters-in-law came into the room with Mom and me, and greeted us. She asked how Jerry was, and since I assumed she meant Jerry Jennings, the mayor of Albany, I said something like, "Same as always. Thinks he runs the world." At this point, I remembered my mother’s directive to call my family, jumped up in my dream and actually woke up. It was 4:44, and the storm was fading in the distance.

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Some of my family and friends were throwing me a party. When my husband and I arrived at the party, it soon became clear that it was a baby shower for me. I was surprised I was pregnant, but not really, and the one problem was that I had been drinking wine during the days before the party (since I hadn’t realized I was pregnant). I apologized to my husband for jeopardizing our baby’s heath, and he assured me the baby would be fine. My dead mother-in-law began handing me gifts, and after I received many things for the baby, she gave me two presents I recognized somehow, gifts from my husband. One was a strange watch somehow made of denim, and the other was something made of glass, like a small balloon. At some point during the shower, two smallish men came in to talk to us (we all were apparently going to a concert after the shower), and they were very nice and kind. I remember looking directly at their faces and realizing that they were deformed. But I kept looking and smiling at them as they smiled back. Then we piled into my mother-in-law's car and drove to the concert.