In my dream I came upon a woman who sat alone in the burned out remains of her house.  Parts of the house were still intact: an outdoor garage filled with stuff and one side of the front room, which included the large armchair in which she sat, the chimney place and part of a mantel piece, but that was all.  The rest of the house stood as charred remains.

The doctor who was also my doctor, a tall young man, walked into what was once the woman’s lounge room and muttered words of sympathy.  She fell into his arms and sobbed.
‘How did this happen?’ he asked.
The woman was not certain she said but thought it had something to do with the fibres that were woven into a mat that lay on the floor covered in soot and burned debris. The woman pulled out a fibre and it morphed into a fuller shape as if it took on a life of its own.

Before she could explain any further I began to recognise that the fibres were probably related to ghosts or strands of similar fibres on the other side of the world.

The area became a bustling child care centre.  I was inside one of the rooms when I came across J, one of my greatest adversaries in relation to a certain professional matter.  We had not spoken for months. ‘Let’s agree to disagree,' I said to her.  'Let’s have a truce.’

She hesitated but in the end nodded her agreement and then handed over a large box of Lego that had once belonged to one of her sons.  Some of the Lego tipped out when I tried to put it down and I saw that these pieces were all so tiny they would be a problem for my children and grandchildren to use, but I accepted the gesture as genuine.

I asked J’s son if he enjoyed playing with this Lego.
‘It’s not much fun, ‘ he said.  It’s more like hard work.’’

All at once the husband of the woman in the burned out house leapt forward and threw a grenade at his wife and at a cluster of small children who were hovering in a sort of cubby house in front of the property.  The woman and children panicked.  They doubled over waiting for the explosion, but the grenade did not go off.

I was aware it could still explode but calmly started to urge the children one by one to leave their dangerous bunker and to go back to another house for tea.  I urged the woman to do likewise when she was the only one remaining but she stayed put and my clock alarm, not the grenade, went off to end the dream.


*


Unbeknown to me and while I was out a Minotaur took up residence in my house. After I realised this, I decided to go in through the back entrance where I met a young school girl. She had been living in this part of the house and told me she had plans to kill the Minotaur.

‘I will wait till it’s asleep and then pierce its eye with my spear.’

I walked up the corridor to the centre of the house when the Minotaur appeared. It looked like a stocky, middle aged, short haired woman with an enraged glare in her eyes. It lunged for me as soon as she it me but I held it at bay using the pile of text books in my arms as a barrier. From around the corner a woman appeared pushing a trolley. She seemed to be a housekeeper or some other such servant and she looked on bemused.

‘What’s that behind you?’ I asked the Minotaur who turned and then launched the attack on the unsuspecting housekeeper. The Minotaur threw the woman  to the ground and left her unconscious.
Then it turned back on me. Its arms, brown and sinewy, reached over the barricade of my books as it tried to grab hold of me. The Minotaur was determined to get me.
I woke in a lather.


*


I was desperate to find a place where I might write unimpeded when I found myself in the quadrangle of the University of Melbourne.  I decided to go upstairs into an area that was usually off limits for those who did not have an ID.

I had lost mine but the woman at the front desk let me in regardless.  She allowed me entry as far as the library but behind her back I snuck upstairs into a series of rooms where at last I thought I might be able to settle into writing.

I met my husband and his three brothers in this same series of rooms.  They had been drinking, but were not yet drunk.  My husband refused to take another drink one of his brothers had offered him and I was relieved.   Otherwise, I thought I might need to carry him out.

We came across a room filled with people who looked as if they were asleep or unconscious.  They did not stir when my husband and his brothers walked through and although their bodies were intact it was as if they were dead.

My husband and his brothers started to jostle these bodies, to wake them up.

The lifeless people began to stir but something in their movement alarmed me.  They moved as if in slow motion and it was only when I looked into their eyes which were blank – there was no iris only white in the middle where the dark orb should be – I realised they were zombies.

I was terrified.  If they should get hold of us, of any of us, I thought, they would grip on and turn each of us, the living ones into zombies.

I woke in a panic.