I dreamed of being Zanne, taking refuge in that house for a time.  In my dream it was the Juarez house across the street.  The Juarez family had eight children and a father on the night shift who had too much on his plate to garden in the few daylight hours that he could get.  In my childhood their home became a kind of refuge for me, a place where nobody scrutinized me for evidence of evil, with lots of girls to hang out with who didn't seem to mind my status as a social pariah at school.

The Juarezes kept late hours, due to their father being the Head Waiter at the El Cortez Hotel (a matter of much esteem in our neighborhood.)  I would often hear them, laughing, talking, singing, shouting, late into the night, and as a kid scared of the dark this comforted me.  It seemed as though nothing horrible could happen to me so long as I could hear Juarezes across the street.

I added the magentine-laced teddy-bears to explain why Raif and Kimba would leave.  But really, the Juarez home was a sanctuary to me, and in my dream of it it provided a safe respite, a launching-point for the ventures ahead.  Perhaps my dream pointed to something safe and reassuring in my past, my foundation, on which to anchor myself.

I wrote George's confession to Gita.  The dreams clearly showed Hulda accursed for being so obtrusively female, and George as the one with the most blunt-force magic to do it, yet it also went against everything else that George seemed to want.  So something had to have gone wrong.

That's the trick with writing from dreams.  The contradictions do not mean that you throw the dreams out—solving the puzzle gives you your plot twists.  This seeming conflict showed me that George wasn't the only power at the school—something much more subtle, and yet more potent, could override the direction that he tried to take.

I wrote the raid on the ammunition cart, but I dreamed that Deirdre sometimes heard Kief's voice after he died.  At first I didn't question Deirdre hallucinating like that, maybe because such things happen to narcoleptics, occasionally, too, the border between sleep and waking grown thin enough that once in a long while, for seconds at a time, we dream awake.  But then I remembered that she is not narcoleptic, and the explanation, in her case, can only mean something darker, and readily apparent, if I didn't shy from facing it.

Deirdre often makes mistakes so that I won't have to.  Doctors would love to prescribe stimulants for my narcolepsy, but dreams of Deirdre's problems with it warn me not to give in.