Last night, right before bed, I watched _The Call of Cthulhu_. It's a crappy delight, a faux silent movie, made in 1920s style by the H.P. Lovecraft Society. It's just the right sort of lovely and cheesy and creepy for Lovecraft. I let my little plush baby Cthulhu watch it with me, who bounced around happily when his daddy menaced.

I just woke up from one of _those_ dreams.

There was some place I wasn't supposed to go, because the men there were really monsters, who held women against their will and...menaced them or something.

Something about the warning: the monsters, and the menace, made me helpless and hot, suddenly eros-shot. Screw Perseus and St. George and all those tiresome knights. I was on a mission.

I ended up in this place somewhere, looking through a closet where a lot of stuff that used to belong to me and my ex was stored. We went through it together, smiling over memories, while I tried to rescue him from some smug and crazy social worker type who smirked at him, took notes, and rolled him a joint at the dining room table. I smacked her in the face, tackled her, and scattered the pot. (Which is odd. I have nothing against pot, and that was never our problem).

Somehow, I ended up in the back of a large camper/station wagon/mobile home driven by the author Ishmael Reed, who grinned secretly over the back seat at me.

Then some forgotten bit of clothing in that old closet where my old domestic life was stored took me to the place where the man-monsters were. It turned out to be a motorcycle shop--the old-fashioned type with grizzled old mechanics. It was a creaky old place, which looked more like an abandoned filling station or grocery store, the type you'd see along the no-longer-used strips of Route 66. The oldest, grizzliest mechanic saw me and grinned, knowingly, and I perked up. I was in the presence of monsters.

One youngish guy was working on a red Ducati Monster (aren't dream puns cute?)--stock, no frills kind. He caught me looking and grinned. A young woman brought me a scrawled note with an unintelligible phone message. drusilla had taken my cats out for a walk in the garden or something. Then, another youngish guy came frantically out of the back and handed me a mauve button, sewn onto a scrap of thin mauve artificial leather. It was from coat belonging to Scarlet Johansson, and he wanted me to give it back to her (I don't even hardly know from Scarlet Johansson).

It was then apparently time to wake up.

I'm not sure which is more peculiar, the cultural rummage sale of my sleeping brain, or the peculiarity of my deeply unconscious erotic responses.