When you lose a ring

Another dream, from what I remember

A single Japanese woman was walking upright on top of a moving train. She approaches a darkly dressed, old Japanese man who looks vaguely like Gen Fu in build but is exponentially more badass. He is clearly the one she is looking for. As she approaches him, others are crawling out of the train and begin to follow her, but a quick wave of her hand creates a force field that appears orange for a second and then turns clear. The two begin to fight, , but the right is not terribly action-packed. Instead, but it’s made more interesting with the use of bullet-time,. Also, the scene angle shows obstacles coming near the train further up and shows the views of each combatant.

The scene changes, and as far as I can tell, I am filling out a survey for William and Mary tours with my parents. We’re in an area similar to the back area of Lodge 1, but more squares and more blue. As I fill it out and answer the question about whether or not I will apply here, I realize how useless it is to fill out the survey, considering I already attend. We’re talking about Law and Order and its spinoffs. I don’t like the newest, Criminal Justice, which shows the acts committed by the criminals through their eyes. I explain that the other spinoffs have clear differences – Special Victims Unit uses only a certain type of crime, and Criminal Intent has that crazy detective. Criminal Justice only uses different camera angles for the same story. It’s not useful. The battle on the train was an episode of Criminal Justice.

New scene. I remember having the spaghetti split among the three of us, possibly my brothers and me. I’ll assume they are. I think it ended up that my little brother Joshua got a lot more spaghetti than either Eric or I did. We wanted to put some in a gladware container to give to the Preston/Giles students, but my little brother didn’t want to, and he got the most. It was decided that we would each give 20 noodles from our meals to the cause. I showed (whoever) that 20 noodles was not a lot – just a mouthful. So, I resigned myself and gave away my entire portion. I went to the kitchen to get it (still, somehow in this blue Lodge 1 area) and filled the gladware container with meatballs. I packed them in, and by the time they were done, they were chocolate chip cookies. Justine had baked about 4 pans of them, and one pan was my… uhh.. spaghetti. I took the cookies and went on to give them to the Preston/Giles residents. There was someone with me. I can’t remember who it was, but it must have been Jeff Handler. Strangely enough, though, I can’t help but feel that at that point, I was Jeff Handler, or invoked him somehow. In any case, as we approached the area to drop off the cookies (which, strangely looked vaguely like the entrance to Lodge 1, with the circling ramp. It’s hard to describe. The places was both inside and outside at the same time. It was night time, and the place was lit by torches in one part, leading up to an are with a counter that had lights and looked like the first Lodge 1 where I filled out my WM survey. There was a small stream with a bridge over it, but it was man-made [canal, I suppose], like the streams you can find in fancy restaurants.) we found a wooden boat. It was red and green and tugboat-shaped, and about the size of the love boat at Miyako. It was floating under the bridge, and we picked it up.

Here’s where things get complicated. The boat had some relationship to Jeff Handler’s little. Maybe he threw it away. Maybe he lost it. All I know is that it may or may not have been carrying our cookies (Yes, I know I was holding the cookies, but dreams don’t have to make sense.) We picked it up and walked up to the counter, past the torches, which were lighting an outdoor classroom of students of all ages (5-17). I’m pretty sure my uncle Cyril was their teacher. At the counter, we decided we wanted to surprise Jeff’s little by returning the boat to him with the cookies so he could turn them in to the Preston/Giles residents. The whole idea was that Jeff’s little would learn to appreciate service. We gave the boat and the cookies to the woman at the counter and then we started asking the students for a piece of paper and something to write with. None of the students had anything. There were scores of neatly stacked pieces of paper all over the students’ desks, but they all had writing on them. I was amazed that five-year-olds had thousands of pages of work to do. Finally, I got a scrap of paper and a red sharpie. I wrote on the note,

Tell him it’s from his A-Big Big, and remember to say “When you lose a ring, you can’t share its shine with the world.”

I don’t know where that last part came from, but I thought it was a well-known phrase that meant that he should keep what he has and use it to make the world a better place. It mixed the lost boat and the idea of service to create a message that I thought made a lot of sense. In fact, when Drew and Chris woke me up to play Dead or Alive 3, I got up and looked for the quote online – I could have sworn it was real.