Sharon and I do some texting, a fire approaches, selfies with baby elephants, and I pee successfully in a dream (without wetting the bed).

I got a text last night while I was dreaming. It was gibberish, or so it appeared at first. It turns out that it was Sharon trying to text me from the afterlife. After a couple of illegible lines, suddenly the messages got clearer. I could read the lines, but since she was right there in the same house as me, I could also see and hear her directly, which obviated the whole texting issue.

A little known fact about Sharon and texting (at least in the dream, since she never owned a smartphone or did any such thing in real life) is that when Sharon is lying or being evasive, the font will become huge, and there will be a lot of extra symbols thrown in to obfuscate the message. It was her tell. 

" I 8***(##((999439ri9 4884**(&^," she texted me frantically from the bathroom.

I scrolled through several lines of this kind of thing, then got to some more legible stuff. It was your basic:

"Hi, how've you been."  

"I'm fine."  

"Nice to hear from you."  

"Let's do this more often."

I was enjoying it, and I decided that I needed to try to find her, since she was right around there somewhere.

"I'm outside taking pictures," I said. "Why don't you come join me?"

She did come join me, and we both found ourselves taking snapshots of things around the property. I was getting some particularly good artistic shots of the horizon using a zoom lens and some filtering and cropping tricks. The subject matter was almost unrecognizable which proved, at least to me, that I was mastering the technique. Trees and sunsets looked like a giant eye with the branches of the trees against a yellow backdrop mimicking the blood vessels in the cornea.

"Look at these!" I said excitedly, proud to show off my skills to Sharon. "You can do it too. It's easy!"

She tried a few using an old school digital camera with an actual zoom lens, but the photos weren't quite coming out like mine.

"It's because you have this real camera," told her. "The fake one in  phone lends itself to impressionism rather than realism. You can still do it, but you have to mess with the settings." I showed her a few things, and soon she was off to the races.

But after a few minutes we were separated again, and she was back in the bathroom. I had to pee as well, and I figured I'd just relieve myself right there on the lawn. I actually went through the entire process of urination in the dream, and I'm proud to say that I didn't wet the bed, not even one drop.

I was still outside on the lawn snapping pics of this and that, when a pair of baby elephants came bounding over like a couple of happy puppy dogs. One of them started to lick my face and gave me a baby elephant hug. I could feel the unbridled joy that exists within young frolicking creatures being transmitted into my body.

Of course, no such moment is complete without a selfie, so out came the camera, and I began to film some video, snapping some stills in the process. I was enjoying myself immensely, and I texted Sharon to get back out here and see the baby elephants. She didn't get out in time, but no worries, I thought, I had the pics to prove that it happened.

What she did arrive in time for was the appearance of a giant plume of smoke rising high into the sky to the north of our property. 

"Oh, hell no!" We both exclaimed at once.

This menacing column was darkening and shifting, spreading out and bringing with it a low lying fog, like a plague of pure evil upon the land. We climbed to the top a knoll to get a better look. It appeared to be about a half mile a way and closing in fast.

"Quick! Turn on the scanner!" I shouted. "We need to know what's going on!"

We were near enough to the fire to not need to be told that we should evacuate, but it was beyond that at this point. We needed to know what resources were coming in, to know whether or not they would try to save our house with us in it or whether we were going to get overtaken and die in the fire. I looked at the house and questioned whether it looked like the kind of a house for which they would dedicate a special airdrop or not. It was untidy, with paint peeling and some rot in the siding. It felt kind of iffy.

A helicopter flew by and then circled back around several times. I think he was trying to get coordinates for the planes. It wasn't equipped with a bucket for doing any water drops, but a small amount of water dripped out of the helicopter onto our property, as if to mark it. Perhaps my subconscious was telling me that I still needed to pee, hence the holding back of the water delivery. 

In the next scene, I was in the bathroom, where I found that someone had swapped out our toilet for an ultra low-boy model. And wouldn't you know it, they'd left the seat up. I was almost at floor level, sitting directly in the toilet bowl before I noticed this nasty trick. But there, next to the sink, was our old toilet, disconnected and unusable.

I woke up soon after that, to dry sheets, thankfully. I love Sharon dreams; fire and toilet dreams, not so much, but baby elephants, come on, who doesn't love that?