I forgot what having NPR on overnight can do to my subconscious
So I bumped into Martin Freeman near downtown Vancouver (Fourth Plain and Broadway, if you must know). He was lost, and rather grumpy about it. He had an address written down on a piece of paper and he couldn't find it. I took the paper, and it was some ridiculously long street number followed by "9th". I told him he was on the right street, but before I could tell him he was going the wrong way he crossed the road against the light and was almost run down by oncoming traffic (thank you, The Good Night >:P).
I freaked, thinking about his wife and kids if he accidentally got himself killed. I crossed after him and caught him up and manhandled him so that I was on the side of the pavement closest to traffic and he was on the inside, scolding him that I was going to keep him there to stop him getting himself run over. He said "okay" but was still grumpy.
About this time we were joined by a dark-haired woman. Instead of just crossing the street back to where we wanted to go, we ended up taking the long way around through a residential neighborhood. Which for some reason involved us going into a woman's house while she was out, enjoying some sunshine on a concrete slab, and him snogging me on the chin so it wouldn't technically qualify as cheating on his wife.
At that point there's a gap. We might have been arrested for breaking and entering (another Freeman film, ha, subtle, subconscious). As I was waiting outside the police station I saw a huge crowd across the road. I thought it was a high school graduation, but it turned out it was a funeral that the Westboro Bapist idiots were picketing. I made my way up to a long table that seemed to be their headquarters - it was all older women seated there - and respectfully asked if I could ask them a question. They didn't have to answer the question; just think about it. They agreed because I was being polite, so I said, "What if God loves you so much he doesn't want you to be afraid all the time?"
Most of them ignored or dismissed me, but I could tell one woman - the youngest one on the end - was thinking about what I'd said. (I even threw in the old, "God is love, and those who don't know love don't know God" bit from the book of John.) She left with her husband, but I could tell I'd planted a seed in her mind. All you can do, really.
At that point I realised I'd lost my friends. I went back to where we were staying, which was some sort of third-world hostel. I checked the sign-in list and saw my own handwriting from a few days ago checking us all in, but nothing since. They hadn't come back yet. I found out that a group of ancient Mayan slaves had found a way to swap places with them; ie, putting themselves into my friends' lives so that Freeman and the dark-haired woman were the Mayan slaves now and the Mayans were now living their stolen lives in the present. For some reason I was the only one who knew this.
I found a bowl full of old trinkets from the era (were we on an archaeological dig or something?) and picked up a bunch of ropy objects that looked like necklaces, but were really the chains they'd used to restrain the slaves: a bunch of segmented clay pieces jointed together. You'd think they'd be fragile and break but they were actually pretty strong. An ancient mask or deity was telling me about what had happened as I pawed through the trinkets, trying to threaten me off, actually. But I knew I had to go back and find them and free them and put things back the way they were meant to be.
But then I woke up.
So...anyone know how to reverse an ancient Mayan swapping-spell to rescue some people trapped and enslaved several thousand years in the past?
Q