The Strange Quilter Read Free Page A

after all the generations of cats living in a suburban environment, they'd have evolved to a point where they wouldn't run TOWARDS a moving vehicle. Doesn't survival information get genetically passed along to each new generation of cats?
    We made it home in fifteen minutes. In seconds, we were in bed, buried under the covers, and quickly succumbed to a coma level of sleep. I entered into a vivid dream - a dream waiting for me to arrive.

 
    Chapter 3: Dreamland
     
    The crazy quilt was the landscape. It formed a vast plain before me, a collage of vibrant primary colors that formed into a quilted chain of mountains on the horizon. The landscape was lit as bright as day, but the sky was dark and filled with stars, as if this world had no atmosphere to disperse the light. Four swirling pinwheel galaxies each filled their own quarter of the sky, with millions of stars filling the gaps between them. Glowing opaque gases of pink and violet, varying in density, hid or revealed various areas of the panoply of stars. The vault of heaven welcomed me to this quilt planet. A planet handmade by a quilter able to work upon the vast platform of space.
    Thick as old redwood trees and just as high, sewing needles of every sort sprouted from the fabric terrain. Needles for hand sewing, needles for machine sewing, both reflected starlight from their metallic bodies. Gigantic red tomato pincushions sat in cleared areas where the sewing needle forest didn't grow. Scattered about the pincushions were large thimbles - the perfect size to sit upon and stargaze.
    This wonderful quilt world must have inhabitants. It couldn't exist without a purpose. I strolled through the kaleidoscopic array of saturated colors, observing the fine needlework, the nearly infinite detail of design printed on the fabric. Where were the natives? I approached one of the tomato pincushions. I discovered that these pincushions were actually houses - big soft houses. I pressed my hand against its velvety surface and it gave way, bouncing back firmly into place when I removed my hand. There was a round door on one side of the pincushion house. It had a doorknob in the form of a velvet tab closure - a magnet was the lock. This secured the door shut snugly against the body of the pincushion.
    I studied the door and found no way to knock on it. There wasn't any doorbell to ring either. Even as I thought these dream-thoughts, a brass door knocker appeared right before me, in the very center of the door. How convenient this dream had become. I grasped the door knocker and clanked away, in the hope someone would answer. The door closure popped open as if it was suddenly demagnetized. The door opened inward. Nell smiled at me from the dark interior of the pincushion. “Hello Barb!” Nell greeted me with a friendly smile.
    I was glad to see her familiar face inside this dream, this semi-lucid fantasy. In this odd state of mind, I'm aware of my sense of smell. This world doesn't smell of linen, but of burnt wiring and scorched circuit boards. I made a dream-note of this fact.
    There was a sensibility to this place, this dream world. I'm expected to display some intelligence. To blindly accept all this dreamland imagery without question would be thoughtless. It begs to be challenged. With this in mind, I said, “Hello Nell. What's going on?”
    “First, I'm not Nell. I'm you. I'm Barbara. You're the dreamer, and everything in your dream is you, all your thoughts jumbled together in your subconscious mind, spewed out in the dark of night. You should know these things. You're not stupid... or at least you think you're not.”
    “I don't think I'm stupid. You're right, or I'm right, depending on my viewpoint. I know that dreams are sometimes a stylized recap of the dreamer's day. If this is true, then my day must have been unusual. I don't have lucid dreams, and I don't have dreams about absurd quilt planets. My recent angst continues on in this dream, an angst caused by the smell of