The Mysterious and Poorly Written Letter

MORNING OF OCTOBER 18, 2009

I dreamed that I was waking up early this morning and one of the first things I did was to go check my e-mail. One of the messages was from a client for whom I used to do regular freelance art for a kids' magazine. In real life it's been roughly a year since my last gig for that client, but the e-mail in the dream informed that they needed another comic. At first I was excited, until I began to look more closely.

As soon as I opened the e-mail, I was holding a physical, handwritten letter instead. The handwriting was very poorly scrawled in pencil. It was difficult to read, but seemed to be asking me do draw something for them, though it offered very little specifics except to see the rough sketches they'd included as examples. There was an attached piece of paper with some hideously vague scribbles that were completely unintelligible. I think they were supposed to be of dinosaurs. I had no idea what these people wanted me to draw.

Then I noticed another handwritten note explaining that said the guy who had written the letter would take 30% of what I was paid for the job because he took the time to draw those example sketches! By now, obviously, this whole thing was beginning to smell of a scam to me.

I think it was around this time that the alarm went off and I hit snooze. Drifting immediately back to sleep, I had a brief dream that seemed to stem from the previous scenario, though it started off more like some kind of movie scene:

There was an attractive girl being kept in some sort of institution. The main doctor taking care of her, a balding middle-aged man, was obviously the villain. He knew she wasn't really crazy, but he had convinced everyone else she was. She was trying to convince the other doctors that her claims were accurate. It had a very "Sarah Connor" feel to it, though I don't think it was supposed to be Terminator related.

At one point the woman showed the "good" doctors papers that looked similar to the hand-scrawled note I'd held earlier in the dream. The bad doctor had supposedly written this, and it somehow proved his evil intent. The bad doctor found out, and locked the woman back in her room, this time heavily strapped down to her bed so she could do no more harm.

The last scene I remember is a large military plane coming in for a landing. It opened its back hatch, and all sorts of items began just rolling out. One of them was that woman's bed, with her still strapped to it. Another was a skateboard covered in art--the art being the scribbled doodles from the mail in the previous dream.

Then the girl broke free from her bead and physically confronted the bad doctor in what looked like someone's driveway.