I realized this morning why my dreams never seem to have a real beginning. It's because my dreams are complete worlds that have history and memories of their own. I'm in one place or another because earlier in dreamtime, I made a decision to be there. The people with me were somewhere else before, and those memories are part of the package. It's why I love my dreams.

I visited my parents house with Badb. She and I were going to stay a few days, and we were in our usual room in the wing of the house furthest from the kitchens, overlooking the mews and the road leading to the house. As we looked out the window, I saw Mariah Carey and her entourage leaving and thought "Oh, thank goodness she's leaving. I'll have the place to myself."

We went downstairs and looked at my father's garden. He had rigged up an ingenious drip irrigation system that featured a series of small containers in a line downslope from his rain cistern. Each container fed into the one below it, and each had a dripper line snaking out from the very bottom, watering a plant bed next to it. The whole gravity-fed thing worked beautifully, since each container only needed to power a single dripper line. (Just for the record, I think it would work in real life, too.)

Once inside, my dad showed me how he'd planted runner beans in small cups. He'd fastened each cup bottom to a pole, and in the hour that we sat in the kitchen talking about them, the runners went from tiny shoots to more than two feet long. My father took the whole thing - picked it up so that the runner beans hung down like a curtain - and hung it up at the edge of the patio outside. (Yup. We're trying this one too, with some modifications.)

We stayed inside talking, the tv on for background noise, when we realized that William Shatner was on, delivering a very passionate sermon. He was much younger - somewhere between Star Trek and TJ Hooker - back before his face went puffy and his nose lost its shape. He wore really thick makeup, bronzer caked on so that you could see the streaks the makeup sponge had left. His confident, passionate, sincere oration gave me everything I could possibly want from a televangelist. Better still, he delivered the whole thing in Spanish. I didn't realize he spoke such good Spanish! Everyone in the room sat, fixated by the cadence and power of his speech.

I woke up trying to figure out what it all means. Because if William Shatner is trying to preach the gospel to me in Spanish, it's got to mean something. It's just got to.