Lunchtime now, and details are getting hazier so here’s a broad recollection of the dream I was having when I awoke this morning:

I was reading a book about a series of five murders. At the same time, there seemed to be a copycat crime matching the first murder in the book. For some reason, I was standing in a field–corn, or wheat, or some other grain–next to a dirt road; a sports car, driven by a large Black woman, stopped and picked me up, and drove me to what was at first a deserted old house but which, at some point, became a group of rooms in the basement of the church from my youth–classrooms, social hall, kitchen and toilets.

When I first arrived at the house, I was exploring the rooms, many of which appeared to be small broom closets, but often with hidden doors to even smaller electrical closets.

I came downstairs into what was now the church social hall, where the driver of the sports car that had brought me here tried to kill me; at the same time, she was completely non-chalant and very cordial, almost apologetic. I avoided the attempt, and she said that she would leave me for the final murder of the book and that I’d have to watch the other three (since the first had already occurred) die first.

At that point, the director of my agency–a Foreign Service ambassador–walked into the social hall, and was knifed by the killer. The ambassador’s spirit separated from her body as her body fell to the floor; her spirit didn’t realize that she was dead, though, and came over and began talking to me.

The room now suddenly but unsurprisingly (in that way that things just happen in dreams) was full of people–mostly my family and people I knew from the church–sitting at all the tables, having a potluck supper. The amassador’s spirit was still talking to me, as was another woman I didn’t recognize, but no one else seemed to see or hear either of them. Then there were loud screams coming from one of the classrooms, where some of the attendees had been sitting having their dinner: a cabinet had opened, and a dead body–the third victim and apparently the body belonging to the other woman talking to me–had fallen face forward into a plate of food at the table.

And then I woke up.