dreamage and puffage

Just this part of last night's dreaming: I've joined the cast/crew of this play that takes place on a train. It's fairly epic, dark and twisty, kind of a cross between Dickens, Gorey, and some Edwardian fantasy of an exotic and ultra luxurious train trip through distant parts... The audience are guests on the train, passengers, and the actors and crew play parts of servants, train operators and workers, and other passengers. At one point in the preparations we are shown a supply car stacked high and wide with white boxes roughly the size and shape of pizza boxes; these hold every imaginable thing that a passenger could want, plus everything we need to fulfill our roles. I am strangely elated by the sight, and by the thought of this wonderful resource. At another point I realize, and tell our director, that I don't know my character's name, though I have a sense of her otherwise. For some reason this requires that I go to a special place where we can get answers to questions, a kind of research library belonging to the company. (On the way, we [I'm going with a couple of other actors] pass a silver, plated together car that looks and moves like a fish.) At the research facility, there's a line, but I get passed through to the front and am left by one of the librarians at a large, flat computer screen, like a table. I call up the map/poster for the company's productions, image of a large, parchmenty, old map kind of thing, then click on the current production and year and get a layered image of a sheaf of smaller, but similar map/posters. By pressing a button I am able to materialize them and lift them from the screen, actual crackly parchment, intricately drafted and drawn upon in full color and much detail, rather like an illuminated manuscript or an antique star map. Somewhere in this is the information I need, my name, and I have to study it to get to it.

I was very pleased with this dreamage when I woke up, because it was intricate, solid feeling, extremely interesting and engaging, muy entertaining. Then I had to go to the hospital for my pulmonary testing. The techs (two, because one of the machines had a malfunction and we had to switch to another, then back) were very nice, and I had a book, but it was so tiring doing all that huffing and puffing for over an hour, and they had me puff on a nebulizer with some dilution of albutrin or something, an asthma inhaler drug, and it made me feel all shakey, and by the end my shoulder, arm, and hand were aching away... and now I'm just really tired and limp feeling. Plus, oh the joy of the deductible, $250 on the credit card, and there will still be %15 of whatever the final bill is that the insurance won't cover. If I had been thinking of getting a DVD player (I had), that thought is now completely trashed. Is sad. But I still have my dream to savor. Plus a cup of Earl Grey and a peanut butter cookie. All will soon be right with the world.