Where we go when we sleep

She woke up crying, which woke me up in turn.

"What's the matter, love?"

"I had a bad dream. A silly bad dream, but still..."

In the dream, she'd been the passenger in a car and had spotted a pair of bobcats. Her companion (not me) had stopped only briefly and begrudgingly—"You got a picture, what are you upset about?"—and then refused to stop at all when two kittens appeared. Her sobbing in the dream spilled over into the real world, and there we were.

Relieved that the content hadn't been truly nightmarish, I proceeded to tell her of my own dream: we'd been driving together, away down South somewhere—rural Georgia, perhaps—and were just coming into a town when Fiona (our white Subaru) starting thumping, a tyre having obviously gone flat. I turned off the two-lane highway onto a short gravel drive leading to what appeared to be an open-air antiques store. Stopping by a glass-fronted bookcase, I began perusing a once-magnificent volume—marbled endpapers, sadly deteriorating leather cover—from around the turn of the last century. The author, an eccentric Victorian hunter, related his experience with, and decided opinions on, various cartridges, ranging from a (non-existent) .20-calibre revolver round to his favourite rifle ammunition—I believe it was .500 Nitro Express—for Tyrannosaurus rex.

She laughed at the thought of this mustachioed gentleman in khakis and pith helmet facing down a tyrannosaur with a double rifle—and then again when she realised that grammatically she had just assigned the double rifle to the tyrannosaur, who manifestly did not need it—and her bobcat disappointment dissipated.

[Thank you, Internet. Here's a nice (actually, "best") side-by-side double rifle by London gunmaker E.J. Churchill; this one is chambered in .470 Nitro Express, but it gives the general idea.]

"Completely unreasonable," I observed.

"I know, right? But you would have stopped for as many pictures as I wanted—I know you would."

"Of course, blossom. But actually, I was referring to you."

"Me? What did I do?!"

"You were pretty impatient with my reading that book."

"Why would I mind that?"

"Well, I think you wanted me to deal with the tyre."