We're newlydeads. There's a mandatory orientation program. Part of it is a counseling group run by angels.

One angel asks the circle of souls to go round and answer this: "What's your dream--what'd be your heaven?" I'm hesitant--I fear these angels will act on my answer and pop me into some static, customized heaven. I don't want that. I'm still changing too much--I want to explore so much (stuff I couldn't explore in waking life, not with my current age, illness, resource-limits and environment). I'd feel stuck in any single scenario, in any career, with any particular lover (unless she were changing a lot too, I guess).

But it's just orientation. I override my reluctance and try to answer honestly for the moment.

Find myself describing a (very meta) dream I had where I was able to prove even to skeptics--most of this planet!--that predictive dreams are real. I forget the details--it involved one of the stars of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and purple hair, and...

And it's just too specific. Just my dream-goal for tonight. Not the rest of time!

"Come on angels, don't grant my wish!" I mutter...

And wake.

• Queer Eye for the Straight Guy star: one was a guest on the comedy improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway?
• Group therapy, "What's your dream?": I just read The Cursed Princesses Club, collecting Lambcat's webcomic about a support group for fairytale princesses with weird curses. Funny if mysterious... what the heck species is Gwen?
• Don't want to be frozen in one scenario or with one lover, need to grow: I also read Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag. Morgan's stuck on a Canadian islet. Dad left, family's in shock; and Morgan's hiding from mom & brother that she likes girls. Then she meets Kelty, a lonely selkie trying to protect her seal rookery... but Kelty gets trapped in the sea for seven years. Morgan wants to wait for her; Kelty says "You can't. You need to learn & grow--see the world outside this rock."
• IDEAL ACTION: Learn what species I am? Go out and see the world and have affairs for seven years? But my health is fragile--travel and relationships are possible but exhausting for me. The spirit is willing but the flesh has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome...
• PRACTICAL ACTION: monthly goals taking small steps? The dream warns "Mind what you wish for; you may get it!" Don't get boxed in.

My housemate Alder's channel surfing. I walk in as she finds Kelly Corrigan interviewing a circle of healers, therapists and counselors who incorporate spirituality in their work. Prayer, miracles, guardian angels, afterlives. Normally, Corrigan interviews individuals, and in depth. But here, with a group, she plays fast rounds of Q&A--like "What's your dream? What's your wish?" Each blurts whatever comes up. Just as in my dream.

The dream foresaw the show's atypical topic and format--but it announced this, too. In the dream I blurted that my current goal is "Proving predictive dreams are real," and then this go-round Q&A about wishes turns out to be predictive itself! Dreams like this, mentioning their own type, I call self-flagging. They needn't be predictive; a lucid dream mentioning lucidity, a shared dream mentioning telepathy... how about a dream where you're told "This isn't symbolic, it's literal!" and you wake to find the dream scenario come literally true? All self-flagging.

Apparently, just as the dream-I or ego can notice "I'm dreaming" and go lucid, the dream director or producer can notice it too, and announce not just that it's a dream but what kind--even if the "I" in the dream hasn't caught on! You can't label an entity this self-aware as a "process".

Well, you could. If you like slurs.

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