dream last night

I’m with a group of friends; we’re all flaked out around a couple of picnic tables behind this building on the top of a fairly large hill overlooking the city, kind of like the Wormhole picked up and deposited in this high place. Most of the people are just like the Wormhole crowd, but Kiera is there, too. She’s never met them before, and I’m so glad to be introducing her to this gang.

A large swarm of hot-air balloons is coming in our direction from the city. They’re moving pretty fast, too. Reminds me of that balloon festival in Ottawa, but these are a strange sort of balloons -- smaller, faster -- racing hot-air balloons, not the large lethargic ones. One of them comes down towards us and lands on a raised platform at the edge of the summit just beyond the trees. As it nears, all of us recognize the two people inside -- intrepid adventurer friends, sometimes with us, mostly gone out into the wide world beyond the horizons. They land and come over to talk with us.

As we all talk and hang out, just exchanging pleasantries, Kiera and I look at the balloon. It is a small, extremely functional affair, the balloon itself round and completely transparent. Kiera makes a few remarks to the ballooners that demonstrate more than a layman’s knowledge of their machine. Then she goes into the building behind us. I follow, finding myself in some kind of restaurant or lounge. She is talking with a bunch of her Ottawa friends inside. I don’t feel like I fit in with this group at all, so I go back outside to my friends at the tables.

I sit down and start listening. The ballooners say that they’ve come here to offer their services to the people that run the place behind us -- they say it’s a prison and that’s just the way it is, I guess. They want to offer day trips over the city or something. Why prisoners would be allowed on those, I don’t know. In any case, we all see through that explanation and know they’ve come to break someone out. This is understood across the board and our conversation turns to prison breaks that we know of. The one that comes up is the story of a guy who just came into this very place incognito and walked out with a prisoner. I wonder who they’ve come to break out of here. For that matter, I don’t know whether or not we ourselves are inmates here.