Chairman Mao, the gryphon thief

Greg and I went to rescue our gryphon from Chairman Mao's palace where it was being held. Mao had also stolen a life-size ornamental replica gryphon and we were going to try to get that back too. We managed to find our gryphon in a very large, tall, ornamented room, and set him loose, but it wasn't strong enough to fly us out. So, without that convenient escape mechanism, we decided to put off stealing back the replica gryphon (which we believed was somewhere on the top floor, while we were still at ground level now). We sent the gryphon flying back to camp, and followed after it, running. We all made it back to camp, which was across the street, without incident.

Spies need SIM cards

I was in an inner courtyard of a school/academy at dusk (drab architecture, all beige and gray and bricky, different terraced levels), spying on some guy. I was getting ready to report back to my chief when I remembered that I needed to steal a SIM card for my cell phone first. I went inside and found an open dorm room and grabbed the SIM card out of their modem.

Later, I ran into another guy I knew (probably another secret agent) and two of our friends, and we went to another dorm room so he could get a SIM card too. The dorm room's door was wide open and nobody was there, so we made ourselves at home, lounging on the bed/floor. He got his SIM card from the computer's modem, then was using the computer to print out some multi-page document. While we were doing this, the girl whose dorm room it was came in (and she had a friend or two waiting outside too). My friend explained that he really had to get this document printed, it was an emergency. She acquiesced, and we got ready to leave. We mentioned to her, on the way out, in passing, that, if, you know, there was anything wrong with her computer, like, the IT people could probably help her out. (Because we stole her SIM card. Probably wouldn't get much Internet anymore.)

Murder mystery? Well, nobody died.

Possibly the opening to a murder mystery. In an old house in a semi-urban area (maybe like Utica) where several people are staying, a stocky middle-aged woman, who had been sharing a room with another woman, had been having a conversation with the other woman, and then they got ready for bed. Then the phone rang downstairs and the middle-aged woman went down to answer it. I (during this phone conversation I was more or less a "fly on the wall") hear her receiving news about some kind of diamonds she will be receiving, worth a lot of money.

Less than five seconds after hanging up the phone, she very suddenly collapses to the ground, unconscious or dead. I grab the phone and dial 911. The female operator asks for the phone number I'm calling from, but I don't know it. I start to fumble around near the phone to see if I can find it. The operator threatens to hang up when suddenly the middle-aged woman comes to. I wonder if she'd gotten any brain damage from whatever happened. I pull the phone away from my ear and ask her what the phone number is for this house. The operator, thinking I'm still talking to her, sasses me. Then I woke up.

Pop folk boater friends apologize for milky clothes

I find myself piloting a very small yacht through an icy pass that goes right by/under a major intersection (i.e. the traffic light in the next dream). I see a bunch of clothes sitting on the boat, and they're all wet (and milky?). My friends, two members of some famous 60's pop folk band or another, had written an apology note for the clothes and offered to turn themselves in if I wanted to press charges. I wrote back saying I obviously wasn't thinking of pressing charges.

I started pondering about the prison system in the area. I think if they did go to prison, it would be on the coast of Lake Superior, probably. Seemed like during this season the Great Lakes are mostly oil, but soon they would be changing to milk. That would be unbearable.

Some cash for my (very good) friend in jail

Someone I know was in some kind of courtroom trial for something that either she didn't do or wasn't normally a punishable offense. The courtroom seemed more like a church with pews. Long story short, she was put in jail, but the sentence was more lenient than the plaintiffs had wanted.

The jail had a strange system going on... Somehow it was okay for my friend to come out to my car (at night, even) and talk to me, but inmates were not allowed to obtain cash for some reason - however, it was apparently normal for inmates to circumvent that rule. As for us, I transferred some bills to her via french kiss before heading home.

Gibbs, the unwilling accomplice

Agent Gibbs from NCIS was somehow caught up with these people who were forcing him to go into a little room where people were chained up and whip them with a chain. When he is back with his crew, he subtly (for some reason) drops a hint at what is going on by accidentally dropping a few bits of the whipping chain he was using. At first his fellow agents are reluctant to believe what the evidence is telling them, but eventually they (and I) find the place and break it up.

Jack the epidemiolinguist

Jack M had written up the name of some obscure disease on the blackboard, except he had parsed it out into several words in a column. He asked what language the words were from and I said they looked Spanish... No, wait. Portuguese. Then he noted that when Casey Anthony (currently on trial for murder) was asked to read those individual words aloud, she tried to pronounce them as if they were English, indicating that she is a monoglot.

John Madden says:

"We're talking about the crime scene here.
We're talking about the vinyl cloak of the shooting star!"

- John Madden, talking about some flaw in the question

Wrongly accused, but hey, she gets a sitcom out of the deal

A junior deputy or some such thinks he has found the culprit in a recent crime, a woman (who happens to be cute, in a wholesome sort of way) with brown hair in her twenties. She is found guilty and put in jail. However, soon after, someone else is also found guilty of the same instance of the same crime. The deputy then goes about trying to prove the original girl's innocence, but her fingerprints all over the original crime scene (dusty shelves at a library) are enough to keep her in jail. So, the deputy's mission (along with his hilarious, believable backing cast) throughout the rest of the sitcom is to keep his convict entertained and make sure she enjoys her stay at the jail. Comedy gold, I bet. I'm sure they fall in love, too, because it's TV.

Ringo's cooking show; retrieving my guns

Ringo & pregnant wife, cooking show, chopping melons which are floating on the water in a swimming pool. Scottish guy or Mr. Scott or something, talking about how he survived falling into the steep shallow river on the mountain but his two brothers had not survived (on some other occasion, I guess).

-

Leaving the studio and going on a shooting/robbing spree on the back paths of wherever. Threw away guns a little off the path when I ran out of ammo. Heard people were starting to look for the guns so I snuck out into the woods and retrieved them (found some guns that weren't even mine). At some point, hiding in a boxy enclosure walled by screening with a low ceiling, near the path, may have been spotted by a passing woman. Etc.

Beth's holey driveway; our new weird pool table

Extremely foggy rollercoaster/suspension bridge. We go off the track before a big rise. Pity. I come up to a driveway as Beth F is swerving a large van into it. It tips and falls sideways (driverside up) into a van-sized hole at the base of the driveway. I'm acting somewhat romantic as I offer a hand to help her out of the van. This van may be the same van that appeared earlier in the dream, after I was being sought following my great help in an investigation.

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Me and dad at home. I am setting up a new pool table in front of the back doors in the family room. I notice that on one of the sides the corner pocket is offset about 4 or 5 inches to the right and the side pocket is too. I remove a few top layers and see that the holes have different possible preset positions. Interesting.