I was a young girl, or listening to and envisioning a recounted story about one (for clarity, I'll just refer to myself as the girl). I was walking into some kind of building, part home improvement store, part barn-shaped restaurant (inside, it was somewhere between a grocery store and a restaurant that looked like the Ponderosa we used to go to), with my parents, and I was lagging behind a bit. I had long hair and a purple baseball cap, and it was really windy. I think the story was being recounted to me and I was imagining it, and just like the girl from The Fall (great movie, btw), I used pieces of my own experiences to fill it out -- the hair felt like my hair, especially at the ends, the hat was the same purple as one of my t-shirts, had the 1-up Mushroom from a green hat I have, and when the wind blew the hat off my head, it stayed stuck on my hair for a while, as has happened once or twice in real life. The hat stayed stuck to my hair for a while, but eventually it blew away behind me. I wanted to go back and get it, but I didn't want to lose my parents in the crowd. Then someone came up, grabbed the hat off the ground, and handed it to me, and I made sure to hold onto it tight.
The person telling the story to me told me that while the hat was on her shoulder, she had felt a strange, beautiful sensation, and somehow knew that it was God keeping her hat from blowing away. I wasn't totally convinced, but I was intrigued. She continued that once inside, nothing that her parents got her as a gift in that vaguely-defined building could compare to that experience.
Later, I went to do my radio show without a playlist prepared. But I think the dream shifted before the show actually started.
Later still, I had bought a bunch of t-shirts online while I was at college, and now that I was back home, my mom was washing some of them. One was some odd pink and green mishmash of political figures with Mario's head replaced with Mickey Mouse's face in front of all of it. My mom didn't get the point of it (and now that I'm awake, neither do I), and she said I was going to get an award for Worst Replaced Corporate Logo. She told me this by replacing the label on an old t-shirt I have that looks like a Heinz bottle (I've had it for so long that I remember deciding not to wear it in 2004 in case people thought it meant I was voting for Kerry) with a label saying something about the Worst Replaced Corporate Logo award. One was an old-timey world map, which, when washed, somehow became a large, flat square, with no apparent arm holes or anything. I convinced myself that somehow it worked as a shirt. My mom was impressed with this one, especially when I told her it was only ten dollars. One of the shirts on the website was a made-up female cartoon character who somehow conveyed some kind of message I agreed with. I don't think I got that shirt, but someone a few feet away from me did, and I may have gotten the action figure of her (if I did, I think I got it in the barn restaurant thing). Then there was another shirt sort of like the Mario/Mickey one that I ended up wearing.
It was cold outside, and I was watching some kind of show like the Today show. In this area, the local networks shuffled to different channels every few months, but it wasn't based on ratings, even though it seemed like it. One of the several hosts was a guy who, from certain angles, looked for all the world like Joe Biden. They mentioned that they had some mimes in their green room, and switched the cameras over to there so we could see them. The green room looked a lot like the inside of the barn restaurant place. Inside were two mimes painted to look like statues. One was dressed as Abraham Lincoln and painted mostly silver, the other was supposed to be John Wilkes Booth and was painted to look wooden. The hosts asked them to start dancing stiffly. Suddenly a Jefferson Davis mime rode in on a black horse wearing black armor and carrying an ax with a head bigger than Abraham Lincoln's body, although you could tell from the way it moved that it was made from plastic or rubber or something. The horse reared back. A woman ran up and opened the hotel doors, then ran out of the way, and the horse, with Jefferson Davis, rode through the doors, leaving a woman between the inside doors and the outside doors, carrying a baby, who I think was different than the door-opening woman, very surprised. Someone picked up a piece of aluminum shaped like an M&M, red, with some kind of intricate design on it framing a logo for something. Either a soda brand other than Dr Pepper, or Big Red, I don't remember. It had been dented a bit when the horse ran over it. I went and stood in the place between the doors, which suddenly shrunk, and people started coming in for the costume party. The only ones I remember were a trio of siblings dressed as Mario, Luigi, and Peach. All of them were blond and freckly and midwesterny and normal (for some reason I didn't find it odd that the girl's breasts were hairy and nippleless and around her waist and sticking out of the bottom of her shirt) and probably lived on a farm. I knew that that was a setup for them being horribly dismembered by the monster later, and I wondered why horror movies always had to do that. Then I remembered a horror movie where the heroine was kind of a slut, and I said to myself while waking up, "But isn't it still the same mindset?"
tl;dr: While a girl, God saved my hat. I was briefly unprepared. My mom washed weird t-shirts. Then there was a total mindscrew thing with mimes that I'm not gonna bother trying to figure out.
