Cars and Captains.

 This dream is really a crazy mix-up of things! 

It has cars -- red cars, specifically. At least two, maybe three.

It has my parents.

It has various in-and-out (of the dream story) siblings.

It has my daughter Tracy.

And it has rival Star Trek captains on rival TV networks at the same time for the express purpose of competing. Sometimes straight out popularity, sometimes diversity, sometimes for better story lines, or believable story lines. Like so much going on in our world, the reasons why or what for are subject to the persons explaining -- I mean reporting-- them. 

The basic story is that we are having an impromptu family gathering over the rival programming. It starts a few days (or weeks, who knows; it's a dream) before the event. So life is going on as normal. (If you think my real normal is weird, you should see my dreams!)

My mom is going to work in her car. My dad is coming home from work in his car. I'm taking care of things in the home and my car is is driveway.  Sibling comes in (Chip?) talking rather loudly and excitedly about the programming and asking everyone how they are voting. Daddy says shut up he doesn't want to hear about all that nonsense. We all mostly ignore him because he can't hear anyway, so what's he complaining about.Whole bunch of us start talking about how and where were going to watch and which one well be watching.

I say I have two TVs so I'm going to watch "at least" both of them.

Tracy says she's going to channel flip between the two.

Another sibling, John , says that's cheating and we all get to brangling about if it is cheating or not. After all, you can like people equally for different reasons. You can even see both very effective actions and reactions as being equally appropriate to the circumstances of each situation. In which case it would not be cheating, it would just be -- the same but different. (Yes, this is something we would argue about and agree to as a solution. Or not.)

**********************************************

My mom hasn't come home from work, so we all go out looking for her. 

My dad comes back being hateful to us because we don't know where she is, so somebody's lying to him. We probably all are. Grumble, grumble, then sit and stew. So we all go out on our own to try to find her. Even though, to each of us, she has disappeared as if she never existed except as a dim, vague memory.

I find her little red car with a white roof in a snowbank/ditch along a stand of skinny trees, on an unmarked road. Tracy is with me, ans she and I check the car out and decide it needs a battery.

So we go to the 1st Stop in Winchester. The old store, where it was when we first lived there. I go in to get something and take it out to Tracy. 

We get the battery and go back to the car and end up pushing it to the gas station, where my car still is. Someone has smashed into it. So somehow Daddy is coming to get my car and we are going to drive Mom's home and tow mine somehow.

We get back to the gas station and I go inside to tell her we're getting my car. While there, the woman working there (one who actually did, I think) starts ragging on me saying she knows I'm not my Mamma and my Mamma would be so ashamed of me, and she wouldn't like it when she told her about it.

I thought, but I AM the Mammaw, now.  WHAT is her problem?

But when my dad shows up, he had someone take him back and Tracy and I are left there with three cars, one not drive-able. 

Somehow fenders and keys and changing something (oil pump? brakes?) all starts a big old discussion . Sometime in this discussion we realize that we can fix it because all the cars are red, inside and out. I think we used one car foe parts to fix the other two. But no one would know because they were all red. 

And then we were watching Captain Janeway vs Captain Picard, and we sibs were texting back and forth about who was what-ing and why, and Tracy came out of her room to complain that my two TVs were using all the power and making her TV fuzzy and I needed to turn one off. 

Then they all went gray and staticky.

Now some of this is understandable. The red car with white top  was in a book I was reading before sleep, and also was watching Magnum, which features a red car. And before Magnum, Kate Mulgrew had been on Murder She Wrote.