Bears on the Porch, Oh My!

So there I was, tucked up all cozy in my bed, snoozing peacefully. The dream movie was spooling along as usual, little bits of this and that, not much of note. Then a familiar scene brightened the "screen" - I was in my girly green Ranger, accompanied by my daughter Meredith. We'd been somewhere unspecified, and were now pulling up in front of my house. I glanced up at the front porch, a 10' by 10' space reached by 5 broad granite steps. OMG! The porch and upper steps were a heaving mass of BEARS! It was hard to tell exactly how many, but at least three - one a golden brown, and the rest black. They seemed to be wrestling playfully, and somehow I knew - although I couldn't see him - that my dog Tucker was in the midst of the roiling scrum.

Thinking fast, I asked Meredith to reach through the back slider and open the tailgate so I could call Tucker to safety in the back of the truck. Of course, I'd asked the impossible - it's a long-bed truck, and the sliders in the cab and cap are too small for any adult human to lean through, much less reach the distant tailgate. But dreams have their own logic, and somehow the tailgate got opened anyway.

I yelled "Load up!" Bursting from the writhing mountain of bear fur, Tucker bounded onto the tailgate and dog-trotted forward to the slider, where he advised us that we should call the city animal control officer (he speaks very well for a dingo). Right! I started punching buttons on my cell phone, but somehow managed to hit all the wrong keys on each attempt. Frustrated, I jumped out of the truck and ran around the corner to an imaginary real estate office, where I commandeered a desk phone and punched in the police emergency number.

As I did so, I glanced out the bay window and saw a whole crew of EBTs (Emergency Bear Technicians) in the open-front office next door, wrangling several heavily sedated bears onto gurneys so they could be loaded into the flashing rescue trucks lined up outside on fashionable Bellevue Avenue. How the EBTs and bears got there so fast is a dream mystery, never to be solved. The bears were passed out cold on their backs, paws in air, tongues lolling out, soaked in sweat after all that rasslin'.

Right about then, someone answered the phone at the police station. I assured them that the EBTs were already on the scene, but that the environmental people might want to know, because a sweaty bear is a stinky bear. As I started fretting about how to clean the stinky bear sweat off my porch, Tucker rolled over and had a nice morning stretch at the end of my bed, herding the bears off to the dream archives. Good doggie!