I had a dream this morning (from which Alex woke me up). Mom and I were flying in a tiny, tiny plane the size of a kayak. The cockpit was open to the air, and I was the pilot, but we took turns sitting in front, almost in each other's laps. I wasn't very good at piloting, and I flapped my arms to help the plane gain altitude, and circled and circled. Mom kept getting distracted and stopping places to talk to people. At one place we were crossing a river and I thought it was the Mississippi, but she asked and it was something else, and it turned into a water park. In the forest on the riverside, there were hot springs, and people and dogs sitting in the steaming water. She had to take a picture of one guy and his dog, even though she told him I thought he was a homosexual (it hadn't occurred to me to wonder). We took off again, and circled upward. It seemed that we kept having to go higher to get over higher and higher hills. There was a girl riding her bicycle through slushy snow and talking to her friend about how she really, really wanted to get a trampoline soon. I thought to myself that she should get it now, before she gets old and loses the energy for it. We kept having to take off from inside people's houses, overlooking vistas of valleys. Most of the people had a large window or a sliding glass door that opened onto a balcony which was big enough for the plane to take off from, but every once in a while we had to back out of a house and find another. There was a large gun, like a machine gun, above the plane's nose, and at one point I was holding it and circling with my free arm and the plane began to over-tilt. I started to fall out of the plane. I dropped the gun over the side and hung on, and Mom helped me back inside the little cockpit. Then we stopped again, and I took the seat out of the plane and found the seatbelt, and replaced it. This time, I was securely seated. Again, we flapped, circled, and rose into the air. We had a long trip ahead of us to get home, but we would get there.