At the insistence of sister sledge and the instigation of brother wonko, I am posting another attempt at lucid dreaming.

The night’s dreams did not get a scintillating start, as I first dreamt my co-workers and I were having a competition to see who was best at using the new photocopier. At some point in the wee sma’s, however, things got interesting.

I found myself in a clearing in a South American rain forest, outside some sturdy temporary housing built for a scientific expedition of which I was a member. Three of us stood about in the clearing, discussing our latest discovery: me, my brother (Nope, I don’t have a brother. Good catch!), and some incarnation of Joxer, the bumbling good-natured Ted Raimi character from Xena. Whatever we’d discovered, it was pretty neat, so we piled into the expedition’s airplane to carry the news to the outside world.

This airplane was bright yellow, along the lines of a biplane, but terribly small. The pilot had his own cockpit, but there was one long cockpit that seemed much like a burlap sack into which the rest of us had to fit. Whether burdened by the excess people or by the conventional reluctance of things that should fly to do so in my dreams, the little toy biplane simply would not take off. We taxied ’round and ’round, until finally we heard that a terribly dangerous gang of bikers (Yes, bikers in a jungle. Your point?) was on its way to pillage and destroy indiscriminately.

Suddenly, taking off seemed a little more crucial than it had when only Science had been at stake! We taxied around a bit more, and managed at last to gain the air. We were rising, rising, out of the clearing and high into the air. The bikers roared into the clearing below, and just as we were about to be lost to their sight above the trees, the plane blew up.

Luckily, we all seemed to have rainbow guidable parachutes for just such an eventuality, and were tethered together. In fact, my companions seemed so unconcerned I concluded the plane had been meant to explode all along. We glided along towards the river, and the bikers changed course to intercept us.

We landed without event on an old wrecked riverboat mired at an angle in the mud. A number of vague acquaintances of ours were there, seeking a hiding place from the bikers. They were friendly enough, but very impractical, as their wearing black suits in the jungle attested, and while they had handguns, they seemed to know little about them, and kept pointing them at friendly people, including myself.

The bikers appeared, lining up between us and the sheltering jungles, their laughter as deep and menacing as their engine sounds. I really don’t want to die like this, I thought. Piffle, you won’t! I replied, Do you REALLY think this is happening?

Well, when I put it like that — I hazily grasped that this was a dream, and, as if in automatic response to the realization, I raised one fist and blasted up through the roof, flying swiftly and surely into the air. (Much easier than usual!)

Suddenly, as I paused in midair above the boat, two things happened. The dream started trying to take control back, and I decided I had to rescue my friends. My lucidity began to fade, but the dream came up against the thorny problem of having a heroine flying confidently above the banks of the Amazon. So the dream settled the matter at once, and suddenly I was blonde and wearing a suspiciously familiar red and blue costume with a distinctive golden ‘S’ shield on the chest. I swooped back through the hole I’d made in the roof and rejoined my friends.

My brother looked at me, and I realized with a bit of a shock that my brother was Joss Whedon. He didn’t seem at all surprised that I was Supergirl — but, of course, supplied the dream, I had saved his life a bazillion times, of course he knew. He had only saved my life once, when we were kids, from a vampire — and he’d created an entire television franchise about a blonde superpowered girl who can kill vampires without her brother’s help just to needle me.

With a grin at my pesky kid brother, I zoomed out of the wreck and started laying waste to the biker gang with casual ease and flying super-strong fists.

Then I woke up. It was a good dream.