I planned my latest hiking trip using a 7-day forecast instead of the 3-day one I should rely upon, and Mother Nature spun the wheel and ruined it with a day of rain and storms. So I found myself in the Super 8 at Lebanon, MO last night booking a ticket for an afternoon indoor adventure in Branson and a plan to see the art museum in Springfield in the morning.

I often have vivid dreams which play out like a movie which needs a script doctor. Last night, after finally drifting off, I had a hot dream. No, not that kind of heat.

A foundry was running a smelting process. An impurity in the ore caused a hot spot which burned through the chamber and a hot corrosive slug struck a puddle of spilled chemicals. An explosion ripped through the area and a young female worker was severely burned.

Massive swelling disguised the full nature of her injuries until, as the flesh slowly healed and receded, a horrifying reminder of the accident was found to have imprinted across her forehead and cheek: the name of the foundry seared into her face, presumably by a hot marker plate she had fallen down upon.

Dream logic being flawed, the words read clearly across her visage, when it should have been a reversed image. I noticed the flaw during my dream and the scene shifted to a lab where six samples of something glowed brightly from within finger-sized glass tubes. Researchers had arrayed them across a table with six different colors of flame used to illuminate them: open gas jets with small stained glass lenses which were fitted between the flames and the samples.

A blue light revealed, unseen by the scientists, a tiny flaw in one sample tube, which meant they were in grave danger. Time ticked by and I kept hoping someone would glance down and notice the flaw, but alas they did not and suddenly the tube opened at one end and rocketed off the table into one fellow’s forehead, forming a glistening silver third eye.

Later he was found wandering about the rubble of the foundry, babbling incoherently about how he saw the words were the wrong way and he knew why. Someone finally realized he was talking about the injured woman and brought him to her.

His third eye opened and the woman, staring into the Eye of Truth, revealed…

Thunder roared above the Super 8 and I awoke, never to hear her secret.