I'm a spy for the Swedish navy. Which contains every Swede alive.

But I'm not a Swede myself. Or even human. I'm a... shapeshifter? Or just an illusionist, able to appear to be anyone? I'm not even sure right now what my native shape is!

But I'll have to figure that out later, after my current case is over. I got assigned to go ashore and solve a mystery in a small town that looks a lot like the campus of San Francisco State University, out near Ocean Beach.

I become a tall willowy woman. Or pose as one so well I fool me.

A small-town girl falls for me. And I for her. It's sweet now, but I know the mission will end and I'll have to change shape and move on. Unless...

Could I rebel against my Swedish spy-handlers? Does she mean that much to me?

The locals gossip and disapprove. She's not quite eighteen, and small too; just shoulder-high next to me, making her seem younger. I learn she was sexually abused and is using me to undo some of that; I'm big yet I listen, I stop when she gets scared... I don't mind this, I love watching her heal, love the sex, love the affection--she rubs up against me like a cat, leans on me. And her public flaunting of me, even defiance in the face of flak.

Flak from people who act all protective of her now, but didn't protect her then--indeed, some of her relatives conspired to hide her abuse. We wouldn't want to embarrass anyone respectable...

So however much these small-town hypocrites hiss, it's a win-win for us. Just maybe I can stick to this shape--this life. Despite them all.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Small town, tall willowy woman, underage girl, gossip & slander, slut-shaming: I just saw an old mystery film, The Thin Man Goes Home. Nick & Nora, newlyweds, visit his home town. Nora, tall & willowy, meets the eccentric daughter of the town boss. Gossips say the murder victim had an affair with this girl, who's both underage and his first cousin (though in fact it's all lies--they were just friends).
• Abused girl: my friend J.E. was, and she's seeking therapy now, but dreads asking her health provider--expects denial of coverage. I say "Apply! I have the same HMO, and they used to play that game to save money. But some suicides prompted a flood of lawsuits, so now they're afraid to deny you therapy--they pay 100% of my costs."
• Swedes, navy, shapeshifting, sex change, romance with underage girl... whaaat?

FOUR MONTHS LATER

My housemates watch a biopic, Becoming Astrid, a biopic on the grim teen years of writer Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking, Ronia the Robber's Daughter--tales of defiant outsider girls).

She grew up in a cold, drab little Swedish town. At 16 she got a job at the local paper. Had an affair with the editor. Soon found herself pregnant... and on her own. It was all HER fault, you see...

God, I hate small-town sexism. I couldn't even watch the end. For an hour I'd been muttering "Astrid, get outa there, get to a city, a university, civilization..." I walked out.

But why'd I react so strongly? This wasn't my history! I couldn't put my finger on it...

FOUR YEARS LATER

I'd marked the Swedish shapeshifter dream as one I wanted to post to the World Dream Bank, but all through the Covid pandemic I put it off. Reread it, sketched it, accidentally on purpose lost the sketches... never finished it. Reluctant. It felt incomplete.

Four years later, something went click--Eugene Gendlin's "felt shift", when you suddenly understand a dream.

I suddenly knew it had been a reaction to a movie that I only vaguely recalled about a Scandinavian writer I like. Not Tove Jansson. Eleanor Farjeon? Selma Lagerlöf? No... Astrid Lindgren! Once I had her name, I looked her up in my journal, and found... my reaction to the film had been odd too.

Mind you, I expected to find the film weeks or months before the dream--expected to find I'd forgotten the film, but dreamed about it anyway.

Nope. The dream came first! Forgot the dream, but reacted to the film anyway.

JW Dunne advocated setting aside temporal prejudices. It's not as if we know what time is! Ask "if I'd seen the film, reacted strongly, and four months LATER had this dream, would I say it was a response to it?" Unequivocably yes. "Then why balk because the sequence is reversed? A thousand clear predictive dreams have proven they happen, short-term." What stands out is the gulf of months between dream and film--not hours or days. That is rare for me, though not unique.

The real "Aha!" for me as a dreamworker isn't precognition, but how my long reluctance to post the dream as-is now looks less like procrastination and more like patience--four years of slow unconscious groping through a million memories before my own brain could make the connection at last.

As Dunne pointed out, such longer-term foresights may happen all the time and we'd rarely notice--life's just too distracting. But now and then, even a four-year nagging itch gets scratched at last. Relief!

So if you're reluctant to finalize some interpretation of an intense dream... maybe it's laziness, maybe it's sabotage, but maybe it's... the Akashic Librarian, wrinkled and slow as a turtle, paging memory-stacks big as a planet. For you.

If you're patient.

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