A friend calls me at 4 AM. "Let's go visit the Mummy Museum!" I'm reluctant, but still bike over--he'll get me in free, and I hear they have amazing Egyptian art.

Bike in the dark, following faintly visible paths through the wood, onto the grounds. Keep worrying the owners will catch us and think we're thieves.

Oh, great. The museum's an annex to the Bates Motel. Never a good sign!

I lose my friend. The night watchman comes by, on a leisurely round. I glide around him, out of range of his light.

The front gates are open. I slip in. It's a shambles. Many of the best exhibits have been stolen; the rest lie randomly on shelves.

Amid the junk, I spot stacks of my art slides. Don't recall donating those. How much of their collection is stolen?

I find my friend messing around with a mummy--setting up an experiment with lasers, like at the Exploratorium.

I do not approve. Messing with dead people who didn't consent to your experiments? Rude.

My friend doesn't notice my moral shock. He gets to be a mad scientist lasering a mummy. Geek heaven.

The debris proves we weren't the first midnight skulkers; and we're not the last. A bunch of teens crawl in a window... Some look sexy. They eye me and sneer. Well, no wonder. I skitter nervously around them, attracted yet afraid. Pathetic.

They find a food stand at the back of the museum. Exhibits torn out, freezers installed--full of junk food and meat. Twenty-pound cow lumps.

The teens toss two meat hunks onto a barbecue and tear into them as soon as the flesh thaws. Faces and hands bloody as lions. They gigle and sensually lick the blood off each others' faces...

Ugh. They're sexy looking, but... gross. Carnivores give me the creeps. No wonder I got so shy around them.

Find a lot of cloth samples from up to 3000 BC, in plastic bags. Some are for sale for prices up to $200. A guy asks me "Do you think I should buy one?" I wouldn't, but then I'm not into ancient fabric. How would I know if it's worth it for him?

I fool around with colored sands and powders, maroon and peach etc. All natural minerals, not paints. Suspend some in little waterpockets in a complex stone terrarium or geyser-mounds, where veins and pipes and cracks link pools of various temperatures in hollows... Looks like the rocks at Pebble Beach State Park. Pretty colors.

One of the hollows has... my silver ring, the one I made at age fourteen! I fish it out. Unmistakably mine. This museum really is thievish...

One of the teens sees the ring and looks alarmed--says "A ring of power! Sauron or one of his creatures will come to take it back!"

Back? He never touched this! I made it on my own.

As the bloody teens scramble back out the window in fear of the Lord of the Rings, I decide I better take precautions too, in case they're right. Put the ring on to make myself invisible...

But then I realize--that won't work on Sauron or even his higher-grade minions. They live in the spirit world the Ring slips you into. I'm making myself more visible, not less!

But maybe hiding isn't the point any more. With my Ring on, I feel stronger--reclaimed a piece of me.

Why'd I ever settle for life without my power?

I feel so strong, I decide to fly. Instantly, wings and a scaly tail burst out my back! My nails harden into claws. Red scales. I've become a dragon. And not, I now remember, for the first time.

Skim through the museum... sort of. The walls turn glassy and dissolve as I half-slip into the other world. Hints of my old high school appear, where I made the Ring so long ago. Then even those ring-memories of our material world fade, and I'm flying over a gray winter-bound plain, broken only by a snowy range to the south. Loops of silver--a river too big to freeze. Pale sky rippled in ice-clouds. A solemn scene, but beautiful in its way.

A ripple over the hills. The ice-drake wriggles like an eel through the winter sky. My enemy's a bit smaller, but cold and deadly.

But I'm formidable too. A dragon of fire!

Fire and ice are about to fight. And decide just who owns my Power.

• Silver ring made at age 14: real. A massive ring with a snake/river motif. I was proud of it. Friends teased I was forging a Ring of Power. Maybe I was.
• Teens think Sauron will want my ring "back", but it's not his: in the Lord of the Rings, Sauron made most rings of power and gave them as bribes and lures; but the Elves made three silver rings entirely on their own, just as I made mine.
• Ring as a symbol:
  1. Taking my power back, of course, but also...
  2. Not hiding the real me--a precocious, unapologetic, ambitious artist. Like making that ring as a kid (even the teacher, who knew I was gifted, didn't think it'd come out). As opposed to hiding, hoping for acceptance, by acting normal--that is, stupid.
  3. A ring of friends, a social circle where I can be me.
• Invisible in the material world, but more visible in the spirit world: a motif straight out of Lord of the Rings. But it's also true in the creative world. Some art really is over the heads of the majority, can only be seen truly by those with a third eye--not that this guarantees they're moral. Just perceptive.
• Is visibility dangerous? Well, as that bumper sticker says, SILENCE = DEATH. And with my full power reclaimed, do I need to hide?
• Wear a treasure, become a dragon: I'd just seen a biopic on CS Lewis; in his book Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace loots a dragon-hoard, puts on a bracelet, and turns into a dragon. He hates it; his friends now fear him, and the bracelet now pinches his huge forearm. CS Lewis sermonizes about greed...

I think my dream's a critique of Tolkien and Lewis, pointing out some dragons don't mean greed... and some rings of power aren't stolen. They're reclaimed.

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