This Dream I Had II

I write mysteries. Sometimes, I write other things, but over the past few years, it's mostly been mysteries. Recently, I've been focusing on professional development, so I haven't been writing--or blogging, as a handful of you may have noticed--as much recently. A few days ago, I started reading over some things I wrote, and I've done some more writing. I guess that served as the backdrop for a long, involved, and rather strange dream.

The dream felt like it happened in several parts, yet I somehow knew all of them were related.

I was investigating a missing child. Pretty standard fare in the mystery genre, right? I ended up talking to someone in a hospital and figured out the person had a block of time they couldn't account for. I took that info to the police (whose precinct was either connected to or right next to the hospital) who didn't seem interested in it. When I hinted someone there might be involved and may have taken the missing kid to a safehouse, I got a reaction. Then I left.

When I left, I had to wait to cross the street. I remembered thinking of interesting phrases to describe the traffic, making this kind of a meta dream.

Next, I was in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, presumably at my client's house. I went out for something and a random ruffian tried to hold me up as I walked back. I got his gun away from him, shot him in the foot, and tossed the gun down a sewer. Pretty hard-boiled of me, eh? Well, that served to remind me that a crime boss of some sort also lived in the area, and I discovered he was two doors up from my client.

After that, an older man came into the house with what I think was a broken phone. We had three computers on the table, crunching whatever info we needed crunched about the case. Someone in the house decided to help the man with his phone and ended up connecting it to the house line. I got suspicious and unplugged one of the computers from the network. Sure enough, the man with the "broken" phone worked for the crime boss and had uploaded a rootkit to the network. The other two computers were compromised (and helpfully told us that someone else had connected). We had to shut them down.

At some point after that, I narrowed down the suspects to two brothers who owned rival juice businesses. I read billboards of info about them to a friend from grade school who had no previous involvement with the dream or the dream-case.

That was the last thing that happened. I don't know which juice czar, if either, ended up as the guilty party.

Things that may have spurred aspects of this dream:

-I've gotten back to reading and writing my own mysteries more recently.
-Those stories are set in Baltimore and feature a protagonist based in Federal Hill.
-The stories also feature the local crime boss as a minor character.
-My wife and I were talking about going into Baltimore today and lunching at a place we like in Federal Hill.
-I've been reading about information security (the professional development I mentioned earlier). Yesterday, I read a lot about trojans and rootkits.
-For the brothers and rival juicers... yeah, I got nothin'.

Maybe this all means I need to work in a way to write regularly again. Professional development is great and all, but I love writing and have to find a way to take the time and do it. So thank you, strange and rambling dream, for helping me realize that.

Now I just need a strange and rambling dream to get me back to my regular gym routine...