Dream journal

There I was, minding my own business, when a guy who calls himself 86 shows up, talking to me as though he’s known me since school, and tries to persuade me to go on a secret mission. Pretty soon there are more of them — thirteen in all, mostly with consecutive-number names - reminding me of our school days at Luton, an obscure and very specialized high school, and of how we used to be called the Luton Thirteen. I’m still dubious about this, but it vaguely rings a bell, and somehow they convince me to go on an undercover mission to rescue our school, from which we all graduated a few years earlier but are still sufficiently young-looking that we might pass as high school students. (We’ve combined "The Blues Brothers", Harry Potter, The Hobbit, "Get Smart", "Ocean’s Eleven", and "Never Been Kissed" in one untidy plot.) As a warm-up to make sure we’ve still got our magic/spycraft chops, we start with “The Golden Challenge”, in which you jump onto the joint between the last two cars of a speeding train, get inside, and are in the first car, preferably with one of you in the driver’s seat, by the time it comes to a stop. (86 doesn’t look anything like Maxwell Smart — if anything, he looks somewhat older and chunkier, with salt-and-pepper hair and light eyes — but there’s a sense in the dream that this whole thing is a prequel to "Get Smart".) But one of the crew, Callowhill, seems to have a mysterious power over the rest: with a few words, he can make them lose heart in whatever they’re doing and stop running (if that’s what they needed to be doing). And then I woke up.