I had a dream that Lauren was a scientist. In her latest experiment, she was going to see what it was like to be a fish. She had the fish all picked out and everything. She told her students that she was going to be away for about a month, so she couldn’t grade papers until she got back.

She was so nonchalant about it that I was quite surprised when I finally saw how she intended to become this fish – She died.

So, she must’ve had some sort of crazy science plan, right? Well, she sure didn’t explain it to anyone.

Her friends and family all decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. We didn’t have a funeral. We were hoping she’d show back up in a month or so. But we didn’t really expect to see her again.

In about a month, someone showed up at the university, claiming to be Lauren. She and her dad were there. They had a wild story:

They were out fishing one day when they saw a killer whale chasing a dolphin. The dolphin stopped running and rolled over on its back, allowing the killer whale to eat it. The violence shook up the boat and the man and the daughter fell out. The daughter drowned at that point. Somehow, the man decided that he ought to replace her brain with the brain from the dolphin. He felt that this would save her life. Somehow, he knew how to do this.

When she woke up, she said that she was Lauren.

Everybody was very skeptical of this story. I wanted to believe, but I had a hard time feeling like she was Lauren – she had a different body and a different voice. So I asked her some pretty basic questions: How did we meet? What’s my favorite hobby? Basic stuff that Lauren would know. She didn’t respond to any of these things.

We decided that these people were crazies who just wanted some fame. In fact, it looked like the dad was the ringleader and he’d somehow roped his daughter into it.

We decided that Lauren was dead and had a funeral for her.

Later, I started to make friends with that girl anyway. She changed her hair to be more like Lauren’s, which I found made it easier. She still claimed to be Lauren, and picked up some of the things that she should’ve known. It could easily be the result of research, though. Every day, she had to go do something highly mysterious that she would never talk about. She wouldn’t let anybody come with her. What was she doing? Research? Mad science? Who can say? I woke up.