so strange, "bizarre" is far too weak a word to describe them. The most notorious was a rape nightmare, taking place early in my transition. A scruffy, bearded man with greasy black hair climbs into my bed (I had a queen-size bed then) and anally rapes me, screaming gibberish.

Worse, at the time I was in that half-asleep, half-awake state of sleep paralysis, so I could see my surroundings, but also see the nightmare figure as he attacked me. It made the whole experience all the more horrifying, because for about fifteen minutes after I awoke I could swear it actually happened. I don't know how long it took before I stopped shaking.

To make the whole experience even stranger, I saw a fellow on "America's Most Wanted" who bore a frightening resemblance to the phantom figure of my nightmare.

One I had more recently (about three years ago) is one I call "M.C. Escher Hospital." I had a doctor's appointment that my mother drove me to (she was still alive when I dreamed this). She waited for me downstairs while I went up for my appointment.

Right about then, my motorized chair's battery runs out of power. Fortunately, I have my charger with me, but I get into an argument with the nurse, who doesn't want me to use hospital power. Soon, it's a moot point, because the hospital's power goes out at that point (strangely, they have no backup generator).

So because I have no wheelchair power, I grab a pair of crutches and try to walk toward the nearest staircase. Because I haven't used crutches regularly in years, I stumble in pitch darkness all the way down the hallway to the stairs, only to discover they lead nowhere.

I look for other staircases, but find they're all the same--they look as though they lead to where I want to go at first, but when I climb up or down them, I end up back where I started. In the meantime, my increasingly impatient mother is yelling for me to come down, while the nurse is yelling at me for leaving my powerless chair behind. All in all it takes about eleven hours of wandering before I find the way down, and I have to face my now-irate mother. The hospital's power never comes back on.

Then there's what I call (only half-jokingly) my "reincarnation dream", because it seemed for all the world like accounts of so-called past-life dreams I've heard. More like a "wishful thinking" dream, because I was a nine-year-old girl in it.

The girl had been rendered paralyzed in one leg by polio. I had an older sister about fifteen who was diapering me in the back seat of what looked like a '46 Ford. (Apparently the girl, like me, was incontinent because of her disability.) She could stand, but she wore a heavy, uncomfortable leg brace.

I sit up and look out the side window--I see '50s-era cars, tail fins and all. A year pops into my head--"1958".

The scene shifts to the deck of a medium-size private boat--I as the girl am wearing a yellow dress, and remember the air felt a bit chilly around my legs. The man who's supposed to be my father hugs me and disappears. The rest of the family is traveling from Nantucket to relatives in Nova Scotia (yes, I knew the exact locations in the dream).

I find myself in the sleeping quarters of the boat, and feel trapped. I want to get up, but my brace is off, the boat is pitching and I can't move. Unfortunately, that's all I remember before I woke up, in a cold sweat.

The last of the three dreams I've wanted to adapt to a story for this site, but I could never quite answer some questions, such as why I was on a boat, and why my "father" couldn't join the rest of the family.