Monster Breakfast.

I think I stole the plot of my dream last night from a children's book. If not, then someone needs to write it. Even in the dream, at a certain point, I was thinking, "This is a little hackneyed, isn't it?"

I was at a small party at my friend M's apartment in San Francisco. (She moved back to the Midwest years ago, but for many years she lived in the Inner Richmond.) I left to go get something, buy something, I don't remember exactly what, but it should have been a quick errand.

As I was walking, I noticed that nearly the whole neighborhood was under construction. Cranes and huge steel girders, cast iron framework, and trusses everywhere, dwarfing the existing buildings, and a crowd of people here and there on the sidewalks, looking up at the workers.

A burly, shirtless man was climbing up the side of a building -- not a worker just a guy impressing his friends. He was about 3 stories up. A cop shouted, "Hey come down off of there!"

On his way down, he missed a foothold and started falling. Everyone gasped but a small group of people on the sidewalk caught him and lowered him to the sidewalk gently. On his feet, he turned and waved to the crowd and everyone cheered.

But the cheering turned to screaming when we turned to look down the street and saw a huge creature coming toward us, about 20 feet tall, covered with silvery-brown fur, sort of a cross between a gorilla and Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son, rampaging, roaring, grabbing people, tearing them apart and eating them.

Of course we ran. The monster was coming from the direction of M's apartment so I couldn't go back there to safety. I ran with the mob for a few blocks, then a few of us turned into an alley that led to a small enclosed space with a lot of debris piled up at a back wall. (I know, don't go in an alley when you're being chased by a monster, but we weren't thinking clearly.)

We heard the monster coming. We were doomed.

But then through a quick process of discussion and consensus, we discovered that some of us had restaurant skills, we rummaged through the pile of junk and pulled out what we needed to improvise a cute little coffee shop, we fried some bacon and eggs, brewed coffee, and, by the time the monster reached us, we were just sitting at a small table having breakfast, pretending not to be frightened out of our minds.

The monster stopped short, smiled. He was famished, and it turned out he much preferred bacon and eggs to people. He sat down with us and had a scrambled egg sandwich on an English muffin.