Don't give alcohol to ravens or George Washington

I had another convoluted dream last night. I was working in a historical museum with elaborate little dioramas. One of them was of George Washington's estate in New England. (No, to my knowledge, George Washington never had an estate in New England.) I spent a lot of time looking at all the little details. It was on the mainland, right across from Martha's Vineyard, whose name made sense to me for the first time. Of course - here was George's river, and here was his wife Martha's vineyard. There was a big bridge spanning the river, and an island in the shadow of the bridge. The main house was on the island - it was a medieval-style castle with battlements. I wondered why he'd chosen that location, because the castle would be in shadown from the bridge most of the day. It also seemed like an odd architecture choice. Someone else reminded me that George wasn't a very good architect. Mount Vernon was supposed to be situated so that the house had an illusion of floating when you came over a certain hill, but he'd messed up the math and the hill appeared to cut the house in half instead. (WTF, brain? Where is this coming from?) Also, he was a mean drunk. I mean, the time that the Continental Army was trying to go around the Amazon River, he was just plain nasty to poor Ben Franklin.

I walked away from the diorama and saw that another one of the glass display cases was taped over for repairs. But this brat was sticking a pole through a corner and batting it around inside the diorama, breaking things, while his mother just stood there watching. I took the pole away from him and tried to politely explain that he couldn't break things in the museum. But the mother gave him a new one and started yelling at me about suppressing her child's creativity. I took two more long poles from him, and then two short poles, and finally had security escort them out.

I left the museum. We were in the shadow of London Bridge. Next to us was a giant wooden colosseum. These were the town's two claims to fame - other than that, it was a backwater town with nothing else interesting about it. I passed some Princeton bandies who were looking for some friends who always came to Reunions, but were usually late. I sat down on the docks at the river edge. There was a flock of ravens on the telephone wires. For some reason, we were trying to get them drunk. I managed to coax one down and got him to drink something (whisky? rum? brandy?) from a dish. Soon they were all drunk. It turned out that one of them could talk. He was singing a drunken song when I woke up.