She stood up and turned away from her home workstation.

Someone was in the garage. Someone who was waiting for her. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she did know it as clearly as she knew up from down or left from right.

She went to the garage. Someone was waiting there. It was time for her to go.

There was another car parked in the garage next to hers, a long black limousine that barely fit into the available space. The driver’s seat was occupied, but she couldn’t make out any details. The tinted windows made it impossible to see anything else inside the vehicle.

With a loud click, the rear passenger-side door swung partway open. A sultry feminine voice said, “Come in.”

She must be the one who was waiting for her. She took a step forward, and another, and another, until she stood next to the open door.

The door opened the rest of the way before she could reach for the handle. “Come in,” the voice repeated.

She obeyed. On the other side of the seat was a dark-haired woman in a sheer silk robe that did nothing to conceal her curves.

Yes, this woman had been waiting for her. She didn’t know what this woman wanted her for. She’d know soon enough. Then she’d know what to do.

She settled into the seat. It looked like black leather, but it felt like soft fabric against her bare back and legs. She realized that she was wearing only panties and slippers, as she often did when alone at home. She wasn’t alone now, but it didn’t matter. She was sure the woman didn’t mind. The woman wasn’t hiding anything from her, so she shouldn’t hide anything, either.

Sure enough, the woman didn’t comment about her state of undress. She just said, “Buckle yourself in, darling.”

She fastened her seatbelt and settled in, ready to go wherever the woman intended to take her.

The woman slid toward her and buckled herself into the middle seatbelt, strapping their bodies into position right next to each other. She leaned close and whispered into her ear.

“Let me take you on a trip to Paradise.”

She began to understand what the woman wanted her for.

The limo backed out of the garage, down the driveway, and onto the street.

The alarm went off, and Penelope woke up. She blinked, then blinked again.

That was a weird dream!

She didn’t dream very often, at least not dreams she remembered after waking up. Even when she did remember, her recollections tended to be a scattered montage of surreal images, and even those were usually forgotten by the end of the day.

This was different. This time, she remembered a coherent sequence of events in detail. She remembered each moment, not just a few highlights. Everything about the scene looked and sounded and felt completely lifelike.

The one thing that felt unreal was her own behavior. She’d climbed into a limousine with a scantily clad femme fatale who called her “darling” and promised her a “trip to Paradise,” by which she obviously meant “a trip to my lesbian love nest.” She hadn’t objected, or tried to get away, or even seen any problem with the situation.

Where the hell had that fantasy come from? She was straight. She’d known that ever since she’d started developing curves and noticing boys. Sure, she’d done a few college-party fake-out make-outs with another girl, but that was just to mess with the guys and get their attention. Her wet dreams featured men, not women. She picked up a guy, not a girl, when she felt needs that self-service and toys didn’t satisfy.

That was a fact. She was straight. She didn’t need to think about it anymore.

She had a feeling that she was going to find herself thinking about it anyway.

There was no time to try and make sense of it right now. Right now, she had to get ready to go to the office. She worked from home most days, but today was Wednesday and she had to show up in person for the usual round of pointless meetings. Senior management thought they were necessary for “team building” and “corporate culture.”

Penelope stretched and got to her feet. She reached down to peel off her panties, not wanting to look and see whether the dream had left her with a wet spot.

She wasn’t wearing panties.

That was impossible. She always wore panties to bed. When it was this warm, she didn’t wear anything else, but she never slept completely naked.

She’d knew she’d been wearing them yesterday. She’d spent the workday fully dressed from the waist up. When the normal workday was over, she distinctly remembered checking the time, turning off her webcam, covering it with painter’s tape for good measure, and stripping down to just panties and slippers. It was a cheaper way to stay cool than cranking up the air conditioning.

There was no reason she would have taken her panties off to go to bed…

She realized that she didn’t remember going to bed.

The last thing she remembered doing last night was reviewing the latest bug reports from the quantum neurosimulator project. There seemed to be more bug reports every day. After the latest round of budget cuts, they’d been forced to repeatedly patch subsystems instead of making them work right in the first place.

She’d soldiered on, even as her efforts to keep the project moving ahead had made her “working from home” days feel more like a “living at work” grind. Even so, she hadn’t been working that late. It was still twilight outside, so it was sometime not much past eight. She always made it a point to log off no later than nine so she had time to sit in front of the TV and decompress before bedtime.

This damn project was messing with her head. That had to be it. Lately, a job she usually enjoyed had become a headache, with constant missed deadlines and frantic rushes to figure out how to do more with less. Maybe dreaming about something she would never normally do, like a lesbian tryst, was some kind of subconscious code for wishing she were somebody else, somebody who didn’t have to deal with this mess.

She heard the coffeemaker chime. Maybe caffeine would help her make sense of all this. At least it would help her deal with the commute. It figured that something like this would happen the night before she had to be on-site for a series of boring useless meetings.

Her slippers weren’t next to the bed where they were supposed to be. She couldn’t recall where she’d left them. Of course not; she must have taken them off during the time she couldn’t remember. Never mind, she decided, as she padded her way to the kitchen barefoot.

Penelope went through her morning routine of eating breakfast, taking a shower, and getting dressed. A five-minute walk and a half-hour subway ride later, she was ready, more or less, to begin her workday.

“Hi, Penny.” Janice leaned in to get a closer look. “You look stressed out. Is something wrong?”

Just what she needed today, the motor mouth with no sense of boundaries from tech support.

“Nah, I just had this weird dream…” Her voice trailed off as she mentally kicked herself for mentioning that.

“Oh, really? What kind of weird dream?”

Yeah, it was definitely a mistake to mention that.

“I dreamed I left the house and didn’t know why.” Strictly speaking, that was true, and it sidestepped the homoerotic fantasy she really didn’t want to discuss, especially not with the office gossip.

“Is this the setup for a blonde joke?” Janice snarked. “You know you’re supposed to call other people stupid, right?”

“OK, then, stupid, do you have some actual reason to be here?” Penelope snapped.

“Touché!” As annoying as Janice was, she at least had a sense of humor and could take it as well as she dished it out. “I’m here because we logged an issue with your work-from-home connection last night. You dropped off the remote VPN sometime between eight-fifteen and eight-thirty. When we got the connection working again, we tried sending a chat request, but you didn’t answer. Did you notice anything unusual on your end before the connection quit?”

She didn’t remember the connection quitting. As far as she could recall, one moment she was reviewing bug reports and the next moment she was waking up, with only the dream in between.

“No, I didn’t notice anything.” That was also true, and all the truth she felt like telling. She got an idea. “Could you get somebody to take a look at my laptop and issue me a new one?” Maybe IT would find something, maybe they wouldn’t, but in either case they would be satisfied with having Done Something and would stop asking for an explanation she couldn’t give them.

“No problem. Got a sticky note?” Penelope handed her one, and she put it on the laptop and jotted down Penelope’s name and a comment about the loss of network connection. “I’ll let you know if they find anything,” she said as she took it away.

For a moment, she was relieved that Janice was doing her job instead of roping her into an extended conversation. Her relief was cut short as she realized that she couldn’t start work until somebody from tech support — with luck, somebody else from tech support — brought the new laptop and loaded it from her file backups. All she could do until then was wonder what the hell was going on.

The good news was that the new laptop was delivered and set up by an IT tech who stayed focused on doing his job.

The bad news was that Janice dropped in a bit later for a follow-up visit.

“Nobody could find any problems with your old laptop. Any trouble with the new one?”

“No, everything’s working fine.”

“Good. Call me if you need anything. I have to be at an HR meeting to deal with some idiot who got caught downloading porn over the office network, so I can’t stay to chat.”

“You’d better go, then.” That was a lucky break. Or maybe not. The memory of that bizarre dream kept bothering her. It was worst at the meetings where she’d spent hour after hour bored out of her skull listening to people reiterate things they’d already discussed in e-mail. Maybe Janice’s incessant babble would have gotten her mind off the dream for a while.

All she could do now was focus on work and try to put this weirdness behind her.

She put in another late night, partly to keep the project from falling further behind and partly to delay going home to be alone with her own thoughts. When it got close to eight o’clock, she started home, catching one of the last trains headed for her stop.

When she got home, she immediately turned on the TV. It was showing a mockumentary about alien abductions and missing time. She quickly changed the channel.

After a few hours of mindless entertainment that kept her mind off whatever it was that had happened last night, she turned off the TV and started toward the bedroom. Maybe she wouldn’t dream tonight, or at least wouldn’t remember if she did. Normal dreams or forgotten dreams or no dreams at all would be just fine, as long as the weird dream didn’t return.

She got into bed and turned off the lights.