A dream with a moose

Sometimes I wake up early in the morning and have a hard time getting back to sleep. When I do eventually fall asleep, it's not normal sleep. This is when I have my most vivid and weirdest dreams. Weirdest, because there is a certain level of reality within them that make them seem like they could actually happen.

So I was at this new school, looking for a new meter that no one had yet found. A road wound around the perimeter of the campus, and I was driving slowly around it looking for the meter. I saw several boxes but when I stopped to check, there were no meters in them. Eventually I came to the far back corner where there was a large fenced-in area with a small office at the gate. I got out and went into the office. Inside was a weird-looking older hippyish woman. I told her I was looking for a new meter and asked if I could walk around in the fenced area to look for it. "Oh sure," she said, "I'll go with you."

Inside the big pen I saw some weird deer with really long, curly red hair. "Whoa," I said, "I've never seen deer like that before."

"Those are red deer," she said. "That's where we get paraffin from."

"I thought paraffin was a petroleum by-product," I said.

"No," she answered shortly.

There was a few cows in the pen. And then I stopped abruptly when I saw...

"You have a moose in here?!"

"Oh sure," she said. "A moose...there's a bear lying in the shade under those trees over there...and there's a mountain lion in here somewhere."

"Somewhere?! Are you &^%$#@! crazy? You have a bear and a mountain lion at a school with a bunch of little kids running around?"

"Oh, they won't hurt anyone," she said. "They're just like big pets."

"Screw this," I said, "somebody else can find that $#@! meter."

One of the cows stalked me all the way back to the gate.