I had the most amazing dream the other night...it was so vivid and felt so real, that I woke up at 5 a.m. (on a Sunday morning!), went downstairs, and wrote twenty pages on my laptop about it.

It involved a young woman traveling through war-ravaged Mexico with the hero--her one true love. (For those of you who are visual, he was a combination of Matthew Fox and Daniel Day Lewis.) The entire country is in the midst of a brutal and bloody revolution. Communication systems have been shut down, and travel is extremely dangerous, especially for Americans. They stop at the outskirts of a dusty little town to restock supplies. The little general store is held up at gunpoint and the heroine is taken hostage by the bandits, thrown into a car and driven away with them. I can still feel her fear and desperation, and how much she loved the man she'd been traveling with. He was her entire life. She had just one thought: to escape and return to him.

She attempts an escape and is rescued by another man, also American, who kills her abductors. Hundreds of miles now lie between her and the town where she was kidnapped. She has no idea if the hero even survived the robbery. The new guy is silent and has an aura of danger about him. Knowing he is her best chance for survival until she can find the hero, the heroine stays with him. This new guy, meanwhile, has his own agenda. He is a hit-man, and his jobs take him through Mexico, to some of the seediest and most dangerous areas of the war-torn country. He has no problem with the heroine tagging along, and if she finds the hero along the way, all the better. He tells her that he doesn't care if she stays or if she leaves, so long as she doesn't interfere with what he needs to do. There is a lot of tension between them, and a palpable attration which they both resist.

Months pass, and their travels eventually bring them back to the small town where she was separated from the hero, but it soon becomes clear that he isn't there. The town is now deserted except for a pack of feral dogs. The streets are filled with debris and the buildings show evidence of a fierce battle. The heroine has a moment of understanding where she realizes that she may never find the hero. She accepts that the hero is in her past, and this new man represents her future.

At the end of the dream, the heroine and the hitman are standing on the roof of a building, watching the sun set over a filthy, polluted city. In the distance, they could hear the explosion of mortars. She turns to him and tells him that she no longer knows what to do, that she can't keep looking for something that isn't there. The new guy (who started out as Gabriel Byrne but morphed into Taylor Kitsch) pulls her into his arms and kisses her. The dream ended there, but I had the distinct sense that the heroine could love this man as much as she did the hero. And what would happen if she ever did find her first love again?

Okay...sorry. I thought I could condense this into a few, short paragraphs. This dream, and the emotions associated with it have been uppermost in my mind for the past day or so. I keep seeing the hitman's eyes as he watched the heroine desperately look for the hero. Does he know something she doesn't? I have to know!

Have you ever had a dream that stayed with you? That felt so real, you couldn't stop thinking about it?