I dreamt my friend, duckie, died. but, that was a mere background detail
at the beginning of the dream.

[I should say now that what follows is from the dream's point of
view and does not necessarily reflect my current personal beliefs]

duckie had died prematurely and wasn't yet ready to depart from this
earth. so, he decided to hang around. he wasn't really sure what
he still needed to do in order to feel he was ready to go, so instead
of trying to accomplish a task, he hung out with me and his housemate.
we both worked at some strange super-market-type health food store.
I was a cashier and his housemate was the count-the-money person.

I guess duckie was a ghost. he generally seemed a pretty solid
fellow, but he wasn't allowed to be around outside of certain times.
not sure -who- or -what- did the allowing. his hanging out at work
seemed to cause some problems though. people didn't really believe
he was a ghost.

so, to prove his point, he leaned on a counter, and said "watch."
then he did... something ...and his hand went through the counter,
and he then had the traditional epherealism that we all learned
from Disneyland that ghosts ought to have. then he was solid again.
but I had felt something weird too. so I made him do it again...
and I found that when he did whateveritwasthathewasdoing, the counter
felt insubstantial to -me-, and I could put my hand through it too.
that was neat.

so, after a few days, money turned up missing, and duckie was suspected
of having taken it. this is not by stealing, but by inadvertently
making it insubstantial, whenever he bought anything. [feel free
to speculate on exactly why a ghost would buy health food. if you
know duckie, feel free to speculate on why -he- would buy health food.]

after much suspicion and bad feeling, finally an experiment was set
up, whereby a 'fresh' cash drawer would be used and duckie would
buy a single item. then it would be re-counted to see if all the
money was indeed there. this would be done twice.

the first time the item was this triple-connected coffe ice cream stick.
no money turned up missing, and apparently this was chalked up to
the power of the coffe to prevent such occurrances. I don't
remember the second item but it had nothing to do with coffe. when
the transaction took place though, I felt the same feeling I had
felt when he stuck his hand through the counter. I thought, "you idiot,
it -is- you, now you will go away and I will never see you again."

but I woke up before they counted the cash drawer. time to get to work...