I know there was another one around here somewhere... but I'll be buggered if I can find it. So I'm starting a new one.
I had a really interesting dream a couple nights ago. I was somewhere in Africa, in the middle of a vast desert. (I don't think it was the Sahara... it seemed more Egyptian to me.) There was this temple in the desert, and I was apparently its keeper. Inside the temple was a huge machine. perhaps 6 stories high. It looked like a giant clockwork contraption. If you ever saw The Princess Bride, the life-sucking machine, imagine a machine that looked like that, only immensely bigger. And not all wood, mostly brass and steel.
Anyway, the machine apparently kept time. It wasn't a clock... it was somehow a guardian of time itself. And I was the guardian of the machine. I believe I had some underling guards with me, and a "pet" - a small (cat-sized) six-legged sentient creature that looked half-ape, half horse, that called itself "Troop." I got the feeling it called itself that because it was part of a larger army. Perhaps an advanced scout that came to the temple to check it out, and decided to stay. I also got the feeling that it was capable of shape-shifting into a much larger animal if it needed to.
People came to the temple to try to decipher the future. And some came to try to change the past. You could manipulate the pulleys, cogs, etc. to create small changes in the timestream. But doing so was, of course, risky. I recall the main story involved some queen who came with a small army to try to manipulate the timestream so that her and her people would be considered gods to the surrounding tribes, so they could subjugate them, and Troop and I had to find a way to hold them off.
Finally, I recall making some manipulation to the time stream to try to stop her, and ended up waking up in my bed, with the voice of Troop in my head telling me that although I had succeeded, I had been replaced as guardian for doing so, and that from now on, my long service as a Time Guardian would all seem like just a dream to me...