dream

I had a dream last night. (And no, I don't dream every night-I have a sleep disorder.)
I was in the dream, but I'd rather I wasn't!
In it, one of my best friends died. I don't remember her death so I don't think I was there. I will call this friend H. H died under strange circumstances and was autopsied. For some reason they kept one of her legs. The disease she died of was genetically altered or man-made or something. At one point in the dream we were some place where they had an electron microscope and were looking at a sample of this disease and it was made in England at some place beginning with a "Ma" but it wasn't Manchester. (The "We" is me and another person, but I don't know who that other person was. She's not someone I know in real life.)
We went to some kind of pagan/witch/seer person, an older woman who had pretty much retired. She had been a writer, and a friend of H's. She was a very crabby old lady who didn't like to see people. Her back yard was full of all these little huts, like one-person sweat lodges, and they were connected by flexible clear plastic tubing, so her yard looked like a Habitrail for humans. (Habitrail has a really cool web-site, design wise. Check it out.) I took one look and said "I'm not going in there."
The lady's books were about the underworld and the other world and all kinds of ways to bridge the veil. Evidently her Habitrail yard was designed as a series of entrances to different places in the underworld, and the Habitrail format was to keep animals and strangers from entering any of the huts, which were over the entrance sites. Although the plastic seemed very flimsy, not like the rigid plastic of a gerbil-home, apparently it was not easily moved. Magic maybe?
Around the side of her yard she had a bunch of weird-looking animals, and now I can't remember anything about their appareance. They were the size of large dogs, or maybe goats, or maybe a combination. And they talked, and were intelligent. They functioned as security guards and friends.
I've lost the rest.