All Hallows Dream, in which a cat comes back

It's Halloween. I am going to some kind of party, wearing all black and a red hooded cloak (no, until now I didn't think of any connection to little red riding hood). I think I'm just trying to look different than usual, not dressed as something. I spend a fair amount of time sorting through very similar looking clothes in my closet, in a room much like the one I grew up in at my parents house (it might be that one). I do go to the get-together, and sort of hang around awkwardly not knowing what is going on, which is fairly accurate (except, in real life I don’t celebrate Halloween anymore). Darkness is falling.

Somehow I find out that my cat, which was apparently missing for some time, and has been found by somebody and taken to some kind of shelter. The cat in question is C-, who actually died several years ago, but in the dream he was still alive, just lost. I am absolutely overjoyed to get the call. I go with my husband to go find this place. We drive down drizzly logging roads at dusk. Near somewhere that looks like the road where I grew up, we see a young girl with a small pony, riding up the road. I mention to my husband that there used to be a pony at the end of the road that would escape and come down to our house. But then I realize that that pony has surely passed on by now, and this must be a different pony. It is also smaller and browner, almost the size of a Shetland pony.

We get to the place where the cat is being kept, which actually looks kind of like I imagine a preschool or kindergarten would look inside. There are a number of small children, and lots of children's drawings and brightly colored letters and such on the walls, but there are also dividers sort of like cubicles. A short round woman, probably about 40, with light abundant curly hair pulled back into something like a ponytail talks to us about the cat. She seems reluctant to turn him over, and somewhat disapproving of my having lost him. When I see him, he looks actually quite a bit different than C- looked in real life, but in the dream he looks like I expect. He is black like C-, but he also has a small white mark on his chest, and a smaller one next to his left ear, which C- didn't have, and he has some very small brown/torti marks on his face. In the dream, however, he looks "right" and I am very happy to have found him. I have not brought a cat carrier (typical), so I borrow my husband's jacket, which is a light tan one, pick up the cat and wrap him in it tightly with his head out (he is somewhat frightened and jumpy and all claws). I remember all of this part very clearly, and we go back to the car to take him home.

Old Truck

The dream last night was long and involved, but all I can remember is the very end. I was talking to my father, back in my hometown, and my husband drove up in an ancient Ford truck that he had just purchased. It looked somewhat like the old Ford my father used to have (back when they had a very rounded look), but bigger and light tan in color. It also had a back seat or extended cab. My father and I got in the back seat (there was another guy, a friend of my husband, in the front... I could only ever see the back of his head. It was very round with straight black hair) and we all drove around with my father giving occasional backseat driving advice.

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave...

I was visiting a far-away city, somewhere to the east and south in the U.S. (it was somewhat cold and wintry there). I had received as a gift 2-nights stay in a hotel there, and it was now Sunday afternoon and time to go home. I had also booked another hotel starting a day or two previous to the paid-for days (La Quinta), apparently because I’d arrived before the gift stay started. Both hotels were in a long mall block with individual storefronts like the mall in Tig--.

Time was running out and I had to check out of the hotel I had the gift pass for, and also I suddenly remembered I hadn't checked out of the other hotel I'd booked originally (why I had booked the stay in La Quinta through the stay in the free hotel, I do not know). I had to check out of La Quinta by 4 or also pay for another day. And I had to leave as soon as possible afterwards in order to make it back home before I needed to go to work the next day.

However, I wasn’t actually at either hotel when I realized all this, I was in the mall in a shoe store. I had just returned from some peculiar side-trip, possibly to another dimension. It involved archery with large colorful bows. I had discarded the pants I had been wearing on the bow trip (pale blue pantaloons), because they were bloody, and was trying to buy a pair of all black clogs with straps. There was a whole other part of the dream about this side trip, but when I appeared back in the shoe store it was all vague and I couldn’t remember the details of what I had been doing. I found one of them and waited for some time for a salesperson (getting antsy about getting back to the hotel in time to check out) only to discover that they only had the one clog on display, not a pair. I then discovered I had lost the sandals I was wearing (my real-life slip-on Danske sandals). I backtracked in the mall and found my sandals on the floor, and put them on. I kept losing them (or finding that I was shoeless, at any rate) throughout the rest of the dream.

I then hurried over to the counter for the first hotel, to check out. I had the keys, but the lady was taking her time to process my check-out. There were an additional 20 dollars or so I had to pay (reminiscent of our recent gift stay at another real-life hotel, which didn't look anything like this but mimicked its description, a trend I’ve noticed in many of my dreams recently. The situation will sound like something that happened in real life if you describe it, but it's actually totally different).

My mother came up beside me at the counter and said not to worry, she would take care of paying the difference. I was very grateful because it was only about 20 minutes until checkout in the other hotel, and I still had to actually get there, and get my stuff out of the room. But when I asked if I could go now, the lady at the counter said no, not until the room was actually paid for. Then it turned out that my mother was paying by signing over a pile of checks that hadn't been cashed yet, instead of using her credit card. Interminable! Finally, it was done and I tore for the door. My car was parked just outside. But my sandals were missing again. I found them (my husband was there now and helped) and put them on and dashed out to the car. Then I realized, by asking a passerby for directions (I didn't know where anything was in this city or how to get to the other hotel), that the La Quinta hotel was in the same mall, further down. I went back inside instead of driving and finally made it there, got my stuff out of the room, and checked out before the time limit.

During most of the dream my alarm kept going off every 15 minutes and I kept hitting snooze on it so I could go back to the dream and make sure that I finished the whole checking out business within the required time frame. It all worked out well in the end.

Creepy People Everywhere

Earlier and fainter in my recollection, I am at some kind of taekwon-do tournament. There are a lot of creepy people there, and I end up having to pay a fee which I sorely need, even though I was not intending to participate, just watch. The whole thing is very uncomfortable, although I can't remember exactly why. There are some people there from my real life taekwon-do past, although changed, and there is some (I think negative) conversation amongst the others about my recent marriage to my husband.

Afterwards, my husband and I are driving through some kind of mall parking lot, I think leaving the dojang, and there is a scary guy who keeps hassling the car. First we end up driving away to escape him, and the parking stub blows away. Then there is another guy (in cahoots) who won't let us out of the parking lot without paying 15 bucks again for the parking. We don't have any more than that (and we already paid, but thanks to his buddy we don't have the receipt), but finally with him yelling and putting a gun to the window, we give him the money and tear out of there.

Then we are in a movie store and a new movie is playing on the TV inside, people are muttering about it. Rumor has it that embedded in the story (which I think is a cartoon) are directions for some kind of terrorist plot.

Rhododendron Forests - Epistle to Dippy?

Last night, I went to bed with an excruciating headache, almost as bad as a migraine. Somehow I got to sleep, but it stayed even in my dream, and was still there when I woke up.
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It was the Fourth of July weekend (I'm aware that it doesn't fall on the weekend this year, but in the dream it purported to be this year). My husband and I were on a vacation of some sort. We were walking along a sandy road near a coast. The area was very beautiful, with pale golden sand, brilliant blue water, and a low forest of rhododendrons in many, many colors: blue and unrealistic multicolors among the more normal pinks and purples. I realize now that in words, it sounds much like the southern Oregon coast dune area we visited recently, with mountains of sand and rhododendrons growing wild in the woods by the hundreds (pink ones), but it actually didn't look at all the same. For one thing, there was nothing growing in this deserty forest except the rhododendrons, and they were growing in the sand right beside the water.

We walked back up to some kind of guest house where my family was staying. It was white and airy inside. My mother showed us (my husband mainly, because in the dream I had already seen them) a collection of taekwon-do trophy's that my brother had won over the years. In addition to traditional trophies, there was a collection of larger statues that looked like they were made of painted wood or paper mache, sort of like saints. My brother acted typically bored and dismissive about them.

Then, my husband and I were driving through Lincoln Creek Valley, trying to decide where to go to see the fireworks display. We were discussing if we would go all the way to the reservation (where I used to go to see them in real life, near my parent's house), although this would be a pretty long drive for us from where we live now, so I don't know why we didn't find anything closer. On the way, we saw a group of taekwon-doists performing outside of a church or barn. We almost stopped, but when we slowed down I saw that it wasn't a group that I knew, so we kept driving.

Throughout the dream, I had a very large bruise on my forehead, above my left eye, which was extremely painful. I couldn't remember how I had gotten it (not too unusual in real life, I end up with bruises quite often whose origin I can't remember), although in the dream several people expressed concern about it. It was exactly where my real-life headache was centered. When I woke up the headache was still killing me and I couldn't imagine how I'd actually managed to sleep with it.

A bad vacation before life imprisonment

I was on a long car trip with my mother, brother, and possibly my sister. We were going up this road by Mt. St. Helens where we had apparently gone before in the dream world (I have been in real life, but not on this road and it didn't look like in the dream). I was going to be going to prison for the rest of my life at the end of the trip. I am not sure what crime I was accused of committing (or had committed), but the trial had already taken place. I was feeling strangely resigned/numb inside. My sister was with us for part of the trip, but not all of it, and I think I was bickering with her. She may have had something to do with me going to prison.

We had been hiking in the volcano area, and we drove up there again to camp for the night. It was a very desolate landscape, and not much like the actual Mt. St. Helens area. The ground was very flat until a large charcoal gray moon-like landscape rising up to the mountain. We parked at a gravel pull-out beside the road where we had camped in the past, near a small town. I was discussing what we would see on the remainder of the trip with my brother, who was very young in the dream. He was looking forward to a kind of junkyard on the side of the road where they had assembled various metal parts into robot-like figures, which he remembered this from a previous trip.

We had set up the tents and sleeping bags and stuff, and I was sitting in the tent contemplating what it really meant to go away for life, and if I should contact any old friends and tell them, when I discovered my small bag of supplies had been stolen (containing various items of clothes, utensils, pans, and food for the trip). I was furious. I remembered seeing a tall (taller than me), chubby woman with past-shoulder length strawberry blond hair lurking around the stuff in the last town we stopped at, which had some sort of market in session. I tore out to go look for her. I rushed through the stands and items for sale, looking for my things. My mother was there and asked what was going on. She didn't seem overly concerned when I told her they had been stolen. I found some of my things and forcibly took them from the woman, who was upset and protesting. I think she may have had some mild mental disability. She managed to steal some of the items again, and I took them back again. The next morning when we were getting ready to go, I noticed that they had gone missing a third time. By this time, I knew the woman's name, Renee Brene (it rhymes). When I mentioned this, as I sought to find the woman's house, my mother said that she knew her or her mother from a long time ago. She came along with me.

We found the woman was living in a house with my aunt K (my mother's sister, who had apparently moved to this town unbeknownst to us). My stuff, including a bunch of dirty dishes she'd taken, were found there. My mother reminisced with my aunt in the kitchen as I went through each pan and item and washed it (they had food on them), before stacking it up in a plastic bag. Renee was upset and whining/crying a bit. While my mother was talking to my aunt, my aunt brought to light what was apparently an old family secret that my mother hadn't known about. It was a major revelation, but I don't remember what it was. Sometime after that I woke up and realized I had overslept and was late for work.