Trip to Algae Mountain

I have gone to visit my sister at a place she has been staying for a while, and we go to see the main attraction. It is a big rock set at the edge of a bay or inland sea. The waves wash up and crash over it but you can walk to it in between. She tells me that the rock is best accessed at high tide, which doesn't make any sense, because you can only get to it when there is some ground exposed between the land and the rock. The ground around the rock (normally underwater) is covered with white shells and rocks. The surrounding land is hazy with mist or sea spray and is smooth and mounded with bluffs covered with thick green grass. The rock itself is completely covered (almost upholstered) with that thick, cushiony grass-like algae. It looks like it would be slippery but I manage to climb up it, following my sister's lead, without slipping, and we cross it between waves crashing on it.

We go up to a smooth dark gray small slab of rock, partway up the side of the bigger rock. There is a young man with a backpack standing in front of it scratching something on it with a small stone. When he leaves, my sister follows suit and when it is my turn, I see that people have recorded their names or initials and when they visited the rock. There is a line of alphabet letters and most people have scratched their name/initials and date under the appropriate letter. But some people who have visited many times, like my sister, have their names separate with a list of dates underneath. There is not a lot of extra room to write in and I look for a place to scratch my name and the date. There is not enough space under the letter for my initial. My sister tells me to hurry up, and I realize that a line has formed behind me of several boys (maybe 10 years old) waiting to scratch their names. The first boy in line has dark hair and blacked rim glasses, and looks Asian. Finally I find a small empty space and scratch in my initials and the date (all the dates are years, as I recall). The stone is soft like claystone and easy to carve in. When I finish, I realize that the boys are being rounded up to get back into a van, which is parked nearby on another part of the rock. I realize they have to leave without having time to leave their marks, in an apparently very short but important trip out to this rock, and feel sorry for holding up the line.

After they are gone, an old woman comes up and asks my sister if she found something that the woman's brother or husband (not sure which) left her some weeks or months ago. I had the impression that the man who left it here has passed away or something. It seems that my sister has been coming here often. She looks behind the scratching rock, which has a back sort of like a podium, and removes a pouch, looking through it, but does not find the missing object. My sister is very helpful and eventually determines from talking to the slightly tottery old woman that the object is a Leatherman (one of those folding knife/pliers things). She shows the woman her Leatherman and the woman nods enthusiastically. Then from her purse she digs out another Leatherman, more worn looking, and this one has an enormous screw attached to it, maybe 6 inches long and proportionally thick (it was not part of the Leatherman, just tacked on afterwards). The woman is delighted and thanks her profusely.

We return to a house which is somewhat like my parents' house and somewhat like a house that my grandparents used to have. Several people are taking turns using the bathroom. When I go in, I think to myself that the house is big, fancy, has 7 rooms, and yet it only needs one bathroom. It's certainly sufficient, I think (notwithstanding all the people who apparently keep needing to wash muddy clothes in the bathroom), and comparing this to the real life fact that we recently were looking for a 2 bedroom apartment that my husband insisted had to have 2 bathrooms as well... surely unnecessary.

Moving in another world, and at a loss to show how I care

In the first part of the dream, I was on a trip by myself, some kind of vacation in a jungle. At the end, I floated across a small river on a raft. My aunt and her family had been here in the past, and she had told me she could pick me up at the other side of this river on the way back from one of her trips. I had no intention of being picked up, however. She had also told me to be careful of the water lillies that grew on this water. They looked like regular white lillies, but they were poisonous to the touch. I observed them as I poled my raft to the edge and got out.
Now, I was going to walk home from here and then I was going to walk from P-- to S--. This has been a recurrent theme in my past dreams, and sometimes a desire in my waking world, to set out walking on long distances that normally people would not walk.

I walked back to my home, and then crossed the river into V--, to establish my route. At that point, I planned to return to my house, I was going to pack my overnight bag for the rest of the trip. When I turned back some floodgates by the edge of the river (which in the dream was more a flooded small stream) had opened, and muddy water covered some of the paths I had been on. There were several people sitting around who had seen me cross before and watched with amusement at the idea that I was going to get wet crossing back. A girl ahead of me gave up and plowed through, soaking her pants. I was not planning to get soaked for the remainder of my walk, and hopped across a narrow part, onto a large rock, and then jumped the rest of the way across, wetting only a corner of my pant leg.

I returned to my apartment for a bag and set out on the longer walk. It was somewhat late in the day and I could tell that it was going to be dark by the time I arrived at my parents house (an overstatement, since in the real world I think it would be impossible to walk that far in a day, much less a few hours). Almost all the way there, my father was driving by and picked me up, and I reluctantly allowed myself to ride the remainder of the way, I had walked most of it.

In the next part of the dream, I had returned to my home, some time later. Then my cousin returned from a long trip, and wanted to see me. My husband was away and I was trying to get out of visiting my cousin because it would bother him, but also he had chosen to be away and so I couldn't call him and tell him so I ended up going along with it for a little while. I walked along the waterfront to where my cousin was staying to get it over quickly, trying to act nice and friendly. The waterfront was like a conglomeration of some small beach towns I've seen. It had bricked decorative walkways along the fronts of very tall narrow buildings on the edge of the bay. One of them was the building my cousin was staying in. Another was a museum or rocket launching center or something, with a gift shop downstairs. My cousin was acting strangely, and invited me in for dinner. People came up spiral staircases from farther down in the building, carrying tray after tray of food, like an elaborate thanksgiving feast complete with turkey. I was appreciative but protested that I couldn't eat it all and had eaten recently. My cousin was somewhat disappointed. We strolled around for a while more and my cousin asked me a strange question, which made me both somewhat uncomfortable, and also disappointed that I couldn't think of the answer. "If you had 1000 "carules" to spend, how would you show someone that you care for them more than anything in the world." (or some word very similar to that, which was a real word in the dream that meant something like "love points," all the energy and resources that go into demonstrating care and love. In this case 1000 was an extremely large amount, equivalent to saying someone had one the lottery if it had been money).

I was somewhat taken aback at the question, and I wondered if my cousin was getting at something, but I decided to not think about that. I thought about it in terms of showing my husband how much I care and love him. But I could not think of what I would do with my carules, if I had so many to use. I was disappointed and finally said I'd have to think about it, and we watched the seagulls as I felt sad and somewhat inadequate to not know how to spend them.

After I extricated myself from the visit with my cousin, I went to my house to pack my things to move to a new a apartment. I was moving rather suddenly, and to an apartment that I did not particularly like. It was on a second floor, but if you opened the window it looked out onto other people's windows and balconies, and was not private. Also, some parts of the apartment had curtains between them instead of walls. I do not know why I had to move so suddenly. I sat in my apartment cramming the last items into a duffel bag, which were some items of clothing. Some of them I really have in the real world, others were items familiar to me in the dream but that I don't have in the real world. I also crammed my remaining stuffed animal, very worn, into the bag. Some coats and scarves were the last. My mother was helping me pack, although aside from this everything else had been moved.

We walked out past the gift shop on the waterfront, and my mother and I stopped there. I considered buying a small plastic animal but ended up not doing so. We chatted aimlessly and then I continued to the apartment. I felt sad, as I often do when moving.

I reached the new apartment and put my stuff down. My husband had returned and looked at it not liking it very much, as I had expected. My brother was also there to see. I put the stuff in the kitchen and we looked at the apartment somewhat grumpily. My husband also wondered why I'd had to move so suddenly.

There was a break in the dream and then in the last part, one of my neighbors in the apartment complex was having a fight with another neighbor, trying to get her to move out on some half-baked legal claim. The one who was being pushed out was like my old neighbor back in A-, an old woman. The one trying to get her evicted was like my old college roommate, but obnoxious. I watched with some distress, but not knowing what to do. My mother stepped in and began explaining to the old woman what her legal rights really were, and trying to mediate the whole thing.

Easter in July and growing inadequacy

These dreams are from two nights ago; they happened in this order. There have been others, but they've been so wispy lately...

In the first dream, I am in the woods behind my parents' house, looking for Easter Eggs with person who is younger than me (maybe my brother?). I think we are both much younger, children. The eggs are the plastic kind with candy inside. There is another plot overlaid which we are talking about, but I cannot remember it. There's an unsettled and urgent feeling. (Of note, I don't really celebrate Easter in the waking world, although I did hunt for eggs when I was a kid. But we didn't have the plastic kind, although I knew people who did.)

In the next dream, I am back on the farm of my childhood riding instructor, but as an adult. A young teenager is also there who is now doing what my tasks used to be. In the real world now I look back on my instructor with some fondness and wish we had stayed in touch, but in the dream, I am filled with feelings of confusion, not knowing what I'm supposed to be doing, and inadequacy in performing tasks. I am gathering some horses out of the field, and filling a water bucket, but nothing seems to be going right and she yells and snaps at me, and doesn't give me enough instruction on what is supposed to be happening. The kid who is there appears to have figured out a pattern of how to work here, and works quietly in the background, but my adult self doesn't remember how to do anything and is freshly confused. The overall feeling is frantic, inadequate, and as though I had romanticized the past and when it was really like this dream: me confused and responding inappropriately to situations.

The last dream is the worst, I am with my husband and attempting to be somewhat intimate, but with each advance he responds with annoyance, and is plainly growing more and more irritated. He says I have to ask before each thing I do (for example touching him somewhere) and receive an answer that it is okay from him before I proceed. As he gets more annoyed at my attempts I become more upset, and eventually wake up.

In the real world he was not there that night and waking out of the dream basically put a bad start on the whole day.

Wet Desert

I haven't been remembering dreams very well for the last couple of weeks, although the faint ghosts of some of them have flitted around the corners of my waking world. I remembered some scraps from last night, though.

I was in Saudi Arabia with my husband. The land was not like I would imagine it to be, instead it was like a very very drizzly fall day at the beach, but humid. The sand was gray like the northern beaches and wet and stretched away in uneven flatness, with trickling water in between. Visibility was very short, and it was hazy and drippy. We walked to an old building with public showers, seemingly out in the middle of nowhere. It was very large and made of thick, dark, old wood and stone, and was tall and shadowy with staircases going up and down and rooms sort of like dark, wooden locker rooms. My husband went into the men's part, to shower, and I went to the women's part. Nobody else was there, although when I looked out around the corner of the wall, I could see at least one distant figure in the haze, not coming or going I think. I don't remember if I showered or not, but I fumbled a lot with putting my hair up afterwards. It would not stay, and I had 3 or 4 wooden pokers of different kinds that I was trying to keep it up with.

There was more, including riding in a car before or after, I think, but that was the only part I can remember. The whole dream was very quiet, with sort of a pregnant waiting feeling, but not negative.