A strange visit to the optometrist

1/4/2008 - This morning's dream

Only a few scenes stand out clearly. I can't remember enough of the first part of the dream leading up to this segment, or exactly what happens after it, although the dream continues on in both directions.

I am going to an optometrist's office. It's one I haven't been to before, I am new in town. It's a small office, when I walk in the door there is a doctor, probably in his 30's, seated in an examining chair, right inside the door, tilted backwards (where a patient would sit). He has short black straight hair, and a white coat, and is main optometrist. When he looks up at me, I explain that I'm here for somebody else (maybe my husband?). I am not actually being examined today, but we are doing preliminary tests and I'm getting to know the doctor. Later, I or someone else will return for an actual appointment. The main optometrist in the chair sends me off with another guy who is sort of an assistant optometrist. This guy is much older, with gray hair. We go into a back room. As we go in, the old optometrist asks me if I know of a good contact lens solution. Do I have any problem with my contacts getting dry? He also wears them, apparently. It strikes me as odd that he is asking me (a patient) this, thinking I would know more about it, but I tell him what kind I use and say it's been working fine. In fact, I had been thinking about asking if he knew a better one, but I decide against it after this conversation. He is nice enough but doesn't seem that knowledgeable.

Once in the room, we sit at a small wooden table and talk. He says he's going to give me some preliminary tests, which consist of looking at some pictures which are of the "magic eye" sort and similar optical illusions. Except these versions are very clear and amazingly realistic, they don't look like regular magic eye pictures at all. One of them shows a brown version of buildings, sort of escher-esque. I comment on how nice these magic eye pictures are, I've never seen any like this. He agrees that they are quite nice, not like the common ones you find in the newspaper comics. (They actually did used to print them there when they became popular a few years ago, although I haven't seen them there for a while). There's actually an example of one of the usual ones there in the office, in a newspaper which has the comics page showing. I am trying to look at it to compare without him noticing, since he's still talking and that would be rude, but I try to sort of sneak looks at it.

For a while we talk amiably, but then I grow increasingly uncomfortable, and he also changes into a different person, younger, and sort of disturbing or creeping me out. I prepare to leave, but before I do so I put on some different clothes out of a backpack, over my existing clothes. They're a pair of pink pants and a sort of maroon or purple top.

The next part of the dream is unclear and somewhat confusing, but it involves me going into another room, I'm not sure it's in the same building but it has a stark medical look. There is a large machine that looks sort of like a printing press. It's used for some kind of physics-defying travel, maybe time travel or jumping from location to location. I think I or someone else uses this machine but the dream becomes increasingly mixed up at that point, and bops around from place to place, including a trail behind the house and someone else's house, and other people enter the picture. A lot more happens before and after the eye doctor which is related, but I've lost the linear thread of what happens.