The Never Badly-Ending Story

April 4, 2008

Friday Morning/Thursday Night

The main part of the dream is actually a story that I’m reading in the dream, that I’ve sort of entered into. I’m associated with one of the human characters. There are a boy and a girl, probably around 12 or 13. When I’m in the story I don’t realize that it’s a story, it’s just the main dream.

In addition to the girl and boy there is a cat, he is sort of gray/brown stripy, short-haired, and a magical creature which appears as a human baby but can also fly and turn invisible, or appear as a bird. The four of them form a team. They ride together on a bicycle, with the baby/creature in the front basket, attempting to outwit a duo of evildoers.

The team rides down a road which looks like a road near where I grew up. By the “triangle” intersection of the road, they see the evil doers in front of a house. They look like R-, a previous coworker of mine who also appeared in this dream, and an old bald guy, and both are getting into an old red pickup truck. The kids prepare to trail them without being too obvious, so they ride further down the road. After they lose them, the cat jumps down from the bike and sets off down the road. The kids look into the front basket and see that the baby has vanished, leaving only its clothes. They understand that the cat and the baby/invisible flying thing are going to keep following the truck, while the kids will try to intercept the bad guys at their destination.

The kids are at a place like my grandmother’s house. There is an alarm on the wall that rings, indicating that someone is driving up the driveway. They go to the front window and see the bad guys unloading giant lemons from the pickup truck. Each lemon is actually a captured person. The kids have cornered, but the bad guys know they are there too (outcome is uncertain).

Switch scene back to down the road from where we left the cat and bird/invisible/baby thing. The “view” pans up over the bridge that is further down the road. White feathers are fluttering down the river, blowing down the river and falling from the sky, dotting the road and water.

The cat is standing on the other side of the bridge at an intersection, where I- road meets M- Hill Rd. There are two squished cats in the road and a small squished dinosaur. The dinosaur looks sort of like a cartoony version of a triceratops, but about a foot and a half high if it were alive. The bottom half of it is a single leg: it’s sort of like an elephant foot with a head on top of it.

The cat is distraught, these are friends of his that have been killed (it’s unclear what happened to the bird/magical thing, but the feathers fluttering everywhere don’t bode well). Some passersby drive up and take in the scene. The cat rails at them: “Do you even realize what has happened? What a tragedy this is?” He points to the dinosaur and asks them what it is. They are unsure, and say it must be a cat. The cat names the kind of dinosaur (I forget what it was called, some dinosaur sounding name) and berates the hapless humans who are trying to be sympathetic but are basically clueless. “You don’t even know what it was! It was a (name of dinosaur)” (they don’t know what this is either). “It’s not even supposed to exist today. You don’t even know how tragic this is!” Etc.

The scene switches to me on the couch at my parents’ house, reading a book. The previous part of the dream was the end of the book, and I have just finished it. I am somewhat unsatisfied with the ending: I quite liked the book but the ending with the cat standing there amongst his squished friends, and no loose ends tied up about the rest of the story, is just bothersome.

I am playing some kind of music on the television screen. It is currently playing something beginning with P (Persepolis, or Persephone perhaps? This is not a song/band I know in real life, but was apparently a favorite in the dream). A coworker, Ju-, comes in and asks what music it is, and I tell him. I say shyly smiling that I hope it wasn’t too loud and bothering him in his cube. He says No, no, he really likes it and would like to borrow it. I give him the dvd box with the program and also give him the book to borrow, or maybe I give him a movie version of the book.

I start reading another book and become the character again. In it I am a girl who is returning to some kind of riding camp (she actually does look like me in this one, although she isn’t me, I’m just sort of embodying her). I/she am in something like a grocery store but with horse equipment on the shelves, and have not ridden for a long time. Some other girls (who are members of the camp) come to the end of the aisle and say to each other “Who’s that? She’s new.” I smile and say Hi, how are you, or something along those lines, intentionally pretending to be a normal, friendly person. It feels very fake. But I tell myself, I don’t know these people. I can be somebody else here, a different persona. A man comes along and tells the girls to go saddle up and me to clean a saddle that is on the shelf. I understand that this is because I have only just returned and have to work my way back up, so I am not bothered.

My sister comes into the house where I am reading on the couch and I put the book down. I know she was reading the first book and I ask if she finished it and if she liked it. She is non-committal. I tell her that I liked it but I did not like the ending, because it didn’t resolve any questions of the plot, it just ended abruptly with the cat finding the other run-over animals.

Ju- comes back in with some movies including the book (or movie version?) of the same story. I ask if he is finished already, he says no, he only got up to this point (pointing to a picture of a colorfully dressed woman on the back cover, who apparently showed up at some point earlier in the plot---In the dream I remember this. There’s a long part to the story that wasn’t included in my actual dream, which just had the very ending.). Ju- says that he’ll finish it later, so I don’t tell him how it ends or that I didn’t like the ending.

There was another part where I was myself in the house and a fat mouse was running around and one of the cats caught it and killed it, and I was planning to relate this fact to my husband to prove the usefulness of cats. I don’t remember where this part fit in chronologically, if it did at all.