Visiting a Park with a Holy Cliff

Last night's dream (Monday night/Tuesday morning) 11/20/2007

I went with my husband to a famous park and we spent a long time exploring it. It had beautiful thick woods and abrupt gulleys, and we found a small canyon cut 15 feet deep in the mud of the streambed, as if a flood had come through and filled up the valley with mud at the water had cut it down again. It seemed to be summer or spring time and there were lots of small plants growing and white flowers. To continue our exploration we got a guide. Several were available, ours was a young girl with bobbed blond hair and a red and white shirt. She was friendly but not flirtatious, and I did not feel jealous of her and was glad we had gotten her and not one of the male guides.

After this part of the tour was over, my mother, sister, and for some reason a friend of my husband and formerly of me, AM. I think there were some other relatives of mine as well. They parked their cars and we all gathered to visit the most important part of the park, which was a holy place. The guide showed us where to go, there was a sheer rock cliff with a small ledge wide enough to drive on, and we were supposed to drive out. Some of my relatives I think drove a vehicle, and the rest of us walked ahead. The shelf was only just wide enough for the car, and plunging over the edge would mean disaster (this had something to do with why it was a holy pilgrimage spot, you were supposed to have enough faith and bravery to make your way along the edge).

We came to a point very quickly where the floor of the shelf had a lump in it like a small landslide had come down at some point, and it would be difficult to drive the car over without it tipping off the edge, so we decided to leave it and walk on (it would have to be backed up along the ledge to get back too). I went out to the most important point, which was a finger of rock sticking out, and sat there for a while. The rock was sort of a pinky granite. It was very peaceful and yet exciting.

Then, we started to head back and I returned to a hotel room we'd rented nearby, but AM came back with me. My husband and relatives would be following shortly. I was uncomfortable being there with him and realized that when my husband came home he also wouldn't be happy with the situation. So, I claimed I had to go to the bathroom, and went in and stayed there until my husband and mother and sister came back, then I emerged after they walked in, and we all reunited. The sun was just setting at that point illuminating the room with a rosy glow.

The park was well-known in the dream but I don't know of any place like this or that looks similar in the waking world, let alone being some kind of pilgrimage spot.

Work at the coast and a flooded park

At one point I was in this large circular building near the beach, with many open rooms and offices. I was wandering around talking with one of my coworkers, L-. We found a vase on another coworker's desk (not one who exists in the waking world, and at her prompting, I took it to wash it in the sink (knowing we shouldn't do this, but planning to return it before he found out... I'm not sure what the point was in taking it). It turned out the bottom had one of those cardboard pads on it, dyed blue, so when it got wet it started leaching dye. Another (also non-existent in the waking world) coworker came up while we were washing it in the sink and commented on it and how the owner had brought it back from somewhere. He was enthusiastic about it.

I tried to absorb the dye with paper towels and then went to put it back without the guy noticing, but he was already back at his desk. He was dressed in an orange and yellow striped button-up shirt and tie, with several-inches-long straight brown hair. Maybe in his forties, nobody I know in the waking life. He was somewhat surprised when we returned to discover we had his vase. We offered some lame excuse about wanting to put flowers in it or something, (he was dismayed that it was missing but didn't seem to know what to say) and I put it on the table with a folded paper towel underneath to prevent any blue die from leaching, hoping he would not notice that it was damaged. Then the guy who'd seen us washing it at the sink came by and talked jovially about the story of the vase, noting that it had cost the owner 153 dollars (at which I was somewhat shocked, since it was an ugly, squat, square pebbly green-glass vase with a cheap cardboard base, plus I could have totally wrecked it). Later L- and I wandered through other parts of the building, talking between us, but I don't remember all that we did. We were talking about age at one point (she is slightly younger than me but probably does not know that I am that young, she was talking about various pranks or comments people have made to her on account of being the youngest), and generally making friends.

In a later segment of the dream, I was returning from that building to somewhere else, and I drove up a wooded hill not that far from the coast, with plenty of standard trees, salal, and mist. I was going to stop at this park, I think I had to do something there. But when I got to the entrance, I discovered that it was flooded. There were several people just preparing to go in, they had an duffel bag with energy bars and water bottles and stuff, some of them had bikes. I had decided I was going to have to wade through part of the water. It had something to do with the fact that R- (one of the family dogs, who is no longer alive in the waking world) had just given birth to a new litter of puppies in the park on the other side of the flood. I picked over the granola bars to take one with me (I guess they were freely available), and prepared to go through the knee high water.