Don't Park Your Horse In the Garage

This was a couple of days ago, I've lost track. I thought I recorded it but it turns out I didn't!

To start with I was traveling with my family. We stopped in a small town for the night but we couldn't find any lodgings. The people we talked to seemed to indicate that this was not a good neighborhood for us to stay in, and we would be better off looking somewhere else, but we were really tired and it was late so we finally found a place. I had my car and a horse which I beleive was also mine (a bay) and I parked them both in this large stable/garage thing that was next to the hotel (the horse was tied up right next to the car). The next morning we went down there and my car and my horse had been stolen! The robbers had replaced them with a different car and horse in the same place. The car was a red sports car, not brand new but actually probably nicer than my car, and the horse was a chestnut filly who was pregnant. She was actually very nice but I was upset about the thievery and I told the owners of the place that I wanted my OWN car and horse back! They basically told us they were sorry but they'd warned us about staying here and there wasn't anything they could really do.

I ended up taking the car and horse home, they were mine to use or keep as the thieves had taken my others. I did like the new horse a lot but I wanted my own horse back, even though he was kind of old and beat up he was still a good horse. I installed the horse in my parent's field. We went to talk to my aunt and uncle. As it turned out (I think we knew this at the time as well) the parking garage/stable we'd left them at adjoined a shop that they owned in that town. We all went back to see if there was news of the car. My grandma came with us as well. When we returned my car had been found dumped in the lake nearby, and they were hauling it out. It was full of water, of course, and probably ruined.

Evening was falling again and we decided to go get something to eat at a restaurant. I was with my grandma and she kept wandering off and getting lost or staring at stuff, like she wasn't all there. When it was time to leave the restaurant I couldn't find her and I finally found that she had gone out on a small balcony and was looking at the stars. I couldn't really tell if she was starting to have mental problems or she was slipping away on purpose, but she didn't normally act like this (or show such signs of mental decline in real life).

Of Waifs and Wafers

Tuesday morning 6/3/2008

A confusing dream with time loops: various segments sort of replay with variations as if we are going back and doing the same sort of things again and again, but not in time-sequential order. At some point I go to some kind of Bimart or Walmart type lower-end variety store. I am in a side room talking to a manager, or a therapist, or a dentist, or perhaps all of the above. I end up getting a prescription for something, I think tooth-related. The small office has a back door out into an area sort of near S- Hall in R-. It also has a side room filled with lots of random stuff and also the hidden "junk food stash", which I don't discover until later in the dream: lots of creme-filled cookies and such, set out for people to take but obviously in an out of the way spot so only workers in this office will see them. I keep trying to casually pass through with the idea of sampling some of the cookies. There is much driving back and forth to this store, with various members of my family at some points in time, and later with a girl several years younger than me (possibly even in her late teens) called Angelina, or something similar to that. She looks a lot like a girl I know (but not well) on a forum. She is slight, with lank black hair, a pale but pretty face, and a distraught look. She has had a hard life and is basically stuck and I am helping her out, guiding her through some issues. She goes back with me to this store and we go into the office. I don't remember what the point of keeping returning to this store was, but at any rate I get some prescription I need, possibly for dental pain. The Dr returns to this room and we decide we need to slip out. I try to slip out through the junk food room but we end up having to run away so I don't get a chance to snag a treat. We get separated (some of my family members are also with us originally and we all escape but then I can't find them. I give up on them (they will find their way) and go back to me car, and Angelina has returned to the car and is sitting in it waiting for me. Good for her! I was afraid she was going to run off and do something stupid. I get in the car and we start to drive home, but for some reason we have to stop again by the office and go get something, and that point she doesn't listen anymore but jumps out of the car and runs off. I call after her but she's scared of something and can't sit tight, so she's going to get lost somewhere.

Missing a past and nowhere to go

January 26^th - Saturday morning's dream

My parents and family have been arrested for something and all taken away, and the house is barricaded off by the police or FBI or something. All record of their existence has been removed from public record, but I don't think they are dead, just being held somewhere. I was the only one not taken, but I'm not sure why this is (or what crime they had been involved with). I am driving around a small hilly area somewhere in town, in the old pickup I used to drive which once belonged to my parents. The gas is almost empty. I drive back and forth in a several block area, looking for somewhere, but I don't remember where I was trying to get. I don't have anywhere to go home to now. In the dream I was still working for the old company I used to work for, and apparently was living at home. I now will not be able to go back to work there, also I won't be able to get another job because the fact that I worked there has been erased (I think the entire company has been "removed" similarly, or if not that, the fact that I had worked there for 5 years) so I have no employment history or references.

I drive up and down in the truck. I don't have enough gas to get up to a gas station at the top of the hill, so I leave the truck and start walking up to the gas station a short distance away. The path I take is through a flooded streambed in a nearby woods, clogged with fallen logs. I carry an enormous piece of driftwood (which I can somehow lift over my head despite its size) which I put down as a bridge across each flooded place, then pick it up and carry it to the next place to use again. It gets smaller and smaller with each use until it is used up. I arrive at the gas station. It's creepy and made of old concrete. I realize that I don't have any clothes on, so I can't buy gas, and also I don't have anything to put the gas in anyway. There is a Goodwill or similar clothing thrift store nearby, and I think of going there to get some clothes. But then I realize that when you have no clothes at all, it's nearly impossible to get any. It's very difficult to get any normal task done when you've lost your clothes, even getting new ones. People will freak out instead of just giving me some clothes, and possibly think I am crazy.

I decide to return to my parents’ house, which nobody is at but it's cordoned off with police tape and some kind of electronic security surveillance. I sneak into my bedroom past the security devices and pack a suitcase with some things. I think I might come back later but who knows if I will be able to. I can only take as much as I can carry, mostly clothes.

Then, I go to the house of my former riding instructor (in the truck, which I guess I got gas for after I got some clothes) not too far away and well out in the country. She and her significant other are somewhat surprised to see me but they know what has happened to my family. I have nowhere else to go and I can't get work or stay anywhere because my past has been erased, so I don't know what to do. They realize this. She mentions that they have a little room and there are a bunch of odd jobs that they've been meaning to get to, implying that I can stay there and work for her in exchange. I'm not ungrateful although I realize that they can easily take advantage of my situation in getting work out of me.

The house is extremely messy. I look around it thinking that I will clean it up and put it in order, like the protagonist of a book which I recently read (in the waking world as well as in the dream) who stays with somewhat messy foster parents. My riding instructor tells me that if I'm going to stay there, I should know that it was they who orchestrated the crime that eventually led to my parents' arrest, and they are going to continue doing these crimes (some kind of robbery I think). I accept this situation (what can I do, anyway?). Then she asks if they can take my truck to go to town, and I say sure. After they leave I realize that the authorities know whose truck it is, and so they will be tracked down and caught. I envision living here on my own, in this remote holdout. I'm not entirely sure if the authorities will eventually come after me, or not, but it seems best to stay out of the public eye.

Uncomfortable situations in the market

Tuesday night's dream.

I was wandering through a large, circular building with halls around the outside edge, containing shops of many kinds in indoor rooms. It was some time in the afternoon and I was killing time. I bought two large raw packages of hamburger at a butcher shop there, they were already thawed (or never frozen) and drippy, and I was somewhat concerned about not getting them back into refrigeration quickly enough. I carried them around with me throughout the remaining shops, conscious of the problems of setting them down anywhere.

I also went into a "Thai" store, where I spent a long time. It was full of small, decorative, very expensive knickknacks with an oriental look, decorative china and carvings. I hung around there for a long time looking at things, and then I picked up two pieces of flat carvings, about 6 by 8... dark panels with an etched scene. I started to walk out of the store carrying them, and the shopkeeper was on me in an instant, telling me how much they cost. I told him that I'd forgotten that I was carrying them, and clearly he didn't believe me, actually I didn't really believe myself and wondered what the heck I'd been doing. I felt quite embarrassed.

To my surprise, however, he was not angry at me, after I put them back down, he told me that they were getting in a similar sculpture to one I had been admiring, a small black and white figurine... I think I was looking for one of a cat and this was a different animal or something. He encouraged me to come back at a certain time when they would have the one I was looking for.

Then I ran into my coworker, T-. He followed along afterwards and asked me to come over to his place, which was very nearby, for lunch, which I eventually gave into. I was nervous as he was acting overly friendly and I'd thought he was married, but apparently he was divorced and "looking." I did not really want to go, but I felt he would think I was being very rude if I kept refusing. When we got there, we walked into a small entryway, which had lots of decorative knicknacks and draperies, and was rather dark. There was another person there, who was his brother, and he called him over to introduce me. He introduced me by saying it I was "the one I'd been telling you about", and that I was a Muslim. He said this with the air that this was fascinating. The brother, who was much larger, hung back and reacted to this information with an air of disapproval and almost disgust. I was made quite uncomfortable by both their attitudes (although the coworker meant well).

Taco Bell's Notorious Secret Passageway

9/14/2007 Last night's dream (Thursday night)

Stories and memories keep popping up about a taco bell in A- which had a secret passageway in it. It's unclear where the secret passageway went, or where in the store it's actually located (if it's still there), but everybody I run into in the dream keeps mentioning it (my uncle, friends, etc). I have been to the restaurant in question several times in the dream. I recall a series of memories connected to the story of the passageway, including my father telling me about it when I was young and in the restaurant, and starting to show me, but my mother stopping him. My uncle relating a tale about it. Someone I didn't particularly like tells the story, etc. It seems that everyone in the generation older than me has crawled through this passageway at least once.

After going through the series of memories and stories about it, I finally end up in the taco bell in question myself. Nobody will tell me where the passageway actually is, of course. I also wonder if the owner of the store, who surely must have noticed people going through it all the time, has blocked it off. I wander around a bit, wondering where it would be located, and see a storeroom with files in it. Some of the files are in boxes on the floor. As I watch, an employee comes in and moves one of the boxes of files to reveal a trapdoor in the middle of the floor. It's easy to see why it's difficult to hide, although the store apparently tries to do so. He goes through into the floor.

I think about how, at other times, this room serves as the front office for my mother... the trapdoor is never evident because it's always covered by a large rug.

Somehow I go through the door or come from the other side and end up witnessing several people using the door. Actually, I think at this point I stop being me, because they can't see me there (or I start being someone else in their group). Anyway, two or three guys crawl down through the trapdoor. They hand things down through the trapdoor, which opens into some sort of garage/storage room underneath the restaurant, which is open to the outside. All of them are relatively young, in their 20's maybe... the leader is a heavyset fair guy, pleasant enough. I wonder why nobody comes because they are making a lot of noise throwing things down, including heavy things like office chairs. Suddenly, two police appear through the hole and others come in surrounding them.

In addition to the leader guy, there are one or two other guys, friends of his, and his wife and son, who is maybe 10. He is ashamed of being caught and they are all captured, his wife and son upset about how they will live now. Overall my feeling for them is of sympathy. However, the police who captured them have nothing but contempt and also go on about how dangerous this is. One of them shows me how dangerous and stupid the guy was in the way he drove up. He shows me a line of trucks, 4 or 5, which they parked outside to haul the goods away. Safety violations! says the cop. None of the cars have headlamps, apparently so they can sneak away in the dark (although it's not actually dark yet). The headlights just popped off like plastic ones on plastic trucks, and are sitting in a pile, ready to be popped back on when necessary. In addition, the leader/father's truck has a very dangerous fuel source, the cop shows me. There is some kind of tank in the back with tubes coming out of it, which is a fuel cell. It's powered by some kind of liquid (I don't remember what now... vinegar maybe?) over a huge pile of pennies inside the tank. This causes some kind of chemical reaction and powers the truck or gives it a huge power boost. The cop gets in the truck to demonstrate and it drives forward wildly, far too fast, narrowly avoiding crashing into a nearby roof support. He points out to me how he could have been killed. I think he's being a bit foolish.

Shortly afterward I am back inside the restaurant with my family. They are talking about the robbery, and picking out food items from a small internal grocery store within the restaurant. It sells things like vegetable and dry packets of reheatable food, and those Japanese candies in brightly decorated wrappers. My mother keeps asking me if I like, or would finish eating/take home, various items of food if she bought them, including a packet of green beans. Most of the offers I reject. I sort through a large box of dry food packets from some foreign country, trying to pick some out. I am still feeling sorry for the family of thieves who were caught.

I am unaware of any real secret passageway in a Taco Bell, and my mother's office doesn't double as one...I'm actually not even sure in the dream which town it was in, but it began with A.

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.

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.