Seemingly Random Snippets

Tuesday/Wednesday night?

I've been having really disjointed dreams lately. There was another the day before this one but I don't really remember enough to go on, except that I was at home and was a teenager, and was involved romantically with a guy that my father wanted me to break up with, and I was upset and defiant about it. My brother was also in the dream.

The dream the following night was even more disjointed. I remember: Poplar trees. Me as a small child, possibly a boy, running away from somewhere (maybe home) and crawling down into a secret camp I had under a bridge. Someone else was with me who had not been to the place before. There was a trap door leading down to it, and a slow moving river. There were some brightly colored things, maybe jewels. I planned to subsist on my own for a while after the escape.

Also in this dream I read a news article about somebody like Halle Berry, who was a celebrity, but NOT Halle Berry, who had just given birth to a daughter. The baby was named something that sounded Indian, and contained letters like S, A, N, D (the name was not in that order though, and it was longer. It was not sand :P). I had read about this before, but in this article, it said that in addition to the Indian name, she was being brought up to that religion (maybe Hinduism?). I thought this was very strange, as the family was actually not of that religion and they had no cultural connection either, aside from the name they had chosen. I wondered if it would be another crazy celebrity trend that other people would start doing as well.

A Detached College Girl, a Tsunami, and a Magic House

Wednesday 2/20/2008 - Last night's dream

I was at college, whether back to school or originally I'm not sure. There was an auction being held for airplanes, and my sister and cousin K- were both there. My sister wanted to buy a particular plane, and wanted us both to pitch in some of the money. When my sister stepped away to bid, I said to my cousin that I wondered why my sister was getting a plane, when she gets height sick. She laughed and I got the impression that the plane was really for my cousin. I didn't put in any money in the pool, and when my sister bid, she ended up accidentally buying a different plane than the one she wanted (there were four or five small planes available, the one she wanted was I think yellow but she ended up with a black and red one, or vice versa).

Next, I was hanging out with some other girls, who I thought were muslim, trying to make some friends. I eagerly tried to converse with them. One of the girls who I initially kind of liked had two white dots on her forehead, slightly overlapping (somewhat like the mark that some hindu women wear). She looked vaguely Indian. I wanted to ask her about the dot, since I had thought she was muslim, but I couldn't figure out quite how to phrase it without seeming rude or accusatory. I talked with many of them about various things, but now I can't remember the details; I felt very detached from them although I was trying not to be. We may have arranged to go somewhere.

I went to the beach where all the college kids were going to hang out that afternoon. Shortly beforehand, I had realized from the weather or the TV report or something that there was going to be a tsunami, but I decided to go anyway since everybody else was going. I parked my car with some difficulty in a large parking garage on the beach, and walked out. Lots of people were hanging out. There was a long stretch of hilly dunes between me at the parking garage and the water. Somebody said let's go down to the water, and I replied that I thought the water would come up here, or something along those lines. The others didn't take it seriously. I wondered how they could not have noticed that it was coming.

The tsunami waves started coming up, but we were so far up the beach that they weren't that high when they got there, just water flowing all the way up through the dunes to the garage. The others were surprised but I was not. I watched it with interest. By the time the first wave reached where I was at the entrance to the garage, the water was gentle and only about a foot high, but I could see higher water further down the beach between the dunes. Another wave came, higher, this one had a jello-like consistency. People ran out playing in it and exclaiming over it and its strange texture; I just watched. Then the bigger waves came and we took cover inside the parking garage. The water washed up against the outside, preventing going out on the beach side. People discussed how we were going to get out in our cars. A large grid was brought and attached to the inside of the wall, and I understood that they were going to bash a huge hole in the wall to drive out through, and the webbing would hold the pieces of concrete together when they fell, sort of like the safety glass in a car windshield. I was not riled up during any of this, just interested in a detached way. The others were excited and scared by turns.

I went back to an old house in town and climbed up inside, it had several stories. By this time it was dark. The house belonged to one of my former bosses, C-. He was happy to see me and decided to give me the grand tour, showing me around. I don't think we'd run into each other for a long time (although in real life, I didn't work for him until many years after college, but I think I was younger in the dream... time was twisted up anyway). Anyway, in the dream he was also my former boss and we hadn't seen each other for a long time. He took me up to the third floor, up slanty stairways. There were lots of old knickknacks, and big windows and skylights and telescopes and a kitchen with lots of stuff laying out. He showed me a way to walk up the middle of a messy, sloping counter. This put us into a secret part of the building, another dimension sort of. It looked the same, but nobody else could see us. There were tours of people constantly being led through the house, because it was of historical interest, but when we did this, we could see them but they didn't know we were there. They flowed in and out. When they would come in, he would turn on the kitchen faucet under one of the big windows, and run water over an apple as if washing it. Something about this kept us in the hidden dimension of the room.

He showed me stars out two of the windows, something was significant about them. As we looked around, and he pointed at things, he stood behind me closely and gradually put his hand on my back. It was intimate, but I was not put off by it. Rather, I was excited about what might happen next and anticipatory. It felt as if when I was young and very nervous, and interested, but also comforted. I wasn't afraid, but felt good. (I was not married yet in the dream, it seemed like many years ago, and I didn't get the impression he was either as he lived here alone, at any rate I felt no guilt). I leaned back into him and he put his arms around me, and we stood like this several times, talking quietly and still showing me the stars and sights, in between washing the apple to keep the other people in the dark. I started having some problem with my contacts, and took them out and tried to rinse them with my small eyedrop bottle, but when I tried to put them back in, it was like the contacts were the size of dinner plates and wouldn't fit. One in particular gave me a lot of trouble. He suggested I take them out (we both had at some point agreed that I would spend the night rather than heading back to campus tonight, it was discussed innocently enough), but I didn't have my carrying case to put them in or any actual contact solution. Finally I managed to get it back in and it went back to normal size. We continued looking around and hiding from the tour groups, touching and talking quietly.

In the past, say a year or more ago, I had a series of tsunami dreams, it was one of the recurrent themes. I'm not sure what triggered that repetitive theme, but I haven't had one for a while. In those ones I was always excited, electrified by the power of the wave, high with an adrenalines rush that comes of catastrophe. It didn't really have that effect in this dream, although as usual I wasn't scared, but I was more emotionally detached than excited by it. I was detached like this through the whole dream, in fact, seeing and being interested in the goings on around me but unable to connect to them somehow. That is until the last part, where I was no longer emotionally detached, but rather getting butterflies in a good way. Which also surprised me when I woke up (I wouldn't want to imagine such a thing happening with C- in real life, I think it would have creeped me out).

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.