Crossing Flooded Stairs

11/27/2007 - Saturday Night's Dream

At one point I was walking across the city. When I set out, I put on a very colorful outfit, almost clown-like in its many colors. I was somewhat doubtful about it but I don't think I had any other choices. I crossed a large open plaza with a huge number of steps going down and up hills on either side, and steps across the bottom. It was like a deep gully filled with steps. It was sunny and warm and the stairs were nicely made of cream concrete, like on a college campus. After crossing to the other part of town, I did whatever I'd come to do (I don't remember what) and sometime later, I set out back across. I walked through an area of the neighborhood I hadn't been in before, and I saw a large white sign with red letters. I don't remember all of what it said, but it was calling this area (street, district, etc) with my name. As far as I know it was not named after me, but I thought it was an odd coincidence. I wanted to go back and tell the people I'd just been visiting, but I realized I had to get home. I thought I might come back with a camera and take a picture of the sign.

It had been raining, and possibly the river had also risen in addition to that, but when I came back to the stairs the bottom of the valley was flooded with water for a short distance, several feet deep. There were some people standing on the steps on either side but they weren't crossing. I got the impression that this happened regularly, like a tide, and they were going to wait for it to go down again. I had to get home and there was no other way so I started across the water, walking through it. Partway through it occurred to me that this was probably very dangerous, but oh well... I had to cross at any rate.

Strange sinks and wandering

11/7/2007 - Tuesday night's dream
I can only remember a few isolated scenes from this dream.

In the first one I am in a large building with tiled floors and several levels, sort of like a school building, with my sister. We walk around up and down stairs to different floors. We go into a bathroom. It's jam packed with other women waiting to use it, but when I get to the start of the line I realize that the toilets look like two sinks, very high. The one on the right is smaller than the other and becomes available next. I consider my options and how I am going to squeeze up there next to the person on the other sink. The sinks are not only next to each other and not separated by stalls, but basically visible to everybody else waiting to use the bathroom. I eventually decide that I'm not even going to try because I wouldn't be able to relieve myself in this situation, and I make my way out. We find another bathroom eventually.

Unlike most bathroom dreams, I didn't wake up directly afterwards and didn't have to go when I woke up

In the later part of the dream, or the second dream, I am walking around a rural area which is sort of like where I grew up in vegetation, but nowhere I know. The area looks kind of like the end of the road where I grew up, with lots of plants, and a creek, but nearby there is a small neighborhood built on a slight hill. I walk up through the residential area, which is somewhat hilly but not steep. There's also a nearby wooded area with an old flat wooden bridge across the creek. I think I am looking for someone who has run away from his home (as in, he was angry and stormed off and started walking), a boy younger than me, not in my family. I think I meet up with him. It might also have been me that ran off ... it fades back and forth. A cat or kitten is involved at one point or is out there with me.

Touching Another Plane

Monday Night, 9/10
I was at a new class. I'm not sure what kind of class it was, but it was some kind of PE class involving physical activity, or training to do CPR, or swimming... something like that. I had a locker which I retrieved my things from. It was a new class that I just started, and there were some people I knew slightly in it or talked to... I wasn't feeling extremely negative about it, but not that positive either. There were the usual confusions of the new day where I did not seem to know where anything was or what anything meant, while everyone else did.

Then, I have stopped by the P- airport. I am intending to go to a nearby grocery store, as I urgently want to buy some ice cream. I have slipped away from the others, in this, since for one they would not approve and for two, I am intending to eat it all myself, guilty style. I'm having one of those periods of craving things and eating them all myself.

I make my way up and down aisled, through rows. It sort of morphs between an open air market and an actual grocery store of the enormous warehouse style. I collect a cylindrical box of ice cream, a frozen peanut butter pic dessert, and a third item, and make my way to the checkout counter. The guy there has a notice which he is passing out and which is on the wall, a flyer printed on colored paper. It notes that something about ID. I rummage around and around to locate my debit card and driver's license, holding up a lot of people, but I cannot find my current ID. According to the flyer, I can't make a purchase without it. I am steamed, and I resolve then and there to go to the nearby DMV office and get a replacement license in order to make the purchase. I suspect it's really not that lost, but I'm getting frustrated that I cannot buy the ice cream and other stuff. I stomp off to go do this, pondering if anyone will object to the fact that I have obviously driven to the DMV without a license. Around that time, I realize from writing on the flyer relating to the state that I must be across the border in V-, not in P- at all. For some reason this is irritating as well. I maneuver my way around the airport and stores and locate the DMV.
Skip over actually getting the license, I go back and purchase the ice cream and other stuff. The ice cream is in a yellow box like Tillamook ice cream, but it has a black, rather cartoony picture of a jackal on it. I meet up with my mother and sister nearby, and we are looking down into a treed area, possibly a park, from a high distance. I am in a much better mood now, but my mother is pointing down below, talking about how my sister can always see these things she can't see. She asks if my sister can see something down by the river.
My sister rolls her eyes to me, we've been through this before. It is I who can see things other people can't see, not my sister. She tells my mother she can't see anything, while I point out whatever it is down by the river.
Then, I see a pack of jackals (real ones), moving through the trees. I marvel over them and exclaim. My mother and sister cannot see them at all, and gradually throughout this part I realize that it's not that I can see BETTER, it's that they can't see them AT ALL. They are there, but I (and perhaps others) am the only one who can pick them out, as though they exist on another plane but live in this world. I am racing over the implications of this in my mind, thinking of other occurrences this might explain. Suddenly I realize that the jackals actually came from the ice cream I bought, and it is through this that they have been let out. I marvel at them, they are not dangerous or threatening, and the others seem to realize something is there, but cannot see it.

I take my mother's hand and leap down a huge waterfall of fruit from the top of the airport to the bottom. It is in enormous stairsteps, with different kinds of fruit on each step: peaches, strawberries, etc, hundreds and thousands of feet down. I jump easily from step to step, feeling the rush of air but knowing I will land safely as I bounce from one to the next. My feet squish into the fruit at each landing, and I can smell the fruit and see the airport far, far below, but I don't feel heightsick because of the certainty of the giant staircase I am jumping down. I glance to my mother, enjoying the sensations, and realize that she is a little frightened, although trusting of me. Then I realize that it is because she cannot actually see the fruit staircase we are jumping down either! It's like the jackals. I try to imagine what it must look like to her without it, probably scary, but she is coping very well.

Back near the grocery check out I run into some other people carrying their licenses, they can see these things too right now. We compare stories and discover that each time we lose our licenses, we have a glimpse into the "other side" as if we have died, but we haven't. This is what allows me to sometimes see these things from other planes. My best friend, S- died a month ago (in December, apparently... the time is different), and at that exact time I was able to dip into this plane as well. The other occasions for me and the other people this happens to have been triggered by similar events, and seem to also be signaled by the licenses, which get punched with a cancel stamp at that time: D. We are fascinated by our discoveries and heightened senses that we have access to, although it is something that seems to come and go and may be finite.

In real life, the time of the year is different (December was not a month ago), and my friend S- has not died, a month ago or now. But it's sunny and warm like the weather in the dream. I haven't lost my license lately, but I was driven to go and get some of that ice cream after the dream, although I only just made the connection.

Moving in another world, and at a loss to show how I care

In the first part of the dream, I was on a trip by myself, some kind of vacation in a jungle. At the end, I floated across a small river on a raft. My aunt and her family had been here in the past, and she had told me she could pick me up at the other side of this river on the way back from one of her trips. I had no intention of being picked up, however. She had also told me to be careful of the water lillies that grew on this water. They looked like regular white lillies, but they were poisonous to the touch. I observed them as I poled my raft to the edge and got out.
Now, I was going to walk home from here and then I was going to walk from P-- to S--. This has been a recurrent theme in my past dreams, and sometimes a desire in my waking world, to set out walking on long distances that normally people would not walk.

I walked back to my home, and then crossed the river into V--, to establish my route. At that point, I planned to return to my house, I was going to pack my overnight bag for the rest of the trip. When I turned back some floodgates by the edge of the river (which in the dream was more a flooded small stream) had opened, and muddy water covered some of the paths I had been on. There were several people sitting around who had seen me cross before and watched with amusement at the idea that I was going to get wet crossing back. A girl ahead of me gave up and plowed through, soaking her pants. I was not planning to get soaked for the remainder of my walk, and hopped across a narrow part, onto a large rock, and then jumped the rest of the way across, wetting only a corner of my pant leg.

I returned to my apartment for a bag and set out on the longer walk. It was somewhat late in the day and I could tell that it was going to be dark by the time I arrived at my parents house (an overstatement, since in the real world I think it would be impossible to walk that far in a day, much less a few hours). Almost all the way there, my father was driving by and picked me up, and I reluctantly allowed myself to ride the remainder of the way, I had walked most of it.

In the next part of the dream, I had returned to my home, some time later. Then my cousin returned from a long trip, and wanted to see me. My husband was away and I was trying to get out of visiting my cousin because it would bother him, but also he had chosen to be away and so I couldn't call him and tell him so I ended up going along with it for a little while. I walked along the waterfront to where my cousin was staying to get it over quickly, trying to act nice and friendly. The waterfront was like a conglomeration of some small beach towns I've seen. It had bricked decorative walkways along the fronts of very tall narrow buildings on the edge of the bay. One of them was the building my cousin was staying in. Another was a museum or rocket launching center or something, with a gift shop downstairs. My cousin was acting strangely, and invited me in for dinner. People came up spiral staircases from farther down in the building, carrying tray after tray of food, like an elaborate thanksgiving feast complete with turkey. I was appreciative but protested that I couldn't eat it all and had eaten recently. My cousin was somewhat disappointed. We strolled around for a while more and my cousin asked me a strange question, which made me both somewhat uncomfortable, and also disappointed that I couldn't think of the answer. "If you had 1000 "carules" to spend, how would you show someone that you care for them more than anything in the world." (or some word very similar to that, which was a real word in the dream that meant something like "love points," all the energy and resources that go into demonstrating care and love. In this case 1000 was an extremely large amount, equivalent to saying someone had one the lottery if it had been money).

I was somewhat taken aback at the question, and I wondered if my cousin was getting at something, but I decided to not think about that. I thought about it in terms of showing my husband how much I care and love him. But I could not think of what I would do with my carules, if I had so many to use. I was disappointed and finally said I'd have to think about it, and we watched the seagulls as I felt sad and somewhat inadequate to not know how to spend them.

After I extricated myself from the visit with my cousin, I went to my house to pack my things to move to a new a apartment. I was moving rather suddenly, and to an apartment that I did not particularly like. It was on a second floor, but if you opened the window it looked out onto other people's windows and balconies, and was not private. Also, some parts of the apartment had curtains between them instead of walls. I do not know why I had to move so suddenly. I sat in my apartment cramming the last items into a duffel bag, which were some items of clothing. Some of them I really have in the real world, others were items familiar to me in the dream but that I don't have in the real world. I also crammed my remaining stuffed animal, very worn, into the bag. Some coats and scarves were the last. My mother was helping me pack, although aside from this everything else had been moved.

We walked out past the gift shop on the waterfront, and my mother and I stopped there. I considered buying a small plastic animal but ended up not doing so. We chatted aimlessly and then I continued to the apartment. I felt sad, as I often do when moving.

I reached the new apartment and put my stuff down. My husband had returned and looked at it not liking it very much, as I had expected. My brother was also there to see. I put the stuff in the kitchen and we looked at the apartment somewhat grumpily. My husband also wondered why I'd had to move so suddenly.

There was a break in the dream and then in the last part, one of my neighbors in the apartment complex was having a fight with another neighbor, trying to get her to move out on some half-baked legal claim. The one who was being pushed out was like my old neighbor back in A-, an old woman. The one trying to get her evicted was like my old college roommate, but obnoxious. I watched with some distress, but not knowing what to do. My mother stepped in and began explaining to the old woman what her legal rights really were, and trying to mediate the whole thing.

Wet Desert

I haven't been remembering dreams very well for the last couple of weeks, although the faint ghosts of some of them have flitted around the corners of my waking world. I remembered some scraps from last night, though.

I was in Saudi Arabia with my husband. The land was not like I would imagine it to be, instead it was like a very very drizzly fall day at the beach, but humid. The sand was gray like the northern beaches and wet and stretched away in uneven flatness, with trickling water in between. Visibility was very short, and it was hazy and drippy. We walked to an old building with public showers, seemingly out in the middle of nowhere. It was very large and made of thick, dark, old wood and stone, and was tall and shadowy with staircases going up and down and rooms sort of like dark, wooden locker rooms. My husband went into the men's part, to shower, and I went to the women's part. Nobody else was there, although when I looked out around the corner of the wall, I could see at least one distant figure in the haze, not coming or going I think. I don't remember if I showered or not, but I fumbled a lot with putting my hair up afterwards. It would not stay, and I had 3 or 4 wooden pokers of different kinds that I was trying to keep it up with.

There was more, including riding in a car before or after, I think, but that was the only part I can remember. The whole dream was very quiet, with sort of a pregnant waiting feeling, but not negative.