Tag Archives: dream

Last Dream of the Night

I am at an old boyfriend’s parents’ place. They’ve died, and I’ve inherited everything. He and I are no longer speaking – we were never all that close, and we don’t have anything to say. As I walk through the house, I can’t think why I’ve inherited.

The house is very beautiful, with simple lines and lots of glass walls. It is at the top of a steep hill that is thick with complicated rabbit warrens, all whitewashed stone and clay and glass. None of the houses have any surfaces that are more than one floor up from the earth, but because the hill is so steep and the houses so thickly built, there is a sense of a massive, towering edifice, with floors connected by narrow alleys and stairways so steep they are more like ladders.

My mother comes to visit me, and we are at the bottom of the hill when there is a flood advisory. We rush up the hill, and we talk about the house, which she hasn’t seen yet. When we get to it, my old boyfriend is inside. He has made a cup of tea and is watching the floodwaters rise in the distance below. We do not speak.

My mother and I start going through the rooms of the house, culling out things that don’t quite match with most of the contents of the various rooms. I am packing things to give to my old boyfriend.

When I look out the window again, it’s night, and I look through the glass roof into the sky. It is dense with stars, as in a developing country that cannot afford to have light pollution. You can clearly see the outline of the lower part of the African continent, with a completely thawed Antarctica balanced on its cape, curved up into the sky like an enormous breaking wave.

Rescue Me

Leave a reply

I live in my current apartment but instead of a U-shaped hallway around a stairwell, it has one long hallway to the back of the building with a single door leading to a back yard and patio. Some of the neighbors leave the door open, reasoning that the back yard is fairly secure. We let our pets out there.

My next-door neighbor is a movie buff who collects weird things that had belonged to the stars. She works in a law office or maybe some kind of political organization, and she isn’t home very much. I work at home so I can spend a lot of time outdoors during the day. Sometimes my cat takes walks with me.

A mountain lion had started hanging around the building. It is large and black. Sometimes it stretches out in the street or on the sidewalk outside the building. I wave my arms and yell whenever I see it. I stop letting my cat out. If he whines a lot when I go to the door, I tuck him into my shirt instead of letting him walk on his own. Soon, every outing involves seeing the mountain lion, and because we are in the middle of the city, the Park Service refuses to come and remove it.

I come home one day surprised not to see it in the street. When I get inside, I see it in the hallway, lying on the floor between my door and my neighbor’s. She is at work, and I go there to return her keys. She works in an office that circles around 2 sets of escalators and takes up several floors. She is avoiding me, and I keep catching little glimpses of her from the escalator well. The receptionist tries to track her down for me, but although she is extremely competent, my neighbor eludes her as well. Finally we speak. She says she doesn’t understand why there is a problem and repeatedly asks me to keep my voice down because she is at work. Whenever I start to give her the keys, she pushes my hand away. She talks to me for a few minutes at a time, then vanishes, then reappears, over and over.

I go back to our apartment building, still with her keys, and our hallway has been transformed into a garden courtyard. Another neighbor is crouching down, reaching out to the mountain lion, making kitty-kitty noises at it. I scream at the neighbor, grab him, and push him behind me. Then I wave my arms and yell at the mountain lion, walking toward it on tip toe. The mountain lion does not move.

I open the neighbor’s front door, and the mountain lion brushes past me, leaping into the apartment, where it finds a filthy life-size doll representing a child of about 6 years old, lying in the middle of a main room cluttered and stacked with memorabilia. The doll has human hair on its head, delicately painted features, and one remaining eye. The mountain lion rolls around in the small clear space with the doll and then drags it by an arm out of the building through the back yard and disappears.

A Day’s Work

Leave a reply

In this dream, I was working for a guy who was a slight kook but on to some genuinely spooky things. I can’t remember exactly what they were, but they were strange scientific phenomena, not paranormal or supernatural things. I organized information in the office. It was a long, narrow space with lots of desks that were only half as deep as normal desks, but the office was almost paper-free.

An old flame came to visit me at the end of the day. We walked out into the street and looked in windows and stopped somewhere for tea or something (I can’t quite remember). It was dark when we finished, and he offered to walk me to my car. I remember thinking how strange it was that he was shorter and thinner than I am now (in real life, he is solid and much taller). He was wearing large round glasses.

My car was in some funny spot in the parking garage that required a lot of walking around. As we walked, he started dropping things, a coat, a bag, then his hands, hair, even his (in this small incarnation) pointed and birdlike face. When we got to the car he was his (bigger, real) normal self again.

Later (not sure how much later), I was on the bank of a river, and the man I was working for was in the water, almost chest deep, holding a woman at the water’s surface with one arm. He too had removed his hair and face but just looked different – a handsome, gingery, bearded man where he had been dark featured and more pointed before. I didn’t recognize the woman, but she looked (Asian) Indian and was wearing a long, full skirt and a light cotton top. He pushed her top up with his hand, and then drew the tip of a knife in a long, graceful curve over her lower belly. She smiled.

Alternative Transportation

Leave a reply

Last dream of the night.

I was in a cross between Cape Town and SF – a tall hill sweeping down to the ocean, cut with deepwater ravines that had massive suspension bridges. I lived near the Golden Gate and worked near Fisherman’s Wharf. Over the hill was a shantytown of French-speaking natives, controlled by a small, white-haired woman who prided herself on her connection to white Anglo culture.

I went to the shantytown to visit a lab of sorts where small, low-impact motorized vehicles were being designed and built. Most of them were similar to recumbent bicycles but with 4 wheels. Some just looked like butterfly chairs on wheels. I tried one in the lab, and it was ridiculously fun.

The lab was adjacent to a small, secret hospital, illegal in this part of town. I discovered it when I was trapped in the lab and the end of the day, after all the whites had left the shantytown, and I was looking for a safe place to sleep. The hospital was not it; it housed growing numbers of poor locals who were coming down with a mysterious disease. The doctor believed the disease had originated in Ethiopia. The people I saw who were afflicted were losing digits one phalanx at a time, and had badly disfigured faces (essentially, lepers). The doctor was overwhelmed by the epidemic and had started limiting hospital space to those who could pay $15/day to stay there.

I left the lab and found myself in the lobby of the controller’s offices. She was being forced to cede her control, and she was screaming in French at anyone who would listen about all the terrible things that would happen when she was gone, including (where the hell did this come from?) British Airways losing its local hub.

This was not a good place to stay, so I went out in search of transportation over the hill and across a bridge to the part of town where I worked. I found a casual carpool car being driven by a small, sharp-featured man with black hair and blue eyes. There were 8 people in the carpool, and we all pushed toll money at him. He told me to keep mine, because he didn’t want to take me to work; he planned to take me somewhere else.