Dream - In a large building, going through things left by my grandmother

On Saturday, January 3, 2009, I dreamed I was accessing iWon.com after a long time away, then wandering around a huge building that was apparently left to us by my grandmother, seeing dusty piles of old stuff there.

I was sleeping in bed. I dreamed I was in a small room, smaller than a bathroom, that had an opening to each side to much larger rooms. They were very large, especially the one to my left. The one to my right might have been as big, but my awareness was on it much less and I'm not really sure. It did seem to have a lot more in it. The one on the left was pretty sparsely furnished. I was sitting in a chair between the two large doorways, facing the interior of the small room, using a computer that was resting on a deep shelf that ran between the walls. There was another computer, at least one, somewhere in the room to the left. I seemed to be somewhat younger than in real life, perhaps in my late thirties, and slimmer.

I decided to try to access iWon.com. I had not been there in years. I wondered if it would still know me. Of course I wasn't even at my normal computer, so there wouldn't even be a cookie for it to look at.

At first the screen changed to a cloudy coarse gray, white at the edges, then it changed to an irregular globe of the world, done in soft inflatable plastic, with red continents bulging out of a white ocean. It was facing the wrong direction, though, and America wasn't showing. Then it slowly started to turn around, and as America came into view the screen abruptly changed, I think starting to rush toward the surface of the continent and then suddenly fading to something else. I was finally at the site then, and was looking at things. I was also looking at the message boards, I believe.

A woman came in from the room to my left, looking concerned. I was naked, I had been intending to take a shower earlier I believe, and someone was coming now, about something related to her work I think, and she didn't want him to see me naked. I was sitting sideways with relation to the door, and had a big foam rubber bed pillow, I guess I had been sitting on it or had it behind me, and took it and put it beside me. I was sitting in a large but somewhat utilitarian office chair. It could roll and swivel and it had arms on it, but the arms were open structures. I hoped the pillow would hide a lot of my body, so that I wouldn't immediately appear naked unless really looked at. Looking in the room, I could see her talking to him over near the far wall. They were both bent over a little looking at some object on a low table.

Then I was in a huge square building across the street. It was three or four stories. The whole surrounding area didn't have much in it, and I think the street between the buildings might have been dirt. The whole land around was mostly dirt, but the road had lots of tire tracks in it, distinguishing it from the other dirt. I had the feeling the big building was something left to us, that it used to belong to my grandmother, and was passed on to us after she died. It was huge inside, with huge and mostly open rooms. It was dusty and somewhat musty smelling. Old things were stored there, generally in groups and piles. There were a lot of them.

I was walking around the place going to different stories in it, looking at and through some of the groups of stuff. Someone was with me part of the time, perhaps the woman from before, perhaps someone else.

In one of the groups of things, I found an old cardboard 8-track tower, still partly covered in the clear plastic wrap it came in. I remembered years ago being given it as a gift, perhaps at Christmas. I had left the plastic around it so that it would better contain the tapes, without them falling out of the tall slot that ran along the front of it. I was going to take the tapes out at the top or bottom, where I had made openings in the plastic. I think I had gotten a Neal Diamond tape at that time, at least the tower was somehow associated with it.

Now the tower had been on its side, with stuff haphazardly piled on and around it, the cardboard bent and twisted, and the clear plastic partly torn away. I fiddled with it for a bit. I wondered if I should go ahead and just take the plastic off, there didn't seem to be much I could do with it now. The cardboard of the tower was so bent and twisted it was going to be hard to do anything with it, too. It seemed that the tapes would just want to fall out the front of it, that the cardboard would just try to twist back and shove them out. I wasn't sure if I could straighten it enough to work. It seemed a shame.

The whole thing felt kind of sad, going through the old things, seeing them there. Not all were in bad shape, a lot of stuff was just a little dusty. Earlier, in a different pile, I saw some low shelves that looked pretty good, standing upright, just a little dusty and cobwebby. It was sad though, to think of how things had been in the old days, and weren't any longer.

I was still naked, or at least naked from the waist down, I'm not sure. I didn't seem to have bothered to get dressed yet, and it was starting to disturb me a little.

I was in a big room on an upper story, then, at least three stories up. Someone came, a man, and opened the door. He saw that I was naked and was going to come back another time, but I said to stay. I came out and walked around a bit and we talked. At some point I looked different than I had earlier, like a different person, thin and somewhat shorter, with a kind of middle-aged look.

I went out to the side of the building. There was a small balcony out there. I'm not sure I actually went out on it, but I was looking at it, maybe from a window, maybe from the doorway. The balcony had a railing with closely spaced wooden poles or slats. Looking out from where I was, perhaps in the doorway or perhaps out on the balcony some, I saw another large building across the street, set well back from the road, and to the left a cross street went by. There were occasional other buildings around, but not many. Around the buildings were large yards of dirt with scattered areas of low grass. The area had a mostly empty feel. Not many people or cars were around.

In front of me, far down on the ground by the road, I saw a couple of people standing, turned toward each other and apparently talking, looking small in the distance. I wondered if they could see well enough to see I was naked, though they wouldn't actually be able to really see much below my waist, if that far, because of things in the way. If they had even looked up, that is, and I'm not sure they had. I turned away from the balcony and went back in, though, not wanting them to know I was naked and not wanting to take the chance that they might, even if they couldn't actually see anything significant.

Inside, there was a stairway that came up from the floor, ending toward the left, away from me. There was a railing all the way around the rectangular opening, with lathed wooden poles supporting it. A woman and a girl were on the stairs, with the woman being farther up. The woman was probably in her forties and the girl was probably in her late teens, perhaps close to twenty. They were both dark-haired, though the woman's hair had a slightly faded look, like it might have grayed a little. The woman's hair was pulled back, but the girl's wasn't.

The man who had come up earlier went toward them and was trying to distract them and to some extent get between them and me, though he went past that point and to the other side, and was trying to get them to come back later. They went down a step or two but then stopped, while he continued talking to them. Their eyes were lowered a little and they had a bit of a sly little smile on their faces, like they had seen something and were aware of the situation, and were not only not bothered by it but were in no great hurry to leave.