Dream - We go over the mountain on a train to Phoenix, then my mother walks quickly into Phoenix and I follow, searching for her

On Friday, March 27, 2009, early in the morning, I dreamed I was driving around the edge of a neighborhood in the dark, very fast, perhaps somewhere in Mesa or even Tempe. It felt like it was somewhere near the river bottom. I felt it was necessary to go fast for some reason. I had just been talking with a few people about something, my mother and some other people, maybe including my sister. We had been outside, on the sidewalk. We had walked there, to the corner, from a big house, where we had been talking and perhaps having something to eat. Before that, we had been someplace else, driving I think, maybe partly in the Phoenix area, maybe in different cars. A large part of the dream had been devoted to this, though I have little memory of it now.

Someone caught up and passed me, hurrying along very fast on foot while seeming to be at a walking pace, like an extremely speeded up movie. I reached the place where the road turned and was now almost parallel to the main road (Scottsdale Rd., named Rural Rd. in the Mesa/Tempe area), and then went past the short road that led to the main one. I was going too fast. I had intended to turn off someplace, I think, maybe there, but couldn't. I had, in part, originally been showing off, but it seems I also had someplace I needed to go. I think I also intended, at some point, to return to the people I left, my mother and the others.

I went by a couple of people standing on the road near the sidewalk, talking to each other. They paused and stared at me as I shot down the street and then past them. I'm not sure what they thought about it, and I hoped I didn't upset them too much. They seemed to just be surprised, and in wonder at it. I hoped it didn't go beyond that.

I was going to circle around and go back, but I eventually met up with my mother and someone else, and we went in a very long loop, eventually getting to a place far on the opposite side and far past where the original turnoff had been. It seemed to be on University Drive going toward Scottsdale/Rural Rd. from the Phoenix side. The directions would not have worked out in real life, but they seemed normal in the dream, and something that had been done before in other dreams, perhaps many times.

Then we went to the side and were going to go from Phoenix to Scottsdale up over the hill. My mother and my sister and I, along with someone who may have been a man my sister knew, a friend of hers, but who was shorter than him. It was starting to get light now. We were getting on a small train with some other people. The train went over the hill and down the other side. The place on the other side seemed to be a spread-out small town area, similar in some ways to Sparks, Nevada and to parts of Fallon, Nevada.

Then we were going back, driving toward the hill and the train. I got too far to the side on a road that was by some residences, that was basically just paved lanes for the tires, that diverged more and more from the main road while remaining almost parallel to it, and finally just ended in dirt.

Then we stopped and were trying to get into the line of people, but it was too crowded. We got separated when some of them wanted to go back to the end of the line. I initially went back that way, but didn't want to get in the line way back there, and instead went back to near where the hill started and waited for a break in the line. After the train abruptly loaded a lot of people, the line went forward and got much shorter and I was able to get in near the end of the line. My mother was with me in front of me. She had a light-colored sweater and a short gray coat, and kept almost losing the coat for a while, setting it down and forgetting to pick it up unless reminded. She was getting tired. It was a long slow way up, climbing steps that sometimes turned sharply to the side before turning back to resume going up the hill. People nearby were sympathetic to her.

We finally got on the train. It went a little ways, but then stopped, and we had to walk slowly by tables with cheap little things they were trying to sell. It seems it was some kind of cost-saving move they had implemented recently, and only used it at times of the night when ridership was low. It wasn't night now but it was evidently a weekend. The other members of the group were a little behind us. When we got to the top, the train started again and took us down the other side, but stopped partway down the hill, where the slope was less severe I guess.

Everyone got out of the train. It looked like we were going to have to walk the rest of the way. I had turned, was now facing the uphill direction, and was talking to my sister's friend, I guess, maybe my sister too, and I think one of them might have asked about my mother. I turned back and she was just a dark figure in the distance, way ahead of us, hurrying off toward Phoenix, and then seeming to turn toward the left and getting lost along or among the buildings. I rushed after her but was unable to catch up. It seemed like I could hear the others calling distantly after me, trying to stop me.

Then I got on a wide escalator that went through a vast opening going down under the ground. It went down in sections, with a few feet of a more level structure separating them. To hurry up, I was running down them, barely touching the stairs, holding on to the sides and going down in big jumps. I felt she had probably not gone this way and had gone to the side of it. There was still some chance she was down here, but I couldn't see her anywhere ahead of me, at least nobody I could identify as her. A few widely scattered people were around, though not many, but more showed up as I hurried along and got deeper under the ground.

I figured I would probably have to turn around at some point and go back. I had already really gone farther than I needed to or originally intended. There was some hope that when I came out the other side I would be able to catch up with her because she would have gotten near that area by a different route, but the escalator kept going deeper and deeper, much farther than I had intended. It seemed to be part of a system of city-wide public transportation, and when I went up again I was going to be on the other side of Phoenix, which was probably way too far.

Other escalators were beside this one and also coming in from different directions, going down into a huge area where they gradually leveled off and went straight for a while before gradually ascending again. There was a platform to one side, raised high above the surrounding area at a place where the escalators were still descending, where a few people were standing and a screen was showing a tape of when President Bush had been there earlier, perhaps a day or more before, and had given a kind of mild pep talk speech in a somewhat amused manner (in real life Obama was president). I wondered if they were going to do something similar now and if I would be forced to stay and listen to it, delaying me.