Dream - I meet Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans, and then later, my lab partner

On Saturday, July 18, 2009, around 9:15-11:15 PM, I dreamed I was driving to Nevada. I stopped a few places along the way, and got to somewhere up north, perhaps beyond Fallon and several miles to the side, and was staying in a small town. A lot of mountains were around, covered with pine trees.

I had some device with me, that I had picked up somewhere along the way, that I sometimes put on my left shoulder. The object as a whole had a somewhat flattened thin-walled steel tube look, bent a little, and rounded some at the ends. It was steel colored, but darkened and maybe a little grimy or greasy, and was maybe ten inches long and two inches wide. When I had it on my shoulder it was literally laying over it, with most of it down the front but part of over my shoulder to the back. On the side that was underneath was a seam, where one side of the metal overlapped the other. On the part that was on the back of my shoulder, the end of the device slanted sharply, was kind of laid down partway along the underneath part of the device, and had something like a bolt or tube encircled at a distance by the metal of the walls of the device, that stuck out a little, with the area between the walls and the thing in the middle being black, perhaps from a heavy coating of grime or grease, though I think it might have been that color regardless. On the other end, the one that hung down the front, the device was apparently just sealed off by the metal walls being folded together, in a smooth even way, and was somewhat rounded, something like the toe of a sock.

I went outside and put the device on the ridge of the mountain beside the house, for my mother to see the small thing on the end. I normally kept that side facing down, along the back of my shoulder, out of sight, hidden from people, but I had placed it in plain view now, sticking up in the air. I think that the end I was trying to show her might have had some electronic function, and could maybe somehow be used for signaling, but also had a more special significance. It was something important, something that could be used to give us some kind of power over other people, maybe even something like magic, and I wanted her to know that I had it, was successful in getting it. The device was small, and she was far way, beyond mountain after tree covered mountain, that went all the way to the horizon, but I thought it might be visible to her, especially if she used binoculars, as I thought she would. There was something about it, about the magic of it, that somehow magnified it in your awareness, when you focused on it.

I went back inside. Ivan T. Sanderson came in from what used to be my sisters' bedroom, talking to someone, giving him or her a reading or answer to a question. I was hoping to ask him about me. He was dead so would probably be able to give correct information. He kept talking to the other person, though, as I tried to get his attention. We were in what was my bedroom now, larger than in real life and shared with other people. Two largish beds were low on the floor, side by side with space between them. The dark green cover on mine kept lifting up in a big wave, which moved from the far top corner down the sheet. It did it over and over at slightly irregular intervals. I was trying to point it out to Ivan. I finally got his attention and he made a surprised comment on it. I asked him what it was and he was saying it might be a ghost, or maybe he attributed it to some other supernatural entity. I noticed that air from a fan seemed to be coming all the way from another room and was wondering if that could do it, but I'm not sure how much I said about it, if anything.

Two or three other people came in and were talking, one of them a blond woman. I noticed that someone had put a pillow to the left of mine, with a person's name on it. I hadn't expected to have to bunk with someone so soon, and had been hoping I could avoid it. I noticed the name on the pillow was the name of Dick Cheney's daughter, Liz. She was the blond woman, and was now in the space between the beds, turned mostly away from me, talking to someone. I kept trying subtly to get her attention, saying, "Look who is sleeping next to me," or "Look, someone is already sleeping next to me," or some similar thing.

She finally turned around, and realized I was the one she would be bunking with, and said in a forceful, somewhat insulting manner, "Oh no I'm not, I wouldn't sleep with you," or something like that, and took her pillow back and got her bag of stuff, which was by the bed, and moved off to a bed that I guess was on the far side of the room, though I didn't really see. I was glad she was gone, though I had some mixed feelings about it, and wondered if the replacement, who might be a guy, would be any better.

I went back to work. It seemed to have a bit of a shopping center combined with it. I picked up a snack that was basically a thin, breaded skin over a tiny ribcage that had bones like fragile wires, with a long half loop of something, perhaps white plastic, that went over the top and down the sides and beyond. It had some extra breaded skin at the top. I ate at the top while Ivan talked to someone who was apparently Bernard Heuvelmans. The thing I was eating had a brownish string loosely tied around it, in a loop from the top to the bottom, and I pulled it up, which easily broke through the ribs, breaking through and crushing the whole structure and pulling it up, and I ate the skin and crushed ribs, crunching them. Bernard looked at me disapprovingly, not liking the noise and thinking it denoted poor manners, though he initially didn't comment. Later when prompted about it, in a kidding remark by Ivan, he did say something about it being bad manners, and not done where he came from (which was France). I didn't say much about it.

I wanted to find something else to eat now, I was still hungry. I think I went to Engineering for a while, then back toward the other end of the building. I stopped in a small conference room that was where the men's restroom was in real life, and maybe was part of the restroom in the dream. The Engineering people were there, perhaps most of them standing, but a few were sitting on various things. I picked up a canister that was left there, that evidently had some more dried breaded skin in it. It was something left by someone in management. The other people had things too. They appeared to be similar, the ones I glanced at, but I didn't know if they were actually all the same. They were gifts of appreciation, left there for us; apparently the entire department was being rewarded.

I was nibbling at mine, and I think had it mostly gone, when a manager or supervisor I think, someone in power, came in from somewhere in front. I don't remember who it was now, but I knew him in the dream. He looked at what I had, then thanked me for it and put a large cookie on top of it and left. The people nearby were looking at it and at me, at least one with a little smile on his face. I was a little uncertain about what had happened. I hadn't brought him anything, this was something he had given out. I was feeling a little guilty now, though, about not bringing anything. As I picked the cookie up to eat it, the others were getting up and leaving. A little while later I went back toward town, which was Fallon, not the town earlier in the dream.

The way was somewhat different than in real life, with a much longer rise to the mountain going from town, and a more uneven surfaced road. I went back at least part of the way on a little stiff bar with rounded corners and a flat bottom, that had some mechanism, like a few tiny wheels underneath it, that could be used for travel. It seems it had to be pushed along, like a skateboard, to get it started, and then it would go for a while. It was much narrower though, only a couple of inches wide and an inch high.

It was only around two or three in the afternoon. It was cold and the road was wet in places, maybe with some partially melted snow in places too (in real life it was extremely hot that day, around 115). We were on the road leading to the service station, where it would turn and head toward town. The people around me thinned out. There were two or three places along the way that had some connection to work, that we needed to stop at or some people needed to stop at.

I went around the corner, going toward town, but then came back. Someone from work was with me, who wasn't too bright. I cautioned him that we had to go slow, that police might be hiding. He nodded a little, his eyes big, his jaws spread apart but his mouth closed. We went back around the corner a ways, to a nearby place, that was by the service station but on the other side of the road, the east side. It was evidently a bar, and the area in front of it was thick with people from work. I mostly stayed outside, though he went in. He eventually came back out, and slowly walked and drifted through the air in a big arc around the corner, taking my advice to heart about not going very fast. By all appearances he was drunk, though. I stared at him, and some other people did too. I felt that the police were also staring at him, from their hidden location, not sure what to make of this.

I then had to go back to work. I was starting to feel that I might have left too soon. A few other people were also heading back. One of them was the person who had invented the little device to ride on. He seemed to have suffered from hard times, though. He had been unable to get a patent for some reason, and was now being laid off from work. He talked to me a bit about it as we went along. I was having trouble getting it to work now. He seemed to having trouble, too. The device had shrunk to just a few inches long, and I was stretched out pushing it along with my hand, through what remained of the cool wet slush. It had resistance to movement, as before, when I pushed at it to speed it up, but it didn't seem to reach a point where it could travel on its own, and kept slowing down when I stopped pushing.

I stopped at a place along the way, where the road was still going beside the Navy base, though the base was quite a ways to the side, and the place was on the opposite side of the road from it, to the east, on the left. A short, dumpy middle-aged woman there talked in a somewhat critical manner about things, sometimes to other people and sometimes to me, then abruptly softened and reached toward my face with a crumpled ball of tissue, wiping at a sore that was apparently between the corner of my mouth and my nose, on the right side. I had been unaware of having one. She seemed satisfied about getting it clean, then turned away with the tissue, continuing to talk, in a softer and more matter of fact way, about things and work and what people were doing and what they expected of her and what they thought she was doing with her checks and tests, which were not really what she was doing as they had misinterpreted why the tests were needed.

I went on toward work, but then went off to the side to the right, somewhere after the road turned to the left. I went into a wilderness area, with occasional small trees. I found my lab partner there, looking the worse for wear, though he was happy to see me. He had been assigned to this out of the way place, evidently because they didn't want him anywhere and didn't know what to do with him, though he didn't talk much about it, just saying something about being assigned out here now and comically indicating his surroundings. He didn't seem to be too upset about it, just a little confused. There was a large, rough, light grayish basin there, like it had some kind of coating, that had an old book in the middle of it, some papers too I think. He went off somewhere for a while, evidently to do whatever he was assigned to do out here. I knew that people could rate him by marking along the rim of the basin and lower down, with the markings closer to the edge being more favorable, and markings along the inside, along the sides of the bowl, being more unfavorable.

I got something like a pale yellow pastel art crayon and started going along the inside wall of the shallow basin, rubbing the crayon back and forth as I went, making a broad blurry line along the middle there. Different places were supposed to denote different areas being evaluated, but I didn't pay any attention to that. Some other people had left earlier evaluations in different colors, in clearer narrower lines. Many of them, perhaps most, were little marks on the rim itself, but in some places the markings were clearly unfavorable. I came to realize, as I went along, that I should have been going more toward the outer edge than the middle. I hadn't wanted it to appear that I was just giving him a maximum grade, thinking it would look too much like I was just showing favoritism, but it had turned out to look more like a so-so grade, or worse. I had most of it done, though. I went back over it, trying to spread the color out more to the outer edge. I didn't know how this would be checked out by someone, I guessed they would have to come out here on occasion to look at it. My lab partner came back, and then a person came to look at the basin. I don't think they were very happy about it.

I went back to the woman I had met earlier, to complain about it and try to set the record straight. Someone else was already there, though. After talking to me very briefly, apologetically, saying that she had to talk to the other person first, she went off a ways with him. While waiting, I found a little old book or manual, with soft darkened pages, that also had evaluations. It had a section that had a dark red line going around the edges of the pages, a line that had been left there earlier as an evaluation; perhaps part of it was left there at an earlier time by me. I tried to add to it now, going along the edge, making the line darker and more noticeable. The woman came back. I talked to her, trying to defend my lab partner, and she got irritated. She said that people didn't understand, that she didn't care about what grades they got in school, it didn't mean anything, what she cared about was the ability to actually do the work. I was trying to reply, but somewhat stumbling over it, that he really knew things, and really knew how to do things. She looked back at me, her head lowered a little, frowning, but seeming to have softened, just a little.

I finally went back toward work then. It was getting later, though, perhaps close to five, and I was starting to wonder if it was really worth it, and how I would account for the time spent away, but decided to count it as really part of work, since it seemed to deal with work at times. I think I met someone important from work, a man, perhaps a military person of fairly high rank, with gray hair and who stood stiffly erect, and spoke in a very businesslike manner. He seemed at least partly in favor of me, though. I'm not sure I actually made it all the way back to work, it seems he was at some place along the way, somewhere off the road to the right.


Note: Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans were friends in real life. Ivan T. Sanderson (1911-1973) was a naturalist who used to spend a lot of time collecting animals, and became interested in reports of animals that were unknown to science. He became interested in UFOs, too. Bernard Heuvelmans (1916-2001) was a zoologist. He was also interested in unknown animals.

Ivan T. Sanderson wrote a lot of books on unknown animals and some on UFOs. Some of the books are:

* Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life
* Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks at UFO's
* Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs
* Things
* More Things
* Investigating the Unexplained: A Compendium of Disquieting Mysteries of the Natural World

He also wrote books on known animals, including:

* Animal Treasure
* Living Treasure
* Caribbean Treasure
* Living Mammals of the World

Bernard Heuvelmans wrote several books too, including:

* On the Track of Unknown Animals
* In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents


Wikipedia entries on them:

Ivan T. Sanderson
Bernard Heuvelmans

Dream - Cars and fake cars, rock displays and fountains, and barking, painted, seal-like creatures

On Friday, July 31, 2009, around 2:30-6:25 AM, I dreamed I was at some place a little like my old elementary school, and perhaps where the school is, though it and the surrounding area were a little different in the dream. I was in something like the multipurpose room, but it was laid out the other way, north-south, and was some kind of grocery store, an older style one, with simpler shelves and displays. It also sold other things, and had a long tall counter, with a few people behind it, along the east side of the room. I was there a long time, with someone else, perhaps two people. My mother might have been one of them, but someone else was also with me. I mostly wandered around the store by myself. There was some worry about rain and flooding, and it became important to leave soon.

A little later, not long before I left, I went to a wooden replica of a sports car, apparently a Lamborghini or Ferrari or something like that. It was made of two rough, somewhat splintery, light brownish orange wooden halves, put together around the bumper level or just above, so that it had an upper half and a lower half. It was nearly life-size. I pulled the halves apart, pulling the top one up some, doing it a time or two, then a little later started taking the top section apart in small splintery sections, though it had appeared to be carved from a single piece of wood. I was a little surprised that it was coming apart. The pieces almost seemed to be breaking/peeling off, but they were fairly regular in shape, like it was intended to be that way. I had been trying to show someone the car before we left, perhaps my mother, perhaps someone else, then I was outside trying to walk home.

I remember earlier going to the place, walking up there toward it in the dark, with someone with me, perhaps 15 or 20 feet to the right, and us talking some. It was still dark when I left. One or two people were out there with me, some distance away. We sometimes talked. I was trying to walk home through the neighborhood, but they wanted to go a different way and were in more of a hurry. They left, though I'm not sure they went together. I think one or more of them might have ultimately used a car.

I wandered back and forth a bit, without getting very far west. The houses were small with small yards, in rows that ran east-west. They got much smaller then, with the alley between them not even wide enough for any but the smallest cars. I started going west, then down a street that was almost aligned with the school, a little north of center. Things expanded again and the yards became huge.

Several houses down, on the left side of the street, I came across a small car parked there. I think it was initially empty, and I looked it over and fiddled with it some, even looking inside it and feeling things inside it and fiddling with them. Someone else was nearby and it was bothering them, and they were trying to talk me out of it. I don't know if the person was one of the people who had come with me or was one of the people who had been in the school/store. I think it bothered them that I was doing this to some stranger's car.

Then a young dark-haired woman, who long ago was one of my teachers, came out of the house to the left and got in the car. I'm not sure what school I knew her from, it could have been my elementary school or high school or even DeVry, where I went to college. Perhaps she was even a combination of some teachers. She got in the little car and fiddled with things, trying to get it ready to go and started up. She had a smile on her face and seemed only vaguely aware of me, then she talked to me about what she was doing in a somewhat absent minded way. She seemed to age a little after a few moments, perhaps becoming around thirty or in her mid thirties, and had a little bit of a hassled look, though she was still smiling. At this point she may have looked a little like Mr. Monk's dead wife, Trudy (from the "Monk" TV show), though with dark hair, but she still looked more like one of my teachers. She finally got everything like she wanted, I guess, and left.

I wandered off, going some to the west and then turning to the south and going through the neighborhood, partly between houses I think, getting to a minor cross street that looped up and ran north-south for a while before turning back to the west. I felt that some people were after me now, in a small way, maybe disturbed by my wandering around and through the neighborhood.

I came across an area that was more open, with wide spaces between buildings, which didn't always seem to be houses. I was going south still. Not far to the east, a little ways behind the buildings, the land went into a rounded slope heading down to a creek or ditch or canal. The land here seemed to be mostly rock, though some places had dirt. At least a couple of places had rock displays, flat, somewhat irregular rocks stacked on top of each other in a rough square, perhaps six or eight feet on a side and perhaps a couple of feet high. The displays had a few buildings between them and were to the back, with old, worn, colored walks leading back to them from the main walk that ran in front of the buildings. They were wet, either from rain or an associated small fountain or both. I think I went back to the first one and then back to the second. I started picking up some of the irregular decorative slabs, cleaning water off of them.

A young relative came up, perhaps a cousin, a teen-aged girl, and I talked with her about about the displays. She helped with cleaning the water off some. We weren't just wiping water off, a little bit of wet dirt and grit was also being wiped off. Then she went off somewhere, perhaps to a car to go somewhere else. I think she had originally came in a car with some other people, with someone else driving. The car was parked maybe one or two hundred feet away to the southwest, though I think it moved closer, more directly west.

A little later, a car pulled up beside and a little behind a building a couple of buildings back to the north, and one or two people got out to do something in the buildings. Some kids were left in the car, maybe with one or two adults. One of the kids pointed toward me and was saying, "Say, isn't that the person people were looking for?" After continuing a bit with it, the kid was finally able to get the adults' attention and the car came closer, I guess after the people in the building got back in, though I'm not sure all of them did.

Then a young woman in the car started throwing things at me, sometimes hitting the rocks and sometimes hitting me. I think one of them hit me on the left temple/cheek area. They seemed to be rags or paper towels that had been wadded up and dipped in a small can of white paint. It was drizzling rain too, and the paint was running off in thin diluted streaks. I started wiping it off the rocks. I recognized her as a former girlfriend, not of mine, but of the character I was now playing, which seemed separate from the real me. It seemed ironic that she was doing this. She obviously hadn't recognized me, and I wondered how long it would take until she did. The car came much closer, pulling up beside me perhaps only six to ten feet away, and she was still yelling at me and saying how she was going to contact the authorities, and was still throwing wadded, dipped in paint things at me and was about to throw another one, when the cousin came back and quickly went over to her and explained the situation and told her who I was. The woman stopped, then, looking at me a little uncertainly, but with recognition. We talked briefly, then, though I don't think I got too close to the car.

Then I went further east, to where the dark rock went in a sharp rounded slope downward. It was still drizzling rain. The slope turned almost vertical, then mostly flattened out, though it continued downward in a shallow irregular slope, apparently eventually leading to a lake or perhaps the sea. Beginning on the sharp slope, and in a huge mass on the more level area below it, were large, very fat gray seals or perhaps manatees (though they had seal-like heads). A small can of white paint had been thrown out on them, perhaps a more tan one, though I'm not sure. They were making almost continual barking sounds and moving their heads and upper bodies this way and that, sometimes moving to different positions, milling around a bit, and moving the small can from one animal to another with their noses, the can moving downhill from one animal to another but also going back and forth to the sides. A lot of the animals had white streaks of paint running down them, mixing with the rain. It finally seemed like almost all of them did. They were a protected species, whatever they were, and there was concern in the town about their welfare. I could even hear a distant discussion, people far away somewhere, closer to the downtown area I guess, talking about them. I hoped the paint was nontoxic and wouldn't hurt them.

Dream - At a mall, a tiny toy Superman fights a toy super-villain

On Monday, June 15, 2009, at approximately 5:00-7:35 AM, I dreamed I was driving, maybe around locally, more or less, then was in something like a mall, which had a hotel as part of it. My brother and mother and some other family members were there too. We were all much younger, though perhaps not all to the same degree. After some discussion, we separated, and went different directions in the mall. The mall split off in several directions from where we were, near one end, with a branch going off at an angle from the end, and some short branches on the other side at or near the end, most sticking out at right angles, though one at the end had a slight angle to it.

I went down the main aisle of the mall, looking at things as I went. I think I was concerned with getting some food. I made my way to the end, or at least one end, then went back, though along a different branch, one almost parallel to the first, but a little higher and somewhat shorter.

I made my way to the end of the branch, to a large carpeted room. It had some low tables and padded furniture, like a waiting room, and a tall counter was along one side, the one the opening from the mall was by. Some people were behind the counter, perhaps some food vendors and other people. The room also had some association with the hotel, which was behind it and also ran along behind and attached to the mall.

I left the carpeted room, though, and went to the other end of the mall, then went back to it. Near the room, I came across a tiny toy Superman, about six inches high, and picked it up and carried it in. Some other toy figures were standing on the carpet, some together in little curved lines. They were all very lifelike. Some people stood around watching, some behind the counter and some out toward the edges of the room, and there may have been a few in front of the counter or in the room.

Something happened, some device got turned on, and gravity got real heavy for some reason. It was something turned on by an enemy of the toys, another toy, a super-villain. The toy figures were pressed into the carpet, bending over, huddled together, the increased gravity trying to pull them down. As time went on, they became more dragged down, many of them laying on the carpet, pressed deeply into it. The air seemed to be different too, to darken, and a lot of the surrounding area seemed to fade out into a grayness, or to simply disappear entirely from sight. The toy figures were groaning, sometimes calling out to each other or for help. They hoped that someone, maybe the toy Superman, could do something, could save them, but there was some worry about whether he could handle it, whether he would be affected too much by it himself. A toy figure was kidnapped, too, though I'm not sure when it happened.

Superman managed to leap over to the other end of the room, which narrowed to a short hallway leading to the door. Beyond the door was a big open area with an elaborate fountain. A voice was talking about how easy it was to have so-and-so do it, to have them apply the stuff and do the work so you could concentrate on what you needed to do (probably an ad playing on the radio, which was on in real life).

A tall giant figure in a bulky padded gargoyle costume was tending the fountain, adding figures and statuary to it. Apparently it also acted as a central figure in it and could emerge suddenly from the water in a frightening display of power. It was actually life-size or a little larger, but was giant compared to the toy figures, which were around six inches tall. It might have had the toy Lois figure, and someone else, maybe Jimmy, though Jimmy also seemed to be in the area and taking pictures.

Superman came and got into a large robot-like figure made of solid cardboard with a huge rounded chest, splitting it open in a straight vertical line to get inside and then joining the sides back together again. Then, wearing the giant cardboard robot suit, he confronted the gargoyle. It was thought that Luther took Lois, and that the gargoyle was somehow connected with it or knew about it. I was worried that Superman would fight it when it didn't really seem to be part of it, just peaceably puttering with its fountain.

Superman, in his cardboard suit, had come up behind the gargoyle, which turned to face him. They stood there and talked for a while, in low tones, Superman questioning the gargoyle and the gargoyle responding. I couldn't hear what they were saying. Superman seemed satisfied with the gargoyle's answer, though, and went back to where he had gotten the cardboard suit, and split it open again and flew out of it. Then Jimmy was worried that he hadn't gotten the pictures, that something was wrong with his camera, so Superman got back in the cardboard so Jimmy could take the pictures, then got out again and flew around, looking for the kidnappers.

My brother and I went somewhere, then, and got some cheesecakes, with my mother and sisters and perhaps other family members helping. My mother and sisters were much younger, perhaps how they were in the mid 1960s, and my sisters were still children, though it's possible they had been children earlier in the dream, too. My brother got two cheesecakes that were fresh and I got two that were frozen, and there were another two that were picked up somewhere else, maybe a store associated with a service station. The cheesecakes were all large, and they were going to be eaten at a party that was supposed to happen shortly.

We all went to a house, taking the cheesecakes with us. Other people were also there. Most of the people, the family members and others, seemed to be very busy, walking around and doing things and talking to each other. A lot of them were in the large living room, or that area, though some went back and forth to other areas of the house, such as the kitchen or dining room, and some seemed to stay mostly in those areas.

The frozen cheesecakes were set out now, and were being eaten some already. The fresh ones weren't put in the refrigerator or freezer, but were also left out, waiting until Lois and the other person were rescued.

After talking with my brother some, discussing things, I left, and I think he did too, and also some other family members. My brother and I were leaving in separate cars, and going to different places. My mother and my sisters were going to go together, I think, in a station wagon, that was either the 1964 Chevrolet or the 1973 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser. I think it might have been the 1964 Chevrolet. The party wasn't going to happen until later, in the evening, which was still a little ways off, so there was still some time to do things, and it seems most of us had things to do, though part of it may have had something to do with the party, with getting things for it. My mother wanted to get supper for my father, though, at least as part of what she needed to do. She had gotten pretty concerned about it, that it was getting late and she had to hurry. I was under the impression that the place she was going to was several miles to the south and west, at the south side of Phoenix, and it seemed to be somewhere we had lived long ago, perhaps even the house in Missouri in 1966. Quite a few people were still going to be here, though, getting things set up and ready for the party.

I think I may have wanted to get something, though I'm not sure whether it was for the party or not. I felt uneasy about leaving the cheesecakes out, even before I left, and kept looking back toward the room as we were leaving, and when talking some to my brother just outside it. We didn't actually have an exact time for the party, because we didn't know when the people would be rescued, and it might not be as soon as we thought.

I drove away, in the white 1965 El Camino I think, but I continued to worry about the cheesecakes, wondering if I should go back and put them in the refrigerator. I went several miles away, to the northwest, perhaps over into Phoenix, to a large service station with covered bays, with an associated large convenience store/restaurant. I sat there outside it, in the car, still worrying.

Overhead, Superman was still flying around, still searching, looking through things with his super-vision, but he hadn't found anything yet. I sat there, in the car, watching him. It was a little after sundown now, and it was starting to get dark. A feeling of depression was settling in over me, a feeling of resignation, of defeat. It was possible he might rescue the people soon, but it didn't really look like it. If he did do it soon, it had better be fast.

I wasn't sure what was going to happen with the party. It seemed likely that some kind of party or get-together was going to happen, it had been planned and set up, and lots of people invited, but it was going to take a lot of the joy out of it, to not have the people rescued. I had already considered the possibility that the rescue might be delayed some, and had pictured the people at the party talking to each other and discussing it, and then the rescue occurring sometime while the party was going on, maybe late in the party. It now looked like it might be after the party entirely, maybe days later. We might have to have a small second party when it happened.

I should go back soon, I thought, and tell them what was happening, and what was likely to happen. It was something they should know, and would want to know.

I started to drive back, still sometimes watching Superman fly around, the times when he was visible. When he wasn't, there was just the trip back, and the increasingly darkening sky.