Dream - The pickpocket

On Thursday, April 16, 2009, around 5:30-8:00 AM, I dreamed I was going back to a store, somewhere in the Phoenix area I guess, maybe toward Tempe. It was night, fairly late. I had been there not long ago, maybe hours or less, but had to go back. I guess I had gotten the wrong thing or missed getting something or had to talk to my mother about what I found, but whatever happened she wanted me to go back.

I was driving down a long, almost empty street, not going terribly fast. The street was fairly broad, but didn't have any markings, and seemed to be residential on one side, though a wall separated whatever was there from the street. The street was lit by occasional street lights. I think I was a little concerned about a police car possibly going by or even following me, as they sometimes seem to be looking for something to do late at night. It's possible one may have passed going the other way, but I'm not sure.

Far ahead, in a patch of darkness where a tree or bush hung out over the wall, there seemed to be something. I wondered if it was somebody on a bicycle. I slowly angled the car to move further away from the side. As I grew closer, I could see that it was someone on a bicycle. I don't think the person was aware of me until I was very close. I passed him or her at a wide distance.

I finally got to the store, which was a large low building on the left, with a cross street on the other side of it. I pulled off into a little lane that ran by the parking lot, with a low wall separating it from the parking lot, then turned right a short distance and then right again into the entrance to the parking lot. There were still cars there. There were a couple that I noticed in particular, near where I was going to park. They were parked facing toward the wall that ran by the little lane. One was some kind of Cadillac that had been modified to have a huge trunk that stuck way out, maybe ten feet or so. The car I was driving wasn't terribly large, maybe around the size of an Oldsmobile Delta 88, as they were in the late 1980s, or perhaps even a little smaller. However, it was growing smaller still, and as I swung it around to park near the entrance to the lot, actually holding onto the car and picking it up, the wheels ran over the long trunk of the Cadillac. I carelessly let it happen, being too tired to bother worrying about it I think, thinking that the car was too small to really hurt the Cadillac. Indeed, the wheels were now so small they could have been on a golf cart. I did start to worry now, though, that maybe it really did do something to the trunk, that maybe the metal was too weak and thin to withstand it. I went and looked closely at the trunk. It was a pale whitish green, with some variation in color. Though I feared there might be a slightly depressed track along it, and initially there seemed that there might be, I found that there was just a slight tread mark, a slightly dirty area where the tires had gone.

I put the car, which now had shrunk to just a small platform, on the edge of a broad raised area that was evidently part of a speed bump, near some other cars and almost behind one, and next to a small dumpster. The platform had two very long wooden poles attached, that I folded on hinges at their base, and put them along in front of the dumpster, where I thought they would be out of the way. I went inside the store, then.

It seemed to be a kind of hardware/home improvement store, at least the section of it that I was in. It may have had other things further on. There was a room in the front part, partly closed off from the rest of the store, that had particular things in it separated from the rest of the store by tall windows. It had big glass double doors on each end leading on into the rest of the store. On the end I went through, the one farthest from the road and closest to the entrance to the parking lot, the doors led through into a broad hallway that ran along the side of the building for a distance. On the right, doors opened into rooms where various things were being taught. Some kind of how-to type of instruction, I thought, though I think classes of a community service nature were also taught, I supposed. I wanted to get past this area, to where I could access the main part of the store. A few people were in the hallway. As I walked along, I could see some people in the rooms through partly open doors. Some of them looked back.

Then suddenly a short man, with a somewhat frantic look on his face, rushed up behind me and started rapidly patting my back pockets all over. I quickly drew away from him, feeling my back pockets myself, trying to see if my wallet was still there. The pockets seemed enormous, much wider than normal, and at first there didn't seem to be anything in them. I was quickly feeling along the outside, and there just seemed to be me underneath. Getting further back, though, I finally found the wallet, much smaller than normal, half-sized really, practically lost in the huge pocket. Already half-turned from him, I turned more and threw him back, away from me. He looked at me, his arms partly sticking out at the sides, standing with his legs apart and his knees bent a little, looking uncertain and kind of guilty, maybe about six to eight feet away from me. I turned and was walking away, when he rushed me again and was again frantically feeling my back pockets. I again threw him off me and again checked to be sure my wallet was still there, and started loudly calling out for guards, for security people to come, that the man was trying to rob me. Some people came and held him, and looked at me in a calm and reassuring way, saying that they would take care of him.

It turned out, though, that he had been in one of the classes, something about protecting yourself from theft, and he had been assigned by the teacher to go out and do to people what he had done to me, I guess to see how it was when real thieves did it. He didn't seem to be very good at the job, it seemed to me, as normally those people are much more careful, and don't want their victims to know they are being robbed.

I went into one of the classes then, in one of the little rooms, being directed there by the guards I think, and listened to the teacher talk about something for a while. I don't remember now what he was saying. He sat on the edge of a tall chair or stool, while the rest of us had smaller, normal size chairs. I think they were of light colored wood, like school chairs. I wanted to finish this up and go on to what I had been doing. I wasn't intending to stay for the whole thing, just enough to get through the particular thing he was talking about, and then leave.

Dream - Racing along a high, icy road

On Wednesday, April 15, 2009, probably somewhere in the 1:00-5:00 AM area, I dreamed I was driving in Nevada. It was night. I think it was just getting dark when I was setting out. I think my father was with me, also. I was going from Fallon north to gradually increasing elevation, then turning right. There was only one way back from here though, and one lane, not even a lane going here. The lane going back was already clogged with cars, all the way to the road I was on. I couldn't see what the problem was. I went past it to the other side of town. The whole thing was just a thinly developed area with scattered homes and businesses, but there wasn't any other way back. I was concerned about the time, that it would take too long, and I might not get back in time. I may have been concerned about going to work. I continued driving around, then somehow I did get back, at least in a way.

Then I was headed from Fallon, I think, but on the other side of it, going south, and had gotten past or to the first mountain, then I think I was heading back, going with some other cars down a mountain across a broad valley heading to another mountain. There was some kind of problem with the road I think, and maybe police cars waiting further on, that even came this way checking on the cars. There was a backup of cars even here.

Then I seemed to be much farther away, looking at the road from the air and the car going along it. The road was raised high above the ground on a narrow man-made ridge, and the whole area was covered with snow. The road had hardly any cars, and they were very widely separated, with long stretches between them. I saw the car I was in racing along the road, along the narrow snowy icy ridge high above the surrounding land, between mountains and heading toward the next one, and thought how dangerous it was, and how lucky I had been not to get into an accident.

Dream - The woman with the wooden station wagon

On Tuesday, September 15, 2009, in the morning, possibly very early in the morning, I dreamed I was driving in Nevada in the Fallon area in the dark, later driving in the rural outskirts to the south with a few other people. Someone with me, a girl I think, wanted us to sing an old Sonny and Cher song, but with vulgar language added. I didn't sing the vulgar language, though. There was something earlier about going to a room or rooms I was staying at too, and other things, maybe a car lot or junkyard. I think my father was there at times too and maybe my mother. I think it was a fairly long dream, generally pleasant.

Then I was in a big house with big some rooms. Two very large, very long tables had been set up, almost filling portions of two rooms. The tables were covered with various food dishes, fairly simple ones, mostly in plates or shallow bowls. The tables themselves were dark and simple. My aunt, my mother's sister, was there, and I think my mother and younger sister, and possibly my brother. I was trying to find something that my aunt would eat, making various suggestions. I think I found something like soft pretzel sticks and something else, and then a little later some small bananas, then I left to go home. The place was some distance from it.

I had gotten paid now and it was easier to buy things. I was going to get gas and pick up some more groceries. I bought a bunch of groceries at the service station, a paper sack of them. I was tired and operating mostly on nervous energy. I quickly threw a bunch of things in the sack, sweet rolls and maybe some more bananas and some other things, maybe some kind of meat too. I saw a loaf of Rainbow bread, but it had a small tear in the bag. I examined it closely and worried about it a bit, but decided to go ahead and get it. I intended to go to a real store later, but I wanted to pick up a bunch of stuff to keep us going for now. I was very tired. I took it to the counter and paid for it, then went back to the car. I had parked it at the pumps without thinking, since I normally get gas, but I just wanted to grab some groceries this time. I had stopped and looked back at it, but decided to just leave it, and hurry up and get the groceries. I felt bad about blocking the pump and hoped they wouldn't be too mad. I was too tired to get back in and repark it somewhere. It seems I did take the groceries home, and my mother and some other people were there. She was glad to see me, but then I left again and went to a different service station, somewhere in Phoenix. It seemed I was getting gas this time. It was a small station.

When I got back to my car, I saw a woman at a nearby pump who had a wooden car. It was large and boxy and very simple. It sat high off the ground on wooden 2 by 4 inch boards that acted as legs. At first they didn't seem to have wheels, but later I saw tiny dark rollers under them. The car was roughly a tall station wagon configuration with a short hood. It was mostly empty inside. The seats were just a wooden platform. It didn't seem to have an engine. Though sometimes it did seem to go under it's own power, other times it used foot power. I started talking to the woman a bit. She got finished and went to get in her car, and asked if I wanted to go with her. I finally decided to get in. I noticed a police car a little ahead and to the left, at another pump, and worried about it a bit. The car didn't have any seat belts, and he might decide to give us a ticket for that. The car was kind of odd, and potentially noticeable because of that, but since it was obviously a homemade thing I hoped he would give us some slack. He came back to his car and finished up, and mostly seemed to ignore us. The woman kept talking in a somewhat tired, matter of fact way about various things.

We started going and pulled out onto the street. I was sitting at what would normally be the driver's area, and she was on the passenger side, but she did most of the driving, though at some point she suggested I take over, and I drove from where I was without having to move. At some point she joked about having taken a Republican position on something, and hoped I wasn't mad about that. She was apparently a Democrat, though. We eventually got to a house somewhere, apparently hers, but then started to pull out in the street and leave again. It was morning now, though it was night when we started, and the light was still fairly dim. She was driving now, and was driving earlier when we got here I believe. I was still worried about getting stopped by the police, this time more because the car was so odd, and they might think it didn't meet regulations and was somehow unsafe. A police car was starting to come by at the left, as we waited to pull out onto the street.

The dream faded into multiple scenarios then, with us getting stopped by that car or another one, and the officer calling in and asking about it, and another car coming in from the other direction, and another officer on the radio saying that he had stopped some other car that was similarly odd at an earlier time, and the judge threw the case out, so it probably wasn't worth getting involved in, to just let it go.

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.

Dream - After the collapse of civilization, a group of people live in an indoor mall

On Wednesday, March 25, 2009, around 9:10-11:00 PM, I dreamed I was in a large dark indoor mall, sometime after the collapse of civilization. People lived in the dark aisles of the mall and in the shops. There was a small controlling government in the mall, and another one somewhere outside in the woods. The government in the mall was very repressive. There was a strict curfew with guards patrolling in the dark with dogs, and the doors were locked and guarded to prevent people from leaving and to prevent anyone from getting in. If someone did get back in they were shot.

One time a young girl, maybe ten or twelve, managed to escape one night. She made it to the door at the end of the mall aisle, after the aisle had turned a corner, and found the door ajar with no one guarding it. Someone had gotten out before her and it hadn't yet been discovered. She went out through it. There was someone she wanted to see in the woods, a boyfriend I think. She wanted to leave the group, at least eventually, and go away with him. She managed to get back before the door was discovered, and cautiously and swiftly made her way along in the dark, keeping close to the shops. She had almost made it back to the main camp in the aisle when she was discovered. A guard found her and turned his flashlight on her. It was assumed that she had only broken the curfew. I tried to help her out a little, shining a light behind her, and saw a large dark-colored dog a few feet away, slowly sniffing its way toward her. Evidently it had been following her for a while.

The man who was the leader took her with him to one of the shops, where a particular group of people were staying. He said that she would be all right, that she needed some people to take care of her and these would do it, that nothing bad would happen to her. He went back then to where he was staying in the aisle, and was listening to a device that had something similar to a telephone headset but smaller, maybe like a radio set. He had it to one ear while listening to a young woman tell stories to him, like he did every night. I thought the voice on the headset, which was that of a young girl crying out in pain and fear and the faint sound of blows and other voices, sounded very much like the voice of the girl that had just been taken away, and I also realized that it sounded very much like the voice of the young woman who told him stories each night, only the woman's voice, because she was a little older, was smoother and a little deeper. I wondered if the young girl had somehow been brought forward through time and was now being tortured, despite what the man had said.

A few hours later, toward morning, I wandered back toward the shop where the young girl had been taken, feeling a little guilty about it and wondering if she was alright. The leader or someone sent by him came to me and showed me the store window, where I could see what looked something like her along with a bunch of other people, though I couldn't be sure it was really her no matter how hard I concentrated. She started doing a dance with the other people, a big ensemble affair, showing what she had learned and how happy she was. It looked odd sometimes, and sometimes the movements seemed jerky and the figures not quiet real, like animated puppets. I wondered, too, whether I was actually seeing through the glass or if something was being projected on the glass from the other side, and that they might be trying to disguise what had really happened to the girl. The shop window to the right side of it was doing something similar, with people dancing, though with different people or a different dance. I was shown other shop windows on the other side of the aisle, where similar things were happening, though with fewer people shown. I wondered if I should try to go in the room and look for myself to see if she was alright, but was afraid of what might happen, and was unsure if I could do anything to help the situation.

More happened earlier in the dream, but I don't remember it. (I had earlier been watching the TV show "Lost.")