Dream - The radiator shop which was "That Which Cannot Be Named"

On Thursday, May 6, 2010, in a sleep period running from possibly 2:00 AM (give or take a couple of hours) to 9:30 AM, I dreamed I was at the radiator shop, which in the dream was in an outdoor shopping center/plaza. It was a fancy plaza, somewhere near the university on the south, but somehow also near downtown Scottsdale, to the east on the north end. The plaza was divided by a divided roadway that ran through it, but traffic was usually light and people walked in the road as well as on the sidewalks. It had a lot of fake brick for crosswalk areas and medians and for trim. There were also some tall narrow slanted structures in places between the lanes, as decorations, maybe rising 10-15 feet, made of what seemed to be fancy concrete block, maybe coated with a clear varnish.

I had been gone from the radiator shop for a long time, but now I was back in it, working. I think I was brought back by my father, who was much younger looking, more like he was in his mid forties. Scott was there I think, and maybe Rick, looking as they had when they worked there decades ago, possibly Chuey too, but I'm not sure. Some other people worked there, too. I was at a bit of a loss, and wasn't sure I liked being back there. It had been a long time since I had worked in the shop, and I didn't know anything about what was going on. I understood it in a general way, in that jobs were being done, a lot of them from car dealers, and radiators were being repaired, and I understood how that was done, but I didn't know the details of any of the jobs, I didn't know what had come in or anything.

I went and sat in the office, which was at the front on one side. People rushed around doing things, sometimes going by the office or close enough that I could see them through the doorway, which I think faced a hallway, but the hallway also had a doorway immediately at the other side going to the front room. Sometimes people briefly came into the office, too. I was supposed to work at the invoices and bookkeeping I guess, but I hadn't done that for a long time, and I would have to carefully work my way into it, and I wasn't sure how much currently needed to be done, how much I had to catch up on, and I didn't even know what kind of bookkeeping they were doing now, whether it was like it was before or if they were doing something else. I made brief stabs at starting to do something, without ever actually starting or even getting to the point of examining things.

My mother, or someone, reminded me a few times that I needed to hurry, that my nieces and nephews were in a costume contest. They wore Halloween costumes, or something like it, and after the contest there was going to be a party there. It wasn't Halloween or even close, it was more like summer, but they were having it anyway. I could see it in my mind, up near Scottsdale Rd., a lot of kids in costumes standing outside in a roped-off square area, near a building, waiting for it to be time to be judged. It was afternoon now, and I think the judging and/or giving out of awards was going to take place closer to 5:00 PM, though I didn't know the exact time, and it could take place earlier.

I fiddled with things at the shop for a while, without actually doing anything besides occasionally talking to people, then finally walked out the front, which faced to the east, and walked along the shopping center to the north. When I reached the edge of it, I looked toward the east, toward where the contest would take place, a few blocks away, and I think I might have walked in that direction for a bit, but I couldn't see anybody and thought I must have missed it, that they must have been judged already and then gone inside, or maybe it was even already all over and everyone had gone home. I guess I thought about walking down to check, but went back to the shop. Maybe I wanted to finish up things there first or tell them I was leaving.

It was late in the day, and the sun was almost down. I walked back along the walk, going by the long building with its different stores, though a lot of it was still empty, and part still unfinished. It was made of bricks of a fancy dark shiny material, maybe that's what the structures in the median were made of too.

I couldn't find the radiator shop though, it wasn't anywhere. I walked back and forth along the building. The shop was somewhere in the northern portion, but there was no sign for it, and the doors I saw, which weren't many, were closed. Finally I talked to someone about it, someone who had been walking by, and the person said something about there being a problem with the city, that they didn't like the idea of a radiator shop there, and forbid that there be radiator in the name. I noticed a place in the wall that had big dark areas where signs could be, black rectangles where thin boards painted black had been put, and it came to me, perhaps helped along by the person I was talking to, that they were allowed to put up signs saying what the shop was during business hours, but had to take them down afterward, and that a small ad had even been placed in the New Times newspaper, joking about it, and saying that the business was "That Which Cannot Be Named," and I think they were even considering making that the official name. The shop name didn't show up on the building now because it was closed, it had gotten after 5:00 PM while I had walked to check on the kids in the costumes. Everyone had gone and I couldn't get in now.

I decided to walk toward the south, and after a while crossed the street to the other side of the plaza. I came to some rooms that were very unfinished, with open fronts and boards and debris in the rooms. Some other people also came up to them and were interested in them. There seemed to be some kind of mystery involved. I think they were supposed to meet someone there, maybe earlier, but the person didn't show up. I went in the rooms of the two places, crawling around on my hands and knees through the dust and the scattered boards, which tended to be in untidy piles near the edges of the rooms, especially toward the back. They talked about things while I went, following along. They sometimes wondered too why I was there, what my connection to it was. I said I think something to the effect that I was just looking around at things. They wandered off after a while, not all of them together, and I left, too.

I went off at an angle toward the east-southeast, initially still crawling. One of the men walked along with me for a while, a man in late middle age, who was dressed well. His hair, white on the sides, was combed straight back. A little ways after I left the building I got back to my feet and walked along. After a little while he made a remark though about my leg, asking what was wrong with it. I guessed I must have been limping a little. I said something about me being in the hospital I think, and pulled up my right pants leg a little and showed him the tan pressure bandage, the special cloth bandage wrapped tightly around my leg. We continued walking on, him being perhaps ten feet or so from me much of the time, and a little ahead of me.

After a while we came to another plaza. It was on the southeast corner of some roads. It was night now or close to it. We both went into the building, though it was closed. I think he may have still been hoping to meet someone, but I'm not sure. We wandered around inside for a while, though we got separated at some point. It got to be very late. The place was unfinished, some places very much so, with rooms or even aisles that had lots of boards sitting at odd angles, sometimes against the partly finished walls, and plasterboard that was sometimes put up and with the nail depressions plastered over, but otherwise unfinished. Some of the rooms and aisles were so blocked by the boards that it was difficult to get in them or through them, and I tried a few times but didn't get much past the entrance to them. It didn't seem worth trying harder than that and I was a little nervous about doing it, or about being there at all. It didn't seem likely that they wanted people here, late at night with it closed, and especially not in places that needed a lot of work. Most of the places, though, were simply closed up, and many of them had the entrances walled over, like there were no stores there now, though I think some were simply closed for the night. There didn't seem to be many that way though, like a lot of it was still vacant spaces. The man was still with me then, or at least loosely with me, since we still tended to be separated by quite a bit. We sometimes ran into other people too, an occasional maintenance worker. I worried about them a bit, and though some of them looked at us a little strangely, they continued on their way, though I wondered if one of them would call somebody about us.

After a while I turned to the left, to the north, maybe on his suggestion. The other way was mostly blocked anyway, and I had just been trying to get in a room that was mostly blocked. As I took the aisle to the left, to the north, I soon came to a large broad open room to the right, to the east. It was unfinished but not too terribly cluttered. People were practicing for a play. It was something set a few hundred years ago, and some of them were dressed for their parts and some weren't. They paused when they saw me, and one of the people, a middle aged woman who was slightly overweight, came up to me and explained that they were trying to get ready for a play that was going to be put on in a day or two. She said the place was supposed to be finished by then, they had assured her it would, but she looked back to the side a little doubtfully at it, saying she wasn't sure.

As she talked, she walked forward at a slight angle, to the west-southwest, and as we crossed the aisle I saw that there was another large unfinished room there too, but a little smaller than the other one, that led to another room, a little lower and slightly to the southwest. Other people were there, in both rooms, but were headed for the farther one, practicing some part in the play, though some looked back at me as they went. Some were in costumes but maybe not all. The woman started trying to talk me into being part of it, "Say, you could...," wanting me to play one of the parts, maybe just as an understudy. I kept declining, "No, no....", but she kept insisting I could do it, that there was time. It didn't seem like there was much time to me, to learn all the part in a day or two. I was afraid I would forget some of it, was almost certain I would, while I was trying to do it in front of the audience. I didn't really want to get involved in it anyway. I didn't say anything about it though, and we walked on into the first room, heading to the second, as she kept talking about it.


Note: At the time of the dream, I had recently been in the hospital for a severe infection in my lower right leg, and still had a pressure bandage on it. Although I could (and did) walk, it showed up in the dream with me crawling for a while with it.

Dream - The little blue alien that visited my mother

On Monday, October 11, 2010, around 4:00-5:20 AM, I dreamed I walked into the living room from the hallway, and saw a small gray-type alien standing in front of my mother, who looked asleep. She was sitting down, and was at the other, west, end of the room, at the far end of the house actually, in a long narrow area that in the dream ran along the end. It didn't seem to fit with the rest of the house and almost seemed an afterthought, like a filled-in carport. She was wearing a gray sweat shirt and sweat pants, and was sitting on a square couch-like area that ran around a table, with the ends of the couch against the walls, in front of a big window to the front yard area. Her head was tilted a little forward and a little to the side, her eyes closed, and she seemed to be murmuring something, repeating back what the alien was communicating to her. I'm not sure if the alien was actually speaking, or just communicating with its mind, by telepathy. They seemed to be in some kind of communion together, and I felt that they had had many such meetings before.

The alien wasn't actually gray, it was a kind of blue, almost shiny, like leather. It was probably about three feet high. Its head was huge, becoming slightly two lobed at the top, tapering down some almost in a triangular fashion, to a small neck that was relatively short. Its back was to me, and I could see only a little of the side of it. I thought at first it was the little gray kid from next door who sometimes came and talked to her (in the dream it was a human kid who sometimes came over, a little boy with short crew cut-like grayish blond hair), but the whole scene immediately disturbed me for some reason. Then I realized what it really was, an alien, and my eyes grew big.

The alien seemed to sense that something was happening and started to turn its head a little, tilting it slightly, a big black eye partly showing, then all of a sudden it was a faint blur heading my direction and a little to the side, and then fading out. It was gone in a tiny fraction of a second. If I had blinked at the wrong time I would have missed its exit, it was over so fast.

I went off after the gray (really blue) alien, following it into a dining area where several tables were located with people sitting at them. Beyond was another doorway, a large one, that the thing had apparently gone through. There seemed to be little dots of light floating in the air. I wondered if it was somehow the creature, or was maybe something connected with it using a teleportation device or dimensional portal. I swatted at them. They weren't very numerous, just occasional dots, maybe only one or a few visible at once. I felt a slight impact when connecting with them. I turned and the people at a large table there were laughing, though only some of them were looking my way. They had little laser pens and were making dots in the air. Most of the dots were toward the other end of their table. They were having fun with them, just with the making of them and also with seeing if they could confuse people. I said that I could feel it when I hit them, and swiped at the dots again a time or two. I said it a couple of times, but I'm not sure if they believed me.

I wandered off toward the front of the building. The series of rooms kept getting higher, and seemed to have wooden floors, with short transitions that sloped up to the next level. I went though a level that seemed to have something to do with the radiator shop, and then one at the end that seemed to be a house again. My father was there, looking much younger, maybe in his forties. My mother had looked much younger, too. He was talking to some people. They seemed to be minor TV or movie stars, middle aged, who had decided to take up martial arts, and were doing swinging kicks in the middle of the room, but holding on to each other so that the kicks swung way out to the side. My father was sitting on a some dark couch way out into the room, and kicks from one of the people went swinging out way over his head and behind the couch, and swinging back around. On a kick or two the kick scraped against the left-front side of my father's face; apparently it was intended to just brush it, but contacted it a little more firmly than it should have. My father had a shiny piece of thin pale flexible plastic stuck to his face in that area, and he reached up to it and complained a bit, remarking that it might have left a mark (an abrasion) on him that might take a few days to heal, and he would have to walk around like that and explain it to people.

Someone was standing on the other side of my father, a fairly short person who might have been a female, who I think had relatively short blondish hair that stuck out some at the sides, like it was poorly combed. The face of that person was also brushed by a kick, but more lightly, evidently at the planned pressure, though I was never sure whether the extra force on my father's face might not have been intentional. The person who did it remarked on it, but didn't seem to apologize. He and the person he was struggling with sometimes talked, sometimes to each other. After a while they stopped practicing and were wiping the sweat off their faces, and talking some more. I got the feeling that they were hoping to get some Stallone-like movie roles.

I went back to my mother, who had gone over toward the other side of the house, toward the bedrooms, and had gotten a very small gray alien against a small black briefcase, and wanted me to tape it down. I found some Scotch tape in a different room and came back with it. I saw though that she had lots of little aliens taped on already, one to two inches high. The first one was much smaller now, too. I wondered if they could get air, or if they even needed it.

I went looking for a magnifying glass, and went back up to the the upper levels. I tried to get back down to the lower level with a wooden staircase/ladder set in a half-size door opening, but found most of the slats broken away, and I started hanging onto the handle loop of a giant wooden basket they were slowly swinging back and forth and slowly lowering. A man, who might have been Buzz from the TV soap opera "Guiding Light", was in it singing a slow made-up song about a woman, Mary Tyler Moore maybe, who was in the hospital but he hoped would be out soon. The song was to the tune of a familiar one, I think I was thinking Auld Lang Syne, but when I woke up I realized that wasn't the one. I was hanging on to the huge arching handle of the basket, on the side near the top, as it slowly swung back and forth and slowly got lower, toward the small happy crowd below and also heading toward something else, some kind of round walled enclosure maybe five or six feet high, with something in it. The enclosure seemed to be the intended destination.

The long basket handle was fairly thin for its size, and it had a place where it was hooked together with something, a bright metal wire clasp almost like a safety pin or maybe even a paper clip, with a gap of several inches. It seemed a somewhat inadequate repair. I was holding on to the basket handle, on both sides of the clasp, hanging on. The clasp came unhooked then, basically slipped off a notch on the upper portion of the handle, and I was holding the basket handle, with one hand on each section, keeping it from separating too much. I had to go the bathroom and hoped they would hurry this up, but they seemed to be taking their time, as the basket slowly swung and very slowly got lower, and the man kept singing. It looked like it would have been better to take another route down, gone down by some other stairs, but it was too late now.

The dream had a lot more earlier in it, but I don't remember it.


I eventually mentioned to my mother that I had had a dream with her talking with an alien in the living room. She didn't like that idea.


Note: Oddly enough, at the end of the Amazing Race episode on Sunday, October 17, 2010, the two men who came in last and had to leave the race were apparently singers, and sang a slow song at the end about being last, to the tune of some Irish song that I can't remember, maybe Danny Boy but that may not be it. The song seemed eerily reminiscent of the tune in the dream, but with different words of course. The dream may have been predictive of it, almost a week before it happened.

Dream - The imitation Superman and the Kryptonian lettuce-man

On Monday, September 6, 2010, Labor Day, sometime in the afternoon, while napping at the computer, I dreamed I was in the neighborhood, going along 74th St., back to the house. Earlier I had been in a shopping center, that it seems went in parts into a shallow cave. I was also sometimes in a very large tunnel dug out of the earth, with uneven dirt walls. I was a long time in this part of the dream. I was a Superman-like figure, but at the same time apart, someone else too. There were some Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen and Perry White people, too.

Now I was also two people going back to the house somehow, generally separated, one sometimes more back by McDowell Rd. We had been at a shopping center there, where Los Arcos used to be.

Somebody was suspicious of me/us. I turned onto a cross street, still heading home, and something happened, I'm not sure if there was a struggle, or if I just confronted him and overpowered him, but I ended up carrying him around for a while, like a very large stuffed pillow. I got home, and he wouldn't give up, and I finally banged his head repeatedly and violently on things, holding his body and swinging him down. He was now more like a Teddy bear made out of a pillow. Some other people came in and wondered about what I was doing, maybe the Jimmy-Lois-Perry people, but I quickly hid him. Then after a while, I sneaked him out the window with me. He was much smaller now, and I held him against me like a light gray throw pillow wrapped up in some cloth.

I took him back to the shopping center where Los Arcos used to be. It was several stories high, maybe as many as six or eight, and was still under construction, though it was being used. I tried to hide him somewhere, but then had to move him. Eventually, I was high up on a partially finished section. I was going to try to sneak him out, but construction workers were around. It seems I was temporarily injured or weakened somehow, too, and didn't have all my powers. After sneaking along the section I was on, I tried to cross the gap to another, higher part of the building. Some scattered workers saw me and remarked on it, saying that something seemed to be wrong with me. Flying up and across a little, I managed to reach up and pull myself up onto the building section. People knew I was Superman and I didn't want them to know that something was wrong with me. I wasn't the real Superman, just a lesser imitation somehow, and knew this, but they didn't. They were wondering what I was doing, excited about it and talking among themselves while they watched me. I tried to seem like everything was alright, smiling, tried to seem purposeful. I still had to hide the package, the cloth-wrapped pillow-like man, somewhere. I put it in the section of the building I had reached, temporarily hiding it there. This area was still under construction, and probably no one would come here for a while.

A little later, I came back and got it and walked behind the buildings. It was still about the size of a flat throw pillow, wrapped up in cloth. There was a lot of mostly open land, fields, with widely spaced homes. I took it to where they were growing some lettuce-like things, something like leaf lettuce, a little purplish looking. I tried to hide it among them. A man was there, bent over, working. He somehow knew what was going on, and had even been waiting for me. He looked up at me in immediate understanding, and grunted an acknowledgment. We had actually done this sort of thing before. He was going to hide it among the densely packed rows of thick bunches of lettuce leaves. People most likely would never look way out here, or suspect anything, but if they did come out it would be hard to see without doing a thorough search, which they would have no reason to do. The package actually seemed to blend with the lettuce as I handed it toward him, and as we were both holding it for a time, it was coming to look something like the lettuce, seeming to become in part purplish lettuce. I hoped that it would be alright, that he would be alright. He was injured when I was beating up on him, and I hoped he would heal. The lettuce was actually from Krypton, Kryptonian lettuce, and it seemed that the genes from it would be partly blended into his, making him actually part lettuce. Since the lettuce was from Krypton, it too had superpowers, and I hoped and felt that being partly made of it would speed his healing and make him stronger faster, make him much better able to heal, and that he would get better quickly, in only a few days.

Then I went away from the area, to the edge of it, on I guess the north, and it seemed the land blended into a large ship, though embedded in the land, and I was walking along it along the way between the railing and the rooms. I met some people along the way, some of whom seemed to be against me. It seems I was at least partly disguised as Clark Kent at least part of the time. I also met some people from work, maybe Jimmy and Lois. There were some small struggles at times, and something about the lettuce-man coming back, sometimes as partly a man I think, and there was some worry that someone was going to try to hold it over me, what I had done to him, use the threat of exposure of it to control me. I don't remember much about it anymore.

Dream - Harry Potter, Mr. Monk, and the pizza of appreciation

On Sunday, August 29, 2010, around 7:00-10:30 AM, I dreamed it was daytime, and I was driving to the other (west) side of Phoenix, in the 1970 Cadillac. My mother might have been with me. I went to an open place, not much development, with dirt and some desert vegetation, bushes, and small trees. The ground was rising up some, in a roll. Before that it seems there was a small canal running across the land, a few scattered buildings, not much. I spent quite a bit of time there, in the beginning of the dream, but I don't remember much about it.

Then I was in Tempe, it seems around the Mill Ave. area, more or less. It was late afternoon, evening, or might have been very early morning instead. I might have stopped in a small store of some kind. There were lots of small cross streets. It wasn't really as it is in real life, though it's possible it might have more of a resemblance to it as at was decades ago, combined with other things. It's possible my mother was with me, I'm not sure. I went back there a few times, and possibly she wasn't initially with me, but I know she was later.

We went to an area that had recently been constructed, still under construction in places. A major road went north/south, and on the east a smaller road looped out from it, more curved on the south side but with a sharper corner on the north, before it went back straight to the main street. Pale stucco buildings and walls lined the loop road; some of the buildings were right at the sidewalk and some set back some, with low stucco walls in front. It was a narrow, residential-sized street, with parallel parking, some in indents. Some cars were parked there now. I got the Cadillac in a narrow space, somehow, by force of will it seems, magic, somehow lifting it sideways, mostly with my mind. Later, I would make several trips there, and collapse the car to a small bundle of things, letting me park it wherever I wanted.

There was a house in the loop formed by the road. It had a broad front yard going to the main street, and a much smaller back yard, hardly anything at all, with a very small asphalt paved parking area at the back, with curbs, and a lane that ran through under the house, like a driveway. The back yard, with its parking area, ended at the loop road. Sometimes the front yard was much larger, especially at the beginning. A family lived in the house, mother and father and several children, of varying ages. The house seemed somehow reminiscent of my grandmother's house in Arizona, at least some of the interior of it, even having an old organ in the living room, but the outside of the house didn't look anything like it.

I went in it and talked to the people a bit, and it seems that the Harry Potter kid did also at some point. I think they were all excited and happy to see him. A new Harry Potter movie series was being made, with a new person playing him. It had been a long time since the last one, maybe a couple of decades, and the previous actor was middle-aged, too old to play him. They were doing a search for a new boy to play him. What seemed to be the favorite was a shy, slim, quiet boy with a crew cut, pale light brown, almost blond hair. As I kept looking at him, it sometimes seemed that he was older, and that the hair on the sides, very short there, was actually gray or white. I kept seeing him on a street corner, in a mixed residential/commercial area, where I guess they first discovered him. I had a feeling he could do real magic, or could be trained to. Sometimes, too, I seemed to be him.

Mr. Monk (from the TV show Monk) showed up sometimes, and was apparently interchangeable with the boy playing Harry Potter. He went to the house in the loop, where he had found that he was accepted and the people liked him. He kept going back frequently, sometimes more then once a day. He was very happy and smiling, that he had found some people who liked and accepted him. He got in the habit of always bringing them a pizza, to show his appreciation with them.

I got the flat pile of things that represented the car, which we left in the small parking area of a business, behind a low stucco wall, in the straight area on the north that led west to the main road. I had left it on the trunk of another car. There was a small medallion, too, that I used in the process of restoring it. It was a lot easier to do it this way than to try to park the car. I could just carry it and find some impossible parking space and then restore it there. We were leaving now, going away from here for the time being. I worried about losing the medallion, but then had it again. I thought I could probably do it without the medallion, that it might just be a prop I was using to help me do it, but I still worried about it.

My mother had walked on, to the street where my car was parked, the main street. It was perhaps a hundred feet or so down the road from the loop, to the north. This seems contradictory, but I had no problem with it in the dream. I went after her, carrying the flat bunch of things that was my car, its layers of flat things, loosely connected. It seems it might have been clear plastic sleeves, maybe 29 x 18 inches, connected on the end sometimes, with papers or even flattened cloth sheets inside them, with some other things, and maybe 4 to 6 inches high.

I went out to the car, in spite of actually carrying the car in the form of the bundle. I noted the contradiction in my mind. It seemed a little amusing, but that seemed to be the way it was, and I had no ready solution for it. This section of the street didn't have too much built up along it, it had a little bit though, perhaps more on the other side of the street. A few other cars were parked on the street here, but not many. A pale stucco wall ran beside the sidewalk. Several hundred feet ahead, to the north, the road ended where it intersected a major cross street. It late in the afternoon I think, getting toward evening.

My mother had already gotten in the car. I laid the bundle on the trunk momentarily, then opened the trunk and put it inside, the medallion with it I think, then closed the trunk. I was distracted for a bit by someone who had come up on the sidewalk, a woman in her thirties maybe, and talked to her for a little while from several feet away. There were also one or two other people, at least one of which might be associated with her, but I talked to her. It seems the Harry Potter character might have been there too, a little farther away maybe. We might have been talking about him.

I turned back to the car and saw that my mother had gotten tired of waiting and had driven away in it. I hurried after her, calling out, pausing frequently, uncertain what to do, how to proceed. It seemed I could use magic to get to her, zoom through the air somehow, and though it seemed to me that I could do it, I wasn't sure how. She reached the main cross street and turned right onto it. I followed after, sometimes making long hops covering a broad area. Another car was there too, that might have come up from the west. It felt kind of like the road that used to run by Woolco, going to Phoenix, before they changed it. My mother turned left at Rural/Scottsdale Rd., going north. I continued after her. I kept trying to catch up with her, kept trying to reach the car, but was unable to, and mile after mile went by.

I finally caught up with the car, getting a little frantic by this time. It was daylight, I'm not sure what time, but it seemed to be an odd hour, and maybe Sunday. I was in what looked like the downtown, business area of a small town, lots of streets with businesses on them, cars parked at a slant along the streets. I got in the car and talked to my mother, and found that she still wanted to drive. She sat there in the driver's seat, and stayed there. I couldn't convince her to let me drive. I finally got in on her side, and made her move over, though she was actually sitting on top of me at first. She moved over, then, complaining. We were stopped in the street, and had been for a while, but there was no traffic at the moment. I worried about the police seeing us and possibly complaining. I thought I had seen a police car on a nearby street, but nothing happened. Maybe he didn't see us, or maybe we got done fast enough that he decided to let us go. My mother wanted me to drive back to the other side of Phoenix again. I had been trying to go back there too, but it kept getting later, things were taking a long time.

Sometime later I went somewhere, it seems alone, to what felt like somewhere in Scottsdale, possibly in the Hayden Rd. area, possibly somewhere between Indian School and Thomas Rds. I went into a small shopping center, into a room there, a small store maybe. Several people were there. It seemed to be a fan kind of place, maybe a comic book store. There were several people there. I saw a Star Trek fan. He played a character in the store there, and maybe some other places, probably Spock or another Vulcan, as they looked in the original series. He seemed slightly Asian. He looked at me with an amused smile and talked with me a bit. He then gave me a shiny business card, with a broad crosshatched shiny area, the streaks going different ways in each little square/diamond. He wanted me to use the card to contact him later. He apparently had some other place he worked at, too.

Mr. Monk went back/I went back to the residential neighborhood, in the area where they found the boy to play Harry Potter. Three or so other boys were there. They were also hoping to be chosen to play him. I was surprised that the movie people were still looking, I thought the choice had already been pretty much made. The boys were still hopeful. I didn't think they had much of a chance, but didn't say so. One of them was larger than the others, a bit pudgy, with an odd looking head. He was disturbing to look at. He did most of the talking though, more than the other kids. It seemed to be mid to late afternoon, with lots of shadows, and the temperature was pleasant.

It was daytime, then, on a different day maybe, and a person in the house by the loop road, a young man, maybe a teenager, was talking to reporters, from inside, through the window. He said they were getting tired of Monk coming back, and bringing the pizza with him each time. They were getting tired of the pizza, and of him coming all the time. They liked seeing him at first, but they had gotten tired of it, of him coming all the time. The reporter was interested, and was busily writing it down in a notebook. He seemed more of a gossip reporter. Then the kid changed his mind, and didn't want them to say it about the pizza, he felt that it might be giving away too much. He told the reporter to write down a particular soup instead. It was a vegetable/grain soup, gazpacho maybe, but I don't remember the name. The reporter quickly changed what had been written and put down the soup name instead.

Monk went to a small fast-food pizza/Italian place in the outer portion of the road loop. Businesses were packed together there now. It was a lot different from what it was earlier. There was a huge crowd of people on the sidewalks and street. The business was largely take-out, but there was a small dimly-lit inside section. It was the place that the Star Trek person worked. Monk, holding the shiny card and using it to find the address, had decided to get pizza there now; he had been getting it somewhere else before. He/I hoped that it would still taste okay, and that they wouldn't mind the difference. There was a bit of excitement there. The employees, seemingly amused, but intent on doing good service, did some rushing around, but something else seemed to be going on, too. Monk finally got the pizza and headed back over to the house.

He had a lot of trouble getting in. The family didn't want him anymore. It had become too old, and too much of a media circus. He wandered back and forth, going past it on the backyard side and down the driveway to the street, and looking at it from the front side, over the long sloping lawn, from near the street, then going back to the loop street by the back. It seemed to be mid to late afternoon. Sometimes a member or two of the family came out across the back yard to talk to him, with one or two large dogs, maybe cocker spaniels or retrievers, sometimes running ahead of them. But frequently, especially at first, the family just looked out through the windows, sometimes telling him to go away.

After a lot of difficulty, he finally managed to get them to agree to let him in. The pizza seemed acceptable, though some of them looked at it a little curiously, with slight smiles. The kids just seemed to want to mostly play, sometimes sitting on the floor. The adults talked to him casually, with little smiles, but seemed much more distant than before. Monk tried to act like it was like the other times, seeming to be happy, and smiling, and he was happy to be in there, but he wasn't certain he would be let back in again.


My mother and I were out driving again. I drove for a long time, and we talked to each other a lot. It seemed to be mostly in the Phoenix area. It was getting late, around dusk, and we eventually came to near the Tempe area, from the west. As we got closer to it, the road turned right, to the south, and not far from that, on the left, the east, was a squarish old building, dark brick, several stories high, that had a broad opening in the lower floor, basically the whole side of the lower story. I had seen the building several times before, as I drove around in the dream, even been in it.

I debated with myself whether to go into the building. If I drove into it, it would be a shortcut to getting home. When we came out, on the other side, we would be closer to home, and there would be less driving involved. I had done it before, without any real problem, but it was tricky doing it. It involved going up a square spiraling ramp at high speed, and the car shooting through a wall, the north one, fading through it, the wall acting like a dimensional gateway. I felt uneasy about it now, and it didn't feel like it would be quite so easy as it had been. I was tireder now, and it would be more difficult to react that quickly. I discussed taking the building with my mother, briefly, but she basically said that it was alright if I wanted to do it, leaving it up to me.

In the end I turned into it, and we were going up the ramp. It twisted around in a broad spiral, with straight sides, and became much narrower and finally almost vertical, going up boards that were nailed across a slightly sloping wall. It became too hard to drive the car, because of the steepness. We got out and I carried it, or what had become of it, leading the way. Other people or cars were also going up. The passage became the size of a narrow hallway. A few stories up, as we reached the east wall again, we got to something like a small landing, with a door beside it, to the left. Past the landing, the slope was more gentle. Cars whizzed past us, evidently not needing to stop there. Some seemed to disappear through the door like ghosts, at an extreme angle, without slowing at all, while others continued on, to some other destination, some disappearing through the north wall. I used the shiny card given to me earlier, giving it to someone at the window at the landing I think, to finally get out. I worried about getting the card back, but I did, in a room on the other side, at a small counter that was on the other side of the window at the landing. I needed the contact information on it, and was glad I got it back.

The room was at ground level, in spite of my having entered it from a few stories up. The door acted as a dimensional gateway, allowing the attachment. The room was fairly good-sized, about the size of a small store, and had a lot of people playing video or arcade type games. It's possible some betting took place, too. There was also a long counter by a wall, at the front, where people could get food and drinks. I couldn't see it from where I was, because it was beside me and a wall was in the way, but I knew it was there, from when I spent some time there early in the dream. I was basically at the entranceway to the room. A few people, young men, stood in and by the entranceway, casually, but looking at me, seeming to guard the entrance. Apparently I wasn't too welcome anymore, perhaps because of what happened last time, or maybe it had something to do with the recent trip up the long sloping ramp. When I had been here before, I had used the normal entrance, not come through the gateway. When I had used the gateway before, driving at high speed into the north wall, I had sailed through the darkness, and landed on a road somewhere, closer to home.

We went outside, and it was daylight. The building was just one story. It felt a little odd, going in a multistory building and coming out a one-story one, but the passage through the long sloping ramp, and then the door, had been dimensional travel of some kind, and the multistory building with the ramp was elsewhere, somewhere to the west, not even visible from here I think. We were in the area where Woolco used to be. The building was across the parking lot from it, at or near the northeast corner of the lot, near Rural Rd. We went home then, or maybe somewhere else.