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.