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.