Dream - I try to fix the station wagon but it just gets worse, it's towed away, I look for it and the man who towed it, a friend gets poisoned, and I come across various things, including a tractor-like vehicle, a robot, and a device left with an old woman

On Sunday, June 20, 2010, around 8:30-11:45 PM, I dreamed I went to my sister's house with my mother. I think my sister was planning to go somewhere soon for a while, out of state. My sister's house looked nothing like it does in real life, and wasn't where it is in real life. It had very large rooms, but not many of them, and some were partly open to the outside. My sister also had a woman visiting her, slim, probably in her twenties or thirties. I think we might have been going to eat supper there, but I'm not sure.

We were finally going to go back home, then. We got in the car, which was in one of the rooms that was partly open to the outside. The light was dim there, though it had been bright in the other room. We were driving the light blue 1973 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon.

I started the car, and it was making a light tapping noise. It seemed to be the fan. My mother wanted the fan shroud adjusted, and didn't want to leave until it was done. She had fiddled with it before we came for some reason, and it was making a little noise now from the fan blades tapping it. I was loudly begging her to just please, please let it be and let's go home and worry about it later. She kept insisting, saying that we couldn't drive it while it was like this, that she was surprised that I would want to, that it wasn't safe, or something like that. She got out of the car and opened the hood herself and started poking at things.

I finally got some tools and took things loose and was trying to work on it. My mother was talking and I was complaining, and my sister was making remarks, sometimes teasing and sometimes looking insulted, depending on what I said. Her woman friend looked on, amused. I had a couple of tool trays, mine I think, and my sister also had a tool tray, on one of the long tables, that I sometimes looked through. I also looked through the car for tools, especially in the front, in the glove box and on the dashboard. The tools tended to be old and dirty, and sometimes strangely shaped. I kept fiddling with things. I would get part of it done and then couldn't find the right tools again, and then was trying to find something that would work.

I finally had the whole engine out, and then one of the heads off. I set it on a very large table with a tablecloth, next to the car, then it got moved to another very large table, also with a tablecloth. I was loudly talking to my sister about it, irritated that I kept getting constantly interrupted while I was trying to do this, saying that I had the whole engine block out, and it probably weighed 500 pounds, and I could lift it, see, and I picked it up and held it in the air and then held it up and out with my left hand. I had been concerned that it might be too heavy to lift, but it wasn't actually too bad. Then she was going to meet my challenge by lifting it, and I had put it on the other table, and she was smiling and grinning and lifted the head up and held it, and then she was going to put it back and then lift the rest, or maybe the rest without it, but then it was missing and we couldn't find it anywhere. It turned out she had hidden it on a chair by the head under a big cloth, and had made it seem that the cloth was just covering the head. It was something she had done to fool me. A man friend of hers came then to try to help, supposedly. At least I got the engine back.

My mother kept wanting to go, trying to hurry me up. My sister wanted us to go too, so she could finish getting ready and go on her trip. I had only gotten the thermostat housing partly tightened and I couldn't find the right tools now to finish it. The top hose wasn't even on yet, and the radiator had to be refilled with antifreeze and the fan shroud adjusted. I was going to just dump antifreeze in and fill it up and hope we had enough to get at least partway home before it overheated. The antifreeze level would drop after the engine warmed up some, and so would be too low then and would have to be refilled.

We got out of the house and out from it to a large dark parking lot. A man was coming though, trying to get us, wanting to get the car and tow it away. We had someone else with us I think, maybe my niece. The man was going to tow the car, or try to, or a man of some kind tried to.


I think it did turn up missing, and I was trying to find it, going through a series of rooms in a large building, relatively nearby I think, within a few blocks. I found a large tractor-like vehicle in a room there. I thought it had something to do with it, maybe was used for the towing. I cut the main electrical wire to the engine, to the distributor or whatever the equivalent was, and was holding it out to the engine, which was now running, and zapped the engine with it. The engine was completely open on the sides, no covering over it, and was a straight something or other, probably a large straight six.

As I was zapping the side of the engine, a man came from around the counter, on the other side of the vehicle, and was concerned about what I was doing. He said something about the man coming back soon I think, and he didn't want it damaged, though he seemed smugly doubtful I could damage it. I moved the wire over to the distributor, and tried zapping that for a while. The engine kept on running, kind of ragged and irregular, not much of a change from when I was zapping the side of the engine though, maybe a little worse. I finally stopped and left, going to another area, still trying to find the car.


Sometime later, I was at a restaurant somewhere in the place. It was the middle of the night I think. I was with someone, a man I knew. He was concerned somehow with helping me get the car back, and fighting the people, though he wasn't there earlier in the dream. He seemed an important part of it now, though. We had been at the bar, talking with each other and with another person or two, eating there. We started to get ready to go, and he turned to get his coat, which he had put on the back of a chair at a table near the front. The coat, a jacket, had a greasy area on the back of the neck, on the inside, maybe a couple of inches long. It was poison. It was something that had been tried earlier on me I think, and on him in earlier versions of the scene. He went to put it on now, talking to me.

I nervously tried to stop him from putting it on, without saying anything about the poison I think. It seemed like it would be altering the scene with knowledge that I wasn't really supposed to have. Then I took him home, or tried to. He was poisoned by the greasy substance on the back of his coat neck, and he was immediately feeling dizzy. Trying to hurry and get him home, I took the wrong way through the building and its tunnels, having to go back and try a different direction, sometimes without him coming with me, with him still back in the other tunnel, with me waiting for him and finally going on, and then trying again. I finally got him home. I wasn't sure if he would survive, but I left him with his family, and hoped for the best. In an earlier version, or a history hinted at, he didn't make it, though it seems we actually lived through at least one prior version in the dream, and the last one redid it.


I went back and attacked the machine, or tried to. Going back to the big building with the series of rooms, I came across a mostly bare room, concrete-floored, maybe the room where the tractor-like thing had been. I saw a device there like an air conditioner condenser, but thicker. I thought it was connected to the man we were having trouble with, who was trying to get us, and had taken the car. I poked at the grill of it, actually just fins and tubes, poking with a screwdriver-like thing with a bent tip, trying to damage it. It hissed but didn't leak liquid. I wondered if it had air in the tubes or maybe something like a air conditioner has, freon. A man came from around the counter objecting, and a strange little robot, like a thick mobile air conditioner condenser with skinny metal legs and arms. I poked at it with the tool, too. It had been talking, and now its voice sounded funny. It talked somewhat quicker and irregularly, and seemed to be making less sense. It awkwardly rushed off to the side and threw up a little, while the man was talking concernedly at it, then it rushed off in a different direction and tried to throw up again. I left, still looking for the man.

I went outside, and eventually to a place ran by a short skinny woman in late middle age, heavily wrinkled. It was a large outdoor room, out near the road, by the parking lot. The area seemed relatively isolated. The room had a roof but no walls, at least not complete walls. It had a low dark wall running around it, maybe three feet high, with dark screening over the rest, at least in most areas. It was sometime during the day now. She had several devices, lots of them, set out on old long wooden benches. I started poking at one I felt the man had left there, trying to damage it. The woman seemed saddened but a little resigned to it, and talked to me about it. She was obviously concerned about the damage, she was trying to sell them or do something else with some of them, maybe repair them and sell them, or maybe repair them for the owners, and damage would mean a significant loss of money for her. I felt sorry for her, but still felt it should be done, to try to get back at the man. I think I tried to damage a few other things, too. Other people sometimes came and went, men, cowboy-like, who were concerned with other of the devices, maybe dropping them off or picking them up.


I finally made it home, with the car I think. My mother was there, too. It was late afternoon it seemed. I was out in the side in the front, by the carport, near where the round circle of garden border blocks were. I had a shovel I think, and was trying to do something, maybe something with the side yard, but there was also a large device of some kind there I was trying to do something with, and also maybe still trying to do something to the car. For some reason I was not wearing anything from the waist down. I was talking to her, but she didn't seem somehow to really be my mother now, she looked much younger and looked different, and maybe wasn't actually my mother now, it seemed she was actually someone else. I didn't know who she was, though it felt that I did seem to know her, or should know her. I said I thought this was something we had agreed to do, being naked, and you were going to take your clothes off, too. She talked back to me, not looking down, and was saying something like yes, but she had changed her mind, and was wanting me to get dressed. Her eyes looked partly blind too, partly clouded. She seemed tired, and while she did seem bothered some by my being naked from the waist down, she seemed only mildly bothered, and just slightly concerned, almost like it was an afterthought. Some other people were going to come, she reminded me, we were concerned about it, and in a hurry to get things ready. She left, went in the house I guess, probably through the carport door.

Some other people did come, while I was out working, generally one at a time, thin cowboy-looking figures, middle aged. I was becoming more and more concerned about being naked, and was sometimes trying to hold something in front of me, to partly cover me. Nobody mentioned it though, or seemed to pay much attention to it.