Dream - The house with the narrow bridge, running from the Air Force, who thinks I'm an alien, then aliens are in my backyard and then in the kitchen

On Tuesday, June 8, 2010, around 10:00 AM-1:00 PM, I dreamed it was night, and I was driving along, though I think sometimes I was also walking. I was going to the far east side of the Phoenix area, deep into Mesa or Chandler probably, through a residential area on a major road. I think that someone else was with me, maybe in a different car. I believe I went through this area more than once in the dream.

Going back and forth, I eventually centered on and went to a house that had a long narrow raised bridge to the mailbox at the sidewalk, just a footpath. I walked up to the house with my mother and one or two other people. We walked around the house and in the doorways. I think it had two or three of them, at different places. The light was pretty dim. There were a few lights around the house, but they seemed almost decorative, and didn't put out much light. We went around the back to go in. I don't think people were there at first, but they came and invited us in. It was a large house with a large front yard, and sometimes looked a bit medieval from the front. It was fairly elaborate though, like something that might be owned by a wealthy person.

Someone may have commented on the narrow bridge to the mailbox out at the sidewalk, perhaps even me. In any case, it somehow got into the discussion. It was a rural style mailbox, on a post. The yard was several feet under the bridge, maybe as much as six feet or more in some areas, but the ground was irregular and rocky, with some water in some places I think, and partly covered by either an extremely low grass or a low moss. I guess I volunteered to go check the mail, to use the bridge going out to it. I guess I was just trying to show that I could do it, but I was a little uncertain about it, actually. I managed to walk out to the mailbox, with some hesitations along the way, but it seemed much narrower going back and I ended up hugging the bridge, not even sure I could proceed. The owner of the house kept encouraging me, and I did eventually make it back, though it was a long process. I may have done this more than once, I'm not sure.

I came back later, in the daytime, to have my legs and feet examined, to see if they were alright because of a past problem. The dog had scratched them earlier, but my legs and feet had looked alright. Now I found they had long massive open splits, gouges. The doctor, who both evidently lived at the house and had offices there, looked at my mother first. My father was also there, I think, and my brother, accompanying us. I tried to get the doctor's attention and show him my legs and feet and explain about the dog, but he looked briefly at them and nodded and said that can happen, and went back to working on my mother. I wandered back out. It was a square building, not overly large, and looked different than it had in the dark. In fact, at night sometimes it had seemed fairly large, though still square in shape. The yard even looked normal now, smaller and more of a normal size, and flat with normal grass, and it had a hedge separating it from its neighbor. We finally left.

Later, I went back to the house with the narrow bridge. It was getting late in the day. I thought it would be the doctor's house, but it had somebody else, a doctor who substitutes for him. I was there for a while. Supper was being fixed and I was offered to stay and have some, but I declined and said I had to leave. I went out, heading for the back, past a room where a couple of men, friends of theirs, were watching TV, and maybe playing cards. They also offered to have me stay, but I went on. They got up then, and started to leave the room, going the way I had come. It was time to have supper.

I continued making my way to the back. It was getting more complicated than before. There were more rooms and it was spread out more, and people were coming and going, through big glass doors, two or three layers of them, with small entryways in between. A woman asked if she could help and took me off to the side, to other rooms to take and exit from them eventually I guess. Some other people came in and passed through I guess, coming from the back. It seemed almost like some kind of business now, maybe part of a shopping center or large store, like a home improvement store. I wasn't sure this was the right way to go, where she had taken me. It might have been better trying to exit the other way. Some doors seemed to lead in that direction, to the back, from the relatively small room I was in, but there seemed to be other rooms in the way, and I wasn't sure I could get to the exit from them. I evidently got out eventually, but I'm not sure how.


Also, somewhere in the dream, I was gliding low over the parking lot of what was apparently a shopping center. I had driven in at night and parked there, going to the right around a long narrow feature. It seemed to be low concrete walls with a gap in the middle with a deep trench, with landscaping below, and some very small narrow arched bridges/footpaths over it. After parking I went up in the air and glided over things, going vaguely in the direction of the shopping center or whatever it was. It was late at night and I think closed. I expected it to be. There were lots of cars in the parking lots though. I may have been just exploring, or going by the shopping center to somewhere else, maybe trying to get home or to someplace I could stay for the night, when I got distracted by it.

I passed by a raised area with a military installation, Air Force I think. It had a big hill on one side that people had to go up, trainees at least, to an office at the top, where they were approved to reenter the base. Instead of going up the steep, paved, one lane road, I glided along it for a bit, then glided over the low concrete wall and went beside it, up the hillside, filled with rock outcroppings and brush, gliding low over it. A soldier with a mounted machine gun was looking out a window in a concrete wall, watching things, guarding the place. He reported what I was doing, and seemed uncertain about what to do. They radioed back to keep watch on me I think, and report on what I was doing, while they sent other people to try and capture me. I got in anyway, in the main building, staying mostly behind some shelves.

While there, I heard them talking about me and asking if they had found me. The soldier that had come in was saying that they had lost sight of me, but believed that I had gotten in the building. The officers seemed to believe I was an alien, from outer space, and had to be captured or killed.

Meanwhile, other soldiers were looking at me funny. They didn't recognize me. I hoped they would assume I was one of the new recruits. I tried to assume that role, and act like I was one. I eventually had to go to the other side of the shelves, where the officers were talking. I tried to be clumsy at things, and not know what I was doing, trying to act the part of an ignorant recruit. They had paused when I came around the shelves, and looked at me, then resumed talking. When I was making mistakes they stopped again, and one of the officers finally tried to correct me, saying, "Soldier, I know you are new..." or something like that, and then giving me advice. They got suspicious of me at some point though, and I had to escape.

I went back again later, gliding up the hill again. They responded faster, though, and I don't think I got back inside, instead going down the other side of the hill and then over things, in a kind of convoluted path, trying to elude them, and finally going back into the parking lot of the shopping center, which looked a little different. It had more cars, too, I think. It was full of them. Some of the details of the lot were different, too. It still had the long narrow trench with its low concrete walls and landscaping, though it didn't look exactly the same. It all looked pretty familiar for the most part though, and I was saying to myself, I remember this and this and this...

The soldiers were quite a ways behind me, back closer to the shopping center or whatever it was, but they were coming my way. I could hear them on their radios, like my mind was tuned into them. Sometimes they saw me and sometimes they didn't. I needed to get to my car, find where I parked it and get away. It was somewhere on the other side of the trench. The parking lot sloped uphill here, away from the shopping center. I needed to get over the trench, glide over it like before, or around it. I think I was getting past the trench but soldiers were starting to appear at different spots around the parking lot, maybe as close as 40 or 50 feet. I might not be able to go directly to my car. I didn't want them to know where it was, or get in the way when I tried to leave. I started to move in more of a curved zigzag, trying to draw them away and also escape from them.


Then, later, I was at home, in the kitchen and dining room area, wandering back and forth, talking to my mother, who was in the dining room standing near the kitchen table I think, working on papers. Looking out back, through the window in the door to the backyard, while standing in the kitchen, I saw an alien in the backyard. It went behind a bunch of things there, mainly a jumbled stack of pale boxes, not very wide, but with some other things around it and mixed in too. It was like a demon sheep, like the political ad featuring a human in a sheep costume. It was behind the things peering out, dark eyes looking at me, talking to me with a strange, high, Mickey Mouse-like voice, sometimes barely audible. It seemed to want to be friendly, and to some extent I tried to be, but it was also frightening, terrifying, especially when I looked at it, and its eyes.

I was in the kitchen talking to my mother about it, who was in the dining room I think. I kept coming back to the window in the door and looking out. Sometimes I could see it and sometimes I couldn't. It seemed to be playing hide and seek with me, peering out now and then, sometimes coming back to the things in the middle of the yard that it was hiding behind, like it repeatedly left and then came back. I wasn't sure if it was just one or if there were several of them out there.

Then the alien was in the kitchen, behind a pile of boxes made of thin cardboard, that hadn't been there before. I told my mother about it and she came in the kitchen and looked. The alien was singing a song, faintly, a popular song. I thought it liked me and was trying to be friendly, but at the same time it was shy and a little scared of me. I tried to look behind the boxes and see it, or them, but though I had initially seen it peering out briefly earlier, it seemed to move around behind them or inside the pile, like the pile was partially hollow, and I couldn't find it. The singing was trailing off and as I looked I came to feel that it or they were gone. I straightened up and told my mother I thought that they were gone.

Then we were warned by a man who was an alien in disguise, to stop calling aliens. He came to the carport door and then into the house. He was tall and skinny and angular and a little stooped I think, and very ominous and threatening, or at least he was trying to be. I wasn't sure how much he could really do, or what connection he had with the earlier aliens, though he seemed to have a connection of some kind, maybe only peripheral. I wasn't sure, too, how the earlier aliens felt about it, or about him, and how much influence he had over them. It might be that they themselves would be scared off by him, though I wasn't sure about that. I wasn't sure how safe it would be for us to continue with it, though, or how wise it would be to do so.

Dream - The mobster restaurant and the Cadillac

On Friday morning, May 22, 2009, I had a dream where I drove my 1970 Cadillac down an alley and eventually came to a mob restaurant, a place where there had been some trouble in the recent past.

In the earliest part of the dream that I can remember, I was with some other people. We were outside and one of them was giving a talk on something. There were maybe six people or so, including me. We were behind some business, maybe near the radiator shop, maybe slightly south of it. It seemed to be sometime during the day.

Then the leader wanted to show us something. I didn't really like the idea, but went with them anyway. I had the 1970 Cadillac, and apparently some of them went with me in it. The remaining ones, if any, either walked or took another car. We went south past several businesses, going along near the alley. We stopped some place that sometimes seemed to be still in Scottsdale, perhaps somewhere between McDowell Rd. and Oak St., though sometimes it seemed to be around University Dr. in Tempe.

The alley had changed to a broad sandy area. The sand was deep and rose slightly as it headed away from the alley area. At the other side, on the west, was a long block wall. Perhaps homes were on the other side, but I'm not sure. It was evening now.

We got out of the car and I went to get something out of the trunk, or perhaps put something in it, I'm not sure. This was just a temporary stop before continuing on, a break for refreshments. For some reason I took off my shoes. I then walked over toward the block wall. It had some trash cans in various places along it. There were two or three of them where we were, and some dark things were piled by them. The leader continued talking.

I walked in the deep sand by the trash cans, looking at things. Something had run out of something there, making dark, dirty green pools, like old thick antifreeze, and I walked in it before I realized it was there. I was just wearing socks, and quickly walked in the sand afterwards trying to clean some of it off. The sand soaked some of it up, but there was still quite a bit left, and I didn't want to put my shoes back on while my socks, especially one of them, had a big soaked area with whatever the chemical was, plus the sand caked on it.

We went away from the alley and toward the road that ran parallel to it, toward where a restaurant was. Between the restaurant and the broad sandy area was a concrete wall that began about where we were, and between it and the sandy area may have been a long trash bin, then between the concrete wall and the business was a long parking area that was partially paved with old thin sandy asphalt.

The restaurant was kind of a fast food place, with ice cream. It appeared to be owned by some short Italian people with mob connections. Toward the front, it had a fairly large area to eat inside. It had some hamburgers that looked good, but I didn't have much money with me and decided to just get a blocky rectangular ice cream bar, chocolate covered with a few colored sprinkles. I also asked for some water, and they gave me a big paper cup of it with a little bit of ice in it.

The eating place was divided for some reason, like for smoking and non-smoking, but I'm not sure that was the reason. The other area seemed more for people who ate more expensive dinners and/or for more favored patrons, and was fairly full. It seemed to occupy most of the restaurant, leaving a relatively small area along the side and some toward the cashier.

I walked about two thirds of the length of the restaurant, going away from the cashier and toward the road, and sat down at a table, facing away from the road, with the area for favored patrons to my left. I ate my ice cream bar and looked at the menu, back at the counter where the cashier was, and watched the people around me.

I wasn't sure if I should be this close to the other section, or even near it at all. I could see some of the people there looking at me. One or two of the people I was with were nearby, but the others went somewhere, out to the back I think, probably looking for a restroom. There was a bit of tenseness. I was told by someone about some kind of mob trouble that had happened recently. I worried some that we might be associated with it in the minds of the people there. We were strangers and seemed to be looked at by some of the people with suspicion.

I finally left, and as I was going out the door in the side, near where people ordered the food, I met one of the owners, a short skinny guy, who was coming in. He looked up at me solemnly and slightly irritated, though his expression became more neutral. I think someone told him that we didn't have anything to do with the earlier trouble.

I went out toward the broad sandy area. I was worried about leaving my car out there for so long. I hadn't intended for it to be this long, I thought it was just going to be a quick stop.

I discovered that someone had covered the car in a coating of an oily substance and then set it on fire. I was afraid it had been destroyed. It seemed it had burned off quickly, though. The outside of the car was kind of sooty and still a little oily. Evidently it had been done when they still thought we might be some kind of enemy, or have some kind of connections to one, or maybe they just didn't like it parked there. The police were there and a big flatbed tow truck, ready to take my car away, apparently to the junkyard. The interior seemed to be okay and it would probably still work alright, but I accepted that they were going to take it. I hoped that I could get it back later.

I went back north, on foot. It changed to daylight again as I went. I began to glide in the air in short bits, going from object to object, going along down the alley.

As I got close to Thomas Rd., I met up with the others. We crossed Thomas and went to an area a ways on the other side. There were rows of long pale buildings containing businesses and shops, with old broken concrete parking lots, with some areas dirt and some areas asphalt.

The leader took us to a small doctor's office in the middle of one of the buildings at the northern edge of the area, talking about how we should stop in quick and get some particular thing checked, that it was a good idea to have it done. He seemed to be using it as a teaching exercise, showing us that this particular test, or it might have even been a couple of them, was something that was important to be done, and something important to have done after exercising, as we had been doing walking around.

The waiting area was very small. A few people sat in it, waiting. At least one looked up at us. There was a short, slightly curved line of people that led to a door and through it. Apparently the doctor was somewhere on the other side. We got in the line. A few other people were ahead of us, but I didn't know how far the line extended on the other side. Presumably the tests were something that could be done quickly. This was just a brief stop and then the leader was going to continue on, showing us things.

He kept happily talking while we waited in line, but I became increasing disturbed. I hadn't intended to see a doctor. We had been out all this time, and I was kind of sweaty and had been wearing the same clothes for a while, and didn't really feel presentable. I finally asked if we were really going to see the doctor. The leader happily said that we were. I said that I didn't want to and started to leave. The leader looked disappointed, and said "Awwww" and tried to talk me out of it. One or two of the others also briefly tried to, but I left anyway.

I went back to an earlier row of the buildings and stopped in a little shop of some kind, run by an older woman, then went toward Scottsdale Rd. I started flying and gliding from object to object, heading south. Sometimes I got fairly high. Some of the people along the way looked at me funny. I got across Thomas Rd., sailing high above the pavement. It was late afternoon, and the light was somewhat dim. It was cloudy, sometimes raining.

I eventually made it to the edge of the neighborhood where I lived. I met my mother there. She had walked out there, to one of the neighborhood streets, and was near Scottsdale Rd. She was having some kind of trouble with her health, and the medication or the device she had been given had not been working right. She was having some kind of odd breathing problem, and was taking long, not very forceful breaths, almost constantly. Someone from a nearby business had noticed her problem and had helped her with it. I think maybe two or three people had come to help, maybe from more than one place. A doctor or ambulance had apparently been called, but nothing had shown up, and it had been going on for hours.

I took her back home, which seemed to be the place we normally lived, though the appearance was quite a bit different, and the house was quite a bit bigger in the north-south direction. I finally got the device or medication to work better, I figured it out somehow, though it was just temporary and her doctor still had to look at it, if for no other reason than to confirm that it was doing all it could.

Dream - Young self one and two, dreams of different lives

In January of 2008, I had what were really two dreams, one after the other, perhaps one leading into the other, which showed younger versions of myself, when I was a kid, but different from what I was like back then. They were other lives lived in which things had turned out differently, including a different version of my grandmother's death.


The first dream took place in a very large house. My mother was there, and at some point she encouraged me to go out to a patio or porch on the side and back of the house. Lots of little tables were there with food and things. Two little kids had been left with us who were kids or grandkids of my brother or one of my sisters. My mother and I had to watch them. They ran around among the tables, playing and being a nuisance.

The boy later wanted some orange juice, and I went back inside the house, toward the front of a long room filled with rows of tables to get it. I was pointed by someone toward an odd device made of ornate tubes that looked something like a harp frame. It contained orange juice and poured different kinds - high-pulp, no-pulp, normal, spicy - depending on which opening it was poured from. I was surprised at the elaborateness of it, but I was assured that the kid was used to it. A much smaller contraption held lemonade.

It was dark and late at night when my brother came back. He seemed happy. Someone was with him, and I believe some other people also came, including my father. The scene kept replaying itself, changing a little each time.

A younger version of myself showed up, I think maybe actually brought by my brother in one of the replays of the scene (in real life my brother is younger than I am). My younger self was perhaps 12 years old, with short hair perhaps an inch long, maybe slightly longer toward the front. He had a big smile like my brother did, but didn't look quite like I actually looked back then. I'm not sure my younger self knew who I was.


In the second dream, some people were going to make a movie about my life. Danny DeVito was chosen to play my younger self. I thought it was a strange choice, partly because he wasn't tall enough and partly because he didn't look anything like me or have the right personality. His hair was dark and he looked much younger than he does now, but for an instant when I contemplated his age he looked much older with wrinkles and gray hair and then he was young again.

He went to go through a door and looked back at me and laughed, and then continued through the door. I thought, well maybe he was the right choice after all.

I then saw various scenes of my life, my life as it had been in the dream. Apparently my life was being reviewed in an effort to get material for the movie script.

In the dream version of my life, my father was much different. He was tall with dark hair perhaps one and a half inches long on top, a long rectangular face, and a long muscular torso. In real life, my father was tall and strong, but started going bald fairly early, and tended to be overweight. My mother, who was shown in a separate scene, looked about the same as she had in real life, except she was thinner with more of a medium weight. They were both in their mid-thirties at the time shown, and seemed happy.

In the dream, I was put with foster parents for the 7th and 8th grades, but I'm not sure why. I looked back at the 8th grade time and I seemed to be happy. My younger self didn't quite look like I did, looking more like a combination of my brother and myself. In real life, I have a brother and two sisters, but in the dream I didn't have any sisters, though I think I did still have a brother. My younger self also seemed to interact more with the other kids than I did in real life, though he still seemed a little bit shy.

I watched my 8th grade class, at a time when the class was not in session. Kids were in the classroom, standing in various groups, talking to each other. Watching the scene, I saw some girls and remarked to someone with me that I liked a particular girl back then, she was hot. I gave her first name and a couple of different possibilities for her last name, and was a little bothered that I was unable to quite remember it. I don't believe the name in the dream quite matched a real name, but in real life there was a girl something like that - slim with a reasonably good figure, light brown hair and perhaps a little taller and somewhat different looking than the one in the dream. In real life I thought she looked somewhat attractive - especially her figure - but I didn't talk to her and thought someone else looked better (I didn't talk to her either).

My impression is that my younger self, in this new version of my life, did have some interaction with the girls, even if in a relatively minor way. I'm not sure which girls, though, and it may or may not have included the girls mentioned above. And while this version of myself was less shy than I had in reality been, he still tended to let the people around him, whether boys or girls, do most of the talking.

Toward the end there was a scene at a restaurant where I was with my mother and grandmother and perhaps someone else. I was now older than before, an adult, though younger than I am in real life. The tables were widely spaced, and we were sitting down at one in the middle and toward one wall.

Then the scene moved forward in time a little and my grandmother was on the floor on her side, partly curled up from where she fell off the chair. Everyone in the room was staring at her. My mother was leaning to the side and forward, looking at her, an expression of alarm on her face. I was farther down the table, in the process of standing up.

Some time passed, while various people went over to my grandmother and looked briefly at her, perhaps touching her lightly but apparently not doing much else. I could hear them talking among themselves about her, in low, mumbling tones. I didn't catch much of what was being said. I went over there, too, in the form of my younger self, after the others had finished and had indicated that I should come. I bent down and looked at her and I think touched her shoulder, but there didn't seem to be anything I could do.

A little while later the ambulance arrived. Bright light poured in through the suddenly open door and across the floor past where my grandmother lay. A paramedic was in the doorway in silhouette, his shadow stretching across the floor toward us. He went to her and looked at her briefly, then looked up and shook his head and said, "She's gone."

I was watching the scene from the side and above like a ghost. I nodded and acknowledged to someone with me that, yes, this was always sad when things like this happen, though I seemed somehow far removed in time from the scene and even reality itself and could only manage a wistful sort of sadness, like sadness at the passing of an era, and retained a small, understanding smile.

Blood poisoning

When I was perhaps five or six years old, and living in a small town in Missouri, a neighbor who lived a few houses down from us moved to another state, either Arkansas or Alabama. The neighbors had a young boy, somewhat younger than I was and closer to my brother's age. My brother and I used to play with him.

Sometime after they moved, my parents drove down there to visit them, in order that my brother and I could play with him again. We spent a few days there, staying at their house.

One day, while playing out in the yard in my bare feet, I stepped on something. I looked and a thorn was sticking into my heel. I took it out and continued playing. My heel bothered me later, though, and a red line eventually started to form. My parents said that it was an infection that I got from the thorn, blood poisoning. My parents decided to drive us home and see a doctor there, though, because we didn't know any doctors where we were.

On the long drive home I kept looking at my heel. The red line kept getting longer and was going partway up my leg.

Eventually, we made it home and found a doctor, who gave me a tetanus shot.

My mother says that the doctor told her that a few more hours and it would have been too late.