Dream - I drive back to Nevada, then through town behind things, a woman's voice worries that the military might object, I see dead patients and the skins of faces in the windows of a hospital, I go inside but people try to capture me, I go out with my car following, and a woman also, and my car and I get into a fight with people sent after us

On Monday, June 21, 2010, around 9:30-11:30 PM, I dreamed I went back to Fallon, Nevada. It was late at night. I was driving the dark blue 1987 Oldsmobile. I went just outside of town along behind it, and then started going down an alley thickly paved with dust and gravel, going west, running parallel to the main road through town. I went all the way back to the end. It seemed I had done it before, maybe on an earlier trip. Early on someone was commenting on it, someone outside the car, who I somehow clearly heard, maybe a woman, worrying about it, about whether the military might be upset about it. I discounted it some, mainly on the basis that I probably wouldn't be noticed.

At the west end of town there was a big building, one story probably. It seemed to be a hospital as well as other things. The dream seemed to replay that segment a few times. Finally I was driving along it looking at huge windows facing the alley, lined with patients in beds, tilted up some to face the window. I was slowly driving along looking at them, then their faces were near the window, and as I went along looking at them I suddenly realized they were all dead. Then I went by a series of smaller windows, though still picture window size, that had a series of almost flat, collapsed, almost featureless pale leather skins, and I realized it was the skin of faces of people. The voice had still been worrying, but was not as loud, though it still seemed close.

At the end of the building I went inside, as I had done before in some earlier replays. I think the car may have come in too, a little ways, but then I was on foot and going down a corridor, lined with pictures, watercolors perhaps. An occasional person went by, dressed in hospital/laboratory white.

Then there was a bit of a commotion. I had been noticed. Some military officer, maybe a general, was after me, wanted me captured. I quickly retreated, going back and turning at the end to go down the other short corridors, winding. I came across my car, which was somewhat smaller, and it followed me. A woman, maybe in her thirties, started tagging along, at a distance.

I got outside, and the car was still following along, hovering in the air. I didn't have time to get in it. I got a ways out, going along some gravel roads, without buildings, not very far. Then I got into a fight with people who had either been following me or whom I had come across here, maybe partly both. The woman was worrying about things, about the fight. I was fighting one of them and a little ways off the car was fighting the other. The car was much smaller now, maybe six feet long. It got on top the person and was beating at him with its front wheels. He was on his back on the ground and seemed to be getting the worst of it, though he tried to fight back. One time when it seemed he was beaten he suddenly started throwing a lot of hard punches at the car's front, seeming to cause some damage, though I couldn't see it from the angle I was looking as a disembodied presence. My physical body was busy fighting with the other person, successfully so it seemed. My attention was almost entirely on the car and the fight there. The car itself was a little flexible, like a cartoon car. It started fighting back hard then, coming down on the man over and over with its wheels, punching him with them.

The car finally got off him. The woman was worried about the man and went to him, saying that they needed to get him to the hospital. He had been through such things before and come out alright. Then she poked at his chest while he lay there still, and the chest went in some with the sound of breaking glass, but came back out. She paused, staring at it, and said, "Well, maybe not this bad...."


Note: Late that night, maybe around 1:30 AM, June 22, 2010 (I originally wrote 13:30 AM, which would be incorrect; it must have been 1:30 or 12:30), when my mother got up off the couch she knocked her glass off the little table and it fell on the floor and shattered, with the sound of breaking glass, similar in sound probably to what was in my dream, though my dream happened first.

Dream - The policeman, the UFOs, and the long garden hose

On Saturday, May 29, 2010, around 3:00-11:30 AM, I dreamed I was in the Phoenix area, it was dark, and I was driving. I'm not sure what car I was in, possibly the dark blue 1987 Oldsmobile 88, but it could have been the gold 1989 Oldsmobile 88, or even something else. I went up a road going to the north-northwest. It seemed to be on the east side of Phoenix. It wound around a bit, going up, getting up into some mountains that were fairly shallow, not very high, maybe a few thousand feet. It was something that doesn't exist in real life, though there are small mountains around Phoenix.

A policeman went up there, too. I was worried that he might try to stop me for some reason, some imagined violation, but he turned out to be friendly. He kept repeating his name, and then sometimes going into a longer thing about what he was doing and what his duties were, something like "I'm Officer such-and-such, ..." (I don't remember what his name was anymore).

Up near the top of the mountain, in a small, slightly lower area surrounded by ground and peaks that were a little higher, an area that seemed to be partly cut out of the mountain, there were some small buildings, and more further on. It was some kind of government thing. They were checking people that went through, and people evidently were supposed to go up there periodically to get their papers updated and renewed. It was something fairly simple. They were asked a few questions and I guess had to fill out some simple forms, not much more than a few things to fill in, including signing it, though the forms were regular paper-sized and had two or three layers with carbon paper between them. While this happened their cars were being looked at by mechanics, put up on hoists, etc. The government was also doing some kind of scientific research, though, at least partly unrelated to the other.

I think my mother also came up, in a separate car. We might have been expecting my father too, I'm not sure. The policeman showed up, and was again saying who he was and what he did, in a kind of loud droning way, like it was a prepared speech he did often, but he was also there giving updates on something. We managed to leave after a while, without having to go through much, maybe fill out a few places on the forms, which I think my mother handled instead of me. The forms were mostly text, giving instructions and explanations I guess, with just a few places to actually enter things. They may have looked at her car some, but I don't think they did it to mine.

I left and went back down a little ways, then stopped at some other buildings, going through a series of large passageways with my car. One of the places I stopped was some kind of garage, and it seemed like we at least partly owned it. I saw a Cadillac from the early 1960s, that had been raised up in the air several feet. I looked under the back, at the underside of the huge trunk (where the gas tank would be in real life, but wasn't here). I marveled at the size of it, and the length of the car. It looked like they had a lot of room underneath to make the trunk even bigger, though I knew that it was huge already. Though I had used to drive a car like that, I didn't think I would be able to drive something like that anymore. It was just too big, and I wouldn't know how to properly get around in it, particularly with the cramped parking lots they had these days. I had also earlier seen another car or two, somewhat newer but still older models.

I finally made my way out and went on, going down the long, somewhat winding, gentle slope in the dark. I passed the policeman again, who was also driving down that road, but stopping in places along the way. I briefly heard him saying, "I'm such-and such....", a little plaintively this time, before I was on and past him.

It got to be a little lighter, and I was going along a portion where the road turned west for a while, a portion that was almost level and that could be described as simply higher ground rather than a mountain. Beyond the flat stretch of ground, the road would turn left again, and though relatively flat, would turn more downhill, and would be going again among and through some mountains.

While still on the broad flat stretch of land, I saw ahead what looked like a flying saucer parked in the road. I stopped and got out and walked partway around it. It was possibly 20 feet across and 10-12 feet high, and had no windows or doors that I could see. It was a dull silvery color with a slight sheen, and went down in broad folds, like a giant mass of soft ice cream that had been dispensed from a nozzle. In some places it also had some kind of framework sticking out from under it and to the side, large metal tubes at various angles, painted white.

I had no doubt that it was man-made, and not something from outer space. I didn't know what it was doing there, but suspected it was part of some promotion that was being set up. It took up a large part of the road, mostly my side of the road, but the road was wide enough here, with wide shoulders and flat land beyond, that it could be driven around. While I was there, a few cars went by going the other way, in the gray light. Their lane was squeezed a little but not much. They slowed as they went by, though, both to look and because of the lane restriction. I got back in my car and continued on.

I had brought a long garden hose with me, very heavy duty, with a heavy crisscross outer casing of stiff fiberglass cloth. It had had to be cut at some point earlier, before the trip, and was in two pieces, with the short end perhaps 5 or 6 feet long. It was something from the house. It had been awkward trying to coil it up, it was stiff and had lots of places where it had wound about itself, sometimes in long twisted loops, where it repeatedly turned around, like it was trying to weave itself into a rope. I had tried to coil it up into loops, but at some point all I could do was gather it up into long folds. It was extremely heavy too, and tiring to have to hold. I think part of it had dragged behind the car on the way up, and I had had to try to re-coil, re-gather it up on the mountain. I had needed to take it up there for some reason, though I'm not sure what that reason was, and it wasn't too clear even in the dream. Going back down the mountain, a lot of it had trailed out beside and behind me, several car lengths.

Now, after the UFO, I continued on, and the road wound through some small mountains, not much more than hills, and turned back toward the southeast. I was finally coming down a gentle slope, leaving the Phoenix area, with a car or two behind me. It was dark again, and I was very tired. The hose was still dragging and bouncing along behind me. I was coming down alongside a shopping center to the left of me, a strip mall. It was apparently where Woolco used to be in the old days, but the roads in the area in real life have been redone and rearranged, and the road there no longer goes off through the hills, which in some cases no longer exist.

I noticed another flying saucer in the parking lot, similar to the other one. This one had a few banners that had been partially set up, and there was something else set up nearby, some kind of square roped-off area, with small curtains set up along the ropes, blocking off the interior, and maybe a second roped-off area too. It was going to be some kind of Halloween thing. I think one of them was eventually going to be a haunted mansion and the other was an area for judging costumes. I think I stopped there briefly, and tried to do something with the hose, get more of it gathered up and back in the car. The next road, bordering the shopping center, was Rural Rd., which would turn into Scottsdale Rd. as it went north. I got on it, turning left, going north.

After a while I got to the radiator shop. It was still dark. At least some of the employees had come already, and were out front, near the road, tiredly digging. There were several large holes. One of them had to do with the sign tilting and partly falling over, and the others had something to do with various pipes. They had been at it for a long time. It seemed to be a long term project, to have to keep digging, fixing and working on things. Although I came in from the front, it feels that there was also a version where I came in from the alley.

I stopped there, in front of the shop, and got out and tried to undo the hose and rewind/gather it up, undoing some of the tangle, but it was difficult. I tried to find which end was the shorter one, and finally ended up just pulling on one of the ends until I found one that could be pulled out. My father was there, and was sometimes talking to customers that brought their cars in. One of them was a short woman, in her thirties maybe, very slightly overweight, who stood there smiling brightly as she talked about what was happening with her car, and my father talked to her about it and about other things, and I tried to get something done with the hose.


The dream had a lot more at the beginning, but I don't remember it anymore.

Note: I had another dream, relatively close in time to this one, where a woman was smiling brightly, and a dream about the radiator shop sign being at a tilt (the shop was in a different location, though, not matching any in real life).

Dream - The man with the leatherlike fishlike head

On Thursday, August 26, 2010, around 8:00-11:50 AM, I had an interesting dream. I don't remember a lot of the beginning, though I think my father was in it in some way, and maybe my mother too. It seems the earlier part of the dream was in Arizona, at least some of it a little outside the Phoenix area, or at least the most populated parts of it.

Then I looked different, perhaps fiftyish, but with a totally different face and body. I'm not sure where I was, somewhere in Nevada or Arizona I think, maybe in Nevada near the Arizona border. It was daytime. I had come to an area where I had had something going on. I was going along a miles wide strip of land between a small road and a canal, with mountains in the background. The land had lots of vegetation, brush and small trees, and some somewhat faded wispy tall grass. I was apparently raising cattle there, or some other animal. I drove along, following the migration of the animals, and started spraying from a huge broad nozzle, with a thick, very sturdy hose, something that would almost stay in position by itself in the air. The streams came out as though from a broad flat brush, because of the broad flat nozzle with multiple openings. I was worried about it not raining enough the last few months, and the vegetation getting too dry, and there not being enough water for the animals.

A little later, a late middle-aged man with a strange leatherlike, fishlike head showed up and talked with me for a while. He was chinless, with some fine wrinkles, vertical or almost so. His neck was huge, probably bigger than his head, and his head flowed smoothly into it. He had small dark widely set eyes. I'm not sure he had any ears, maybe just little holes with curved wrinkles going into them. His mouth was practically lipless, curved downward and drooping sharply at the corners, and open most of the time, darkness within. His skin was an odd pale tan. He talked quietly, with a bit of flat harshness, like a rural Midwestern accent. I think I was around where I was before, but I might have moved off a little bit, to somewhere relatively nearby.

Sometime later, I drove back to Nevada. I looked more normal, though maybe not entirely like I normally do. I seemed to be younger too, maybe in my thirties. My father was in the area somehow. He came in a different car. He may have been somewhere behind or somewhere else, even off to the side. I was going down the hill toward work now, again. It was dark. The place was different, almost a parallel reality. A business had come in and taken over, and was building something big to the left, in the distance. There were also smaller buildings scattered to the right. There were tall dark brown stakes in clusters at the edge of the road, perhaps a foot and a half high, on both sides of the road. The clusters were widely spaced, and getting larger as I went on, intruding more into the road.

Suddenly someone was standing in front of me, illuminated by the headlights, a hazy figure in the dust. I stopped, and then considered going forward, but I couldn't, because the figure was still there. Then a large earthmoving machine moved in from the right, blocking my path, turning its big scoop toward me. I don't remember now why the man was there, but he wanted to stop me. I'm under the impression that he might have had some kind of car trouble, or something like that, but there was also something else going on, war games of some kind, explosions from bombs dropped by planes, at least some of the explosions in the sky, none real close. It also seems that there were a few other people, not many. It almost seems like they were refugees in some way from the business, off the road a few miles to the left and a little ahead, though it had small branches scattered out in the valley, which was otherwise mostly empty. There was something dangerous happening there at the business, something that shouldn't be happening. It's possible they were let go after they found out. They were afraid that some people might be coming after them soon, to harm them. It was important for them to get away, important for me to get away too. There were still explosions in the air sometimes, bright flashes, from war games apparently, or maybe it was caused by something else, bombs set off for some other reason. The people started to move across the road, heading out across the valley to the other side. I'm not sure if I followed them or not.

I went back again later. It was night. I was worried about my car, the one I was driving, which was apparently the 1970 El Camino. I wondered if it had enough gas, and the gauge, apparently the speedometer, though sometimes it felt like the gas gauge, and it was on the small side, had formed red beads on the upper half of the glass. It was making a strange noise too, and I saw bursts of sparks, like fireflies, in front and zooming over, around and past the car, and I nervously wondered if they were coming from the car, but I also seemed to see them coming on the road from the sides, several car lengths ahead of me, intermittently, and swooping toward me. I was afraid it was the speedometer cable, that it needed oiling. I hoped it could hold out for a while, and not get damaged. There was a place on the other side of the valley, on the right, a large auto parts place, plus something else with it, part of it, it almost seems like an eating place or a motel, although it was all part of the same one-story building. My father was also going this way, maybe coming in from a side road in the earlier part of the valley. I don't remember whether he was ahead of me or behind me. He might have stopped at a little place before getting on the main road.

Then I came back again later, maybe days later, I'm not sure. It was night and raining. The clusters of stakes were still there, indented into the road, but as I went along, getting to the lowest part of the valley, I saw individual stakes driven in the road, widely scattered, in different places. They had apparently been put there to stop people from proceeding. They had evidently been put here since I had been here before, I guess they really decided to block it off this time, keep all but authorized people out. There was no way to avoid the stakes, not at the speed I was going. It was too late to stop too, the road was too slick with the rain, and I was still going slightly downhill. I grimaced and hit the stakes over and over again, apparently breaking them off. I heard a pop-pop sound, and I realized I had at least two tires flat. I kept on going, hoping to make it across to where the auto parts place was, or at least close to it. I could probably get it repaired there. They were open late, I'm not sure they ever really closed.

I got there. It was still raining. The place was lit up and had a tall chain link fence around it, enclosing the building and a small dirt/gravel parking lot. A lot of people were there. I think I talked to some people or tried to. There seemed to be a little bit of tension, not only because I was an outsider, but because something was going to happen, something dangerous was coming. A lot of the people began to move off now, to leave, to get away before it got here.

Then I was back in town, though I'm not sure which one. I stopped in a small shopping center, a strip small. It was daytime. The weather was fairly cool, and it seemed to be overcast. I think I had wanted to get a newspaper, but I had stopped in two stores at the end of the shopping center, one some kind of gift shop and the other an old bookstore, then I was working on the car, apparently the 1987 Oldsmobile. I had the body up in the air, with the frame apparently still on the ground. Dust and pieces of dirt were falling out, getting on me when I walked under it. The body was held up on tall metal poles. Another car was not far away. This section of the parking lot, a fairly small section to the side, was mostly empty. A few people were around though, local people it seems, some out near me and some back toward the stores. Some of them talked some and I talked back. I went back to the stores briefly, and then went back to the cars. The other car also seemed to be associated with me, but I'm not sure how now. I think it was getting late in the afternoon. I really needed to get finished up with things, as best that I could, and then get started back to Arizona.

The man with the leatherlike, fishlike head came back. He was a friend before, but seemed troublesome now, argumentative. He was against what I was doing. I had a gun somehow. It was laying somewhere I think, near or in my car, and I got it and pointed it at him, my arm out straight, and then after a pause, fired, shooting him in the forehead. I saw it hit him and then I saw it from behind too, the bullet coming out the back of his head, out a of small red hole. He stood there for a little bit, then fell. The people seemed bothered by it, saddened. They seemed friendly and I wasn't sure they would tell anyone, but it was possible some of them might, might tell the police and send them here. I felt if they did, it might be a little while before they decided to do it, and that I had a little time, though maybe not much.

I mounted him on the roof of the car, sideways across it, and took him to Mexico, to dispose of him there. My family had a place there, a ranch or something like that. When I got there, or soon after, fireworks were going off, bright flashes in the sky. It was a little disturbing, and a distraction. I had to get the body taken care of, hidden somewhere, and I didn't like all the commotion. I didn't really want anyone from the town happening by and seeing what I was doing, and seeing the body. A few people from the ranch were there, including a few kids. They seemed a little subdued, maybe a little uncertain, because of the body. After a while, surprisingly, he woke up, not dead after all, his wound healed. He stood up and looked at me. I was a little relieved that he was alive somehow, though I didn't really understand it. I supposed that creatures like him must have some special healing/regeneration ability that I didn't know about.

Dream - The mall, the man in the devil mask, and the storm

On Saturday morning, November 20, 2010, in a period of sleep ending around 11:00 AM, I had a long dream in which I ended up at a large mall, apparently where the old Osco/Bashas' stores were, at 74th St. and McDowell Rd., then left and wandered off north, possibly to Plaza 777 where the radiator shop used to be, then I went back to the mall again. I was talking to some other people sometimes, at least some of them family members. It was afternoon, a pleasant temperature, mild, the sky clear but kind of a gray tone. I went back in the mall and was wandering around. Besides little shops, it had layers to go though. Some of the mall was to the right, like at Fashion Square, but I went to the left, and it seemed like I was going through layers of primarily the same store, to different departments, with walls between them. I also found some candy by little walls, in glass jars. I ate some of it and was looking for more.

I finally left, taking a heavy white plastic trophy I saw on a shelf by the free snacks. It was a statue of something, heavy and compact and styled, with just the suggestion of an animal form. Out in the parking lot I began to wonder if it was really free, and decided that it probably wasn't. I looked around it for a price tag. At or near the car, the gold 1989 Olds, I finally found a small white sticker with something written on it. I turned it up toward the sky to try to get more light on it, but the light was dim, it was late in the afternoon and the sky was somewhat overcast. A little sunlight came through, though. At first I thought the price was other things, then finally resolved it as $9.00. I decided that I had to take it back. I walked back in with it, hoping that no one would bother me about it. Some people frowned at me, and I eventually set it down somewhere, not where I got it.

I saw my sister, the oldest one, who was several years younger than me, and we walked through the mall together.

It was starting to get late and things getting ready to close. We went back toward the entrance. We passed some people from the store at a minor side entrance, doing a strange dance, one or two dressed in strange clothes and wearing strange lifelike almost devil-like masks, but without the horns, doing a strange acrobatic dance over a large broad mattress-like thing close to the floor, entertainment for the people. A woman showed up with the mask after a while and did some of the tumbles, but it was like they shared the same mask, that the other guy had taken it off while he was gone and then she emerged wearing it, though I think I eventually saw them together with masks on.

Approaching the main exit, I lost my sister and went back into the mall looking for her. I got to where it turned a corner, and there were other little stores, some of them selling food, but they were pulling down their roll-up covers over the fronts of the stores.

Going back, I passed the man with the devil mask and strange costume. He had his shoes off and his feet were covered with fake feet too. The mask was tight fitting and had no seams, and looked natural, though still somewhat rubbery. He had a reflective expression on his face, sitting and looking off into the distance to the right, toward the short exit, rubbing his foot. He talked very briefly. I moved on. Near the main exit, my sister came up behind me. She had been following me for a while, and seemed amused by it.

She had been for a while at a side room across the aisle, too, a place where food was served and also where everyone sang and played musical instruments. I could see them from here. I went over and went in for a while. The place had a tropical theme, which became more manifest deeper into it. At the other side of the room it blended into an outdoor area with plants and palm trees, and round concrete tables among shrubbery. Inside, everyone sat close together. I wandered outside for a while. There were worries and warnings about a storm approaching. It was still light outside, late afternoon, near sundown, still with some sunlight. A strange cloud was there to the southeast though, gray brown, boiling, churning at the edges, on the ground, wider at the top than the bottom, and with a flat top. It was coming this way, visibly so, though people didn't know if it would dissipate before it got here or not. People were running around, though, trying to get away. I kept looking back at it. Each time I looked it was moving this way, but didn't seem to get closer between looks. I wandered off to the southwest, into the parking lot. Large areas were flooding, with tall palm trees sometimes at a slant, sometimes with large areas of sodden mud over the parking lot and things. It had evidently gone through here already.

I went back inside and went over to the main exit. The various things lining it, little stores and various activities, had closed for the most part, and were covered up, but now they were starting to reopen, a late night thing. Things seemed more sinister. The man in the evil mask was back again. A place there was also offering odds at things, like odds on how TV shows would do, and odds on other minor things, and I thought about placing a bet, but wandered back to the main section and was trying to find the board/sign I saw with odds on it. Looking at it, I realized I had misunderstood what I had read before, and the odds weren't good. I decided not to do it. The man with the devil mask was going over a raised, long rectangular area with concrete edges, and a cloth placed over the middle. Underneath it were a series of crosswise rods and large beads. Before, when I was going to leave, he had been on a slanted one, like an escalator, with things in the middle that weren't moving but with bands on the edges moving down, with little rough things on them and around them, like tiny broken rocks. He had been cavorting in the middle and maybe singing. I had tried to grab onto and slide down one of the bands. As I made my way toward the direction of the exit, I saw him looking my way, not entirely happy at it.

It was night now, had been for a while, late, and I went out the exit to leave. It was cold, and the parking lot was covered by cold mud, with snow dusting it in places. Some areas just had a little mud, and some areas were very diluted, almost water, some just slightly dirty water, and some not much of that. It was daylight still then for a while. I went to the car. It was looking normal, but as I got there, or soon after I got there, it changed to a much smaller and lighter electric car, still with front wheel drive. Some other people were coming too to their cars. We passed by some tiny wooden guard shack type things, damaged by the storm, sometimes sitting at angles there between the rows of cars, wet inside. I walked through one and out the other side, wondering a bit if someone would object. The others seemed more afraid to do that. I got to my car, which turned out to have my mother's purse there on a small white table behind the passenger door. I guessed I must have left it outside the car. I was glad no one had taken it.

I got in and drove, not toward the exit at 74th St., but down the row toward the north, then toward the east and into another row going back south, where conditions were much worse, heavy mud covered the pavement. A delivery type truck was backing out down the row ahead of me. It slowly backed out, but there was some kind of trouble, and it finally got going and moved away. There was another big truck on its side at an angle, that I had to go around. In the dream I didn't know why I came back there, it was a lot harder to get through and more dangerous. The small car with front wheel drive that I was in, though, pulled through and over the mud.

I got to the front, by the mall, and turned to the west, toward 74th. Other cars were going out through the exit near the intersection, across from the bank. I didn't like that though. I thought it was too close to the intersection, too hard to get out, although it had a traffic light. However, there didn't seem to be one earlier, and at times, and I tried to go to the south, to another large exit, further away from the intersection. People on the walk around the mall were calling out to me, not to do it, it was too dangerous. It was fully night now, late. I tried to go south, but ran into increasingly heavier, deeper mud, and there was also worry that I might heading into the storm, that it would come through here. I turned around and went back. A little Mexican-type kid, possibly part Indian, had been following me, a little girl. She was associated with someone, a couple of people mainly, but had been following me, and I agreed to let her go along. The car was so tiny now, that she was riding on the back. It was rainy and cool, even chilly. The car seemed to be a two seater with a small wooden platform on the back, even some wood rails going along the sides, and a very short front.

I waited at the light for a while. It turned red just as I got there. Across the street, there was just the sidewalk with landscaping along it. Everything was wet and cold, and rain was softly falling. Water was running in the gutter in front of me, and it was a sharp short slope to the street. I couldn't see the traffic light from here. I had to lean forward and tilt my head to look up, then I could see a tiny curved dark metal tube coming down from it, with the end glowing the color the light was. Off to the right was the intersection with its own traffic lights, and I thought it was going to be a long time to wait, to get them both coordinated properly. There was only a very short wait, though, before I saw the light in the tube above me turn to green, and I pulled out into the street, going south, the girl happily riding along with me, and sometimes running beside me holding on. I had no idea really what I was going to do with her, whether I could drop her off at her house somewhere along the way, maybe on a small side trip, or at somebody else's house along the way, or just a a place where she could make it home from or be picked up from, an intersection in the neighborhood, or if I even had to take her to my house for a while. Her parents seemed to approve her going along with me though, so I guessed it was alright, whatever was going to happen.

Dream - The pickpocket

On Thursday, April 16, 2009, around 5:30-8:00 AM, I dreamed I was going back to a store, somewhere in the Phoenix area I guess, maybe toward Tempe. It was night, fairly late. I had been there not long ago, maybe hours or less, but had to go back. I guess I had gotten the wrong thing or missed getting something or had to talk to my mother about what I found, but whatever happened she wanted me to go back.

I was driving down a long, almost empty street, not going terribly fast. The street was fairly broad, but didn't have any markings, and seemed to be residential on one side, though a wall separated whatever was there from the street. The street was lit by occasional street lights. I think I was a little concerned about a police car possibly going by or even following me, as they sometimes seem to be looking for something to do late at night. It's possible one may have passed going the other way, but I'm not sure.

Far ahead, in a patch of darkness where a tree or bush hung out over the wall, there seemed to be something. I wondered if it was somebody on a bicycle. I slowly angled the car to move further away from the side. As I grew closer, I could see that it was someone on a bicycle. I don't think the person was aware of me until I was very close. I passed him or her at a wide distance.

I finally got to the store, which was a large low building on the left, with a cross street on the other side of it. I pulled off into a little lane that ran by the parking lot, with a low wall separating it from the parking lot, then turned right a short distance and then right again into the entrance to the parking lot. There were still cars there. There were a couple that I noticed in particular, near where I was going to park. They were parked facing toward the wall that ran by the little lane. One was some kind of Cadillac that had been modified to have a huge trunk that stuck way out, maybe ten feet or so. The car I was driving wasn't terribly large, maybe around the size of an Oldsmobile Delta 88, as they were in the late 1980s, or perhaps even a little smaller. However, it was growing smaller still, and as I swung it around to park near the entrance to the lot, actually holding onto the car and picking it up, the wheels ran over the long trunk of the Cadillac. I carelessly let it happen, being too tired to bother worrying about it I think, thinking that the car was too small to really hurt the Cadillac. Indeed, the wheels were now so small they could have been on a golf cart. I did start to worry now, though, that maybe it really did do something to the trunk, that maybe the metal was too weak and thin to withstand it. I went and looked closely at the trunk. It was a pale whitish green, with some variation in color. Though I feared there might be a slightly depressed track along it, and initially there seemed that there might be, I found that there was just a slight tread mark, a slightly dirty area where the tires had gone.

I put the car, which now had shrunk to just a small platform, on the edge of a broad raised area that was evidently part of a speed bump, near some other cars and almost behind one, and next to a small dumpster. The platform had two very long wooden poles attached, that I folded on hinges at their base, and put them along in front of the dumpster, where I thought they would be out of the way. I went inside the store, then.

It seemed to be a kind of hardware/home improvement store, at least the section of it that I was in. It may have had other things further on. There was a room in the front part, partly closed off from the rest of the store, that had particular things in it separated from the rest of the store by tall windows. It had big glass double doors on each end leading on into the rest of the store. On the end I went through, the one farthest from the road and closest to the entrance to the parking lot, the doors led through into a broad hallway that ran along the side of the building for a distance. On the right, doors opened into rooms where various things were being taught. Some kind of how-to type of instruction, I thought, though I think classes of a community service nature were also taught, I supposed. I wanted to get past this area, to where I could access the main part of the store. A few people were in the hallway. As I walked along, I could see some people in the rooms through partly open doors. Some of them looked back.

Then suddenly a short man, with a somewhat frantic look on his face, rushed up behind me and started rapidly patting my back pockets all over. I quickly drew away from him, feeling my back pockets myself, trying to see if my wallet was still there. The pockets seemed enormous, much wider than normal, and at first there didn't seem to be anything in them. I was quickly feeling along the outside, and there just seemed to be me underneath. Getting further back, though, I finally found the wallet, much smaller than normal, half-sized really, practically lost in the huge pocket. Already half-turned from him, I turned more and threw him back, away from me. He looked at me, his arms partly sticking out at the sides, standing with his legs apart and his knees bent a little, looking uncertain and kind of guilty, maybe about six to eight feet away from me. I turned and was walking away, when he rushed me again and was again frantically feeling my back pockets. I again threw him off me and again checked to be sure my wallet was still there, and started loudly calling out for guards, for security people to come, that the man was trying to rob me. Some people came and held him, and looked at me in a calm and reassuring way, saying that they would take care of him.

It turned out, though, that he had been in one of the classes, something about protecting yourself from theft, and he had been assigned by the teacher to go out and do to people what he had done to me, I guess to see how it was when real thieves did it. He didn't seem to be very good at the job, it seemed to me, as normally those people are much more careful, and don't want their victims to know they are being robbed.

I went into one of the classes then, in one of the little rooms, being directed there by the guards I think, and listened to the teacher talk about something for a while. I don't remember now what he was saying. He sat on the edge of a tall chair or stool, while the rest of us had smaller, normal size chairs. I think they were of light colored wood, like school chairs. I wanted to finish this up and go on to what I had been doing. I wasn't intending to stay for the whole thing, just enough to get through the particular thing he was talking about, and then leave.

Dream - The complimentary cake

Sunday morning, May 23, 2010, I dreamed I was in Nevada, driving off to work and then, after work, driving back to town. I was in the dark blue 1987 Oldsmobile, I think. I had recently come back from Arizona, maybe the previous day.

When I left for work, I was worried about having enough gas, but I thought if I had to I could stop at a couple of places before I got back to town, particularly the service station on the corner where the road turns toward town. I didn't want to, though, and besides I was a little suspicious of the service station on the corner's gas, and probably more so of the other one. I did have enough gas to make it back, though, and didn't think about it after that.

I had read something in the previous day's local newspaper, in the want ads, about someone giving out free cake tonight. They didn't say free, it was some other word meaning that, maybe complimentary. They were doing it because of something else that was happening, maybe a special occasion, maybe a fund raiser, maybe something else, I don't remember now. I thought I would stop and get some on the way back from work. I thought about it off and on that day at work, sometimes looking at the ad again, and sometimes wondering if I would really go ahead with it, but I kept reminding myself of how I had wanted to do it. I also thought if I should mention it to other people at work.

I was driving back into town now, into a neighborhood. It was night, early evening I guess. I didn't take the turn I normally did in the neighborhood, I went the other way. One of the cars from work went by, turning in the normal direction, the people in it looking back at me, probably wondering what I was doing. I took a few more turns, and the street itself turned back to the left, the area beyond it a broad dirt area. A lot of cars were parked along the curb. It was difficult to see the numbers painted on the curb because of them. I went on for a short while, just a few houses, then decided, based on the numbers and my feeling about the matter, that I had gone too far, and the house I was looking for was way back, maybe near the corner. I picked up the paper from the seat beside me and peered at it in the dark. It was supposed to be number 75.

I parked back at the corner, in the dirt area, and walked up beside a house and looked in the front window, from a distance. The kitchen table had a lot of stuff on it, including some large odd shaped un-iced white cakes, apparently in the shape of animals, maybe rabbits. A woman was there, slightly overweight, and a couple of kids. This looked like it was probably the place. I thought I should probably ask them.

One of the kids, a boy, went out back to the swing set. I went out there too, at a distance, staying out of the yard. The mother came out the back door, and I saw that what she was wearing was a pink flowered house dress or nightgown. She called to the kid to come back inside, that it was time to eat, and the kid said something and started to head for the house. The woman turned around and started to go back in. The soft rain falling on what she was wearing looked oddly slick and shiny, and I realized that she was wearing a transparent raincoat over her dress. I also saw that the dress had a seam down the back which had separated in the area of her rear, maybe two or three inches. Nothing was visible through it right now, though, it was just a dark line in the seam. I wondered about the advisability of actually asking them about whether this was the place with the cake, and wondered if I should just leave and forget about it. I really wanted some cake, though.

I went back to the front, and the sidewalk, and wandered there for a bit and among the cars, thinking I would try to find the house numbers on the curb I guess, and maybe getting some courage to knock on the door, when I saw an old woman out there, dressed in fancy clothes and heavy makeup. She was smiling, grinning, and asked if I was looking for the cake. I said that I was, and she took me in the house. The younger woman and the kids were at the kitchen table, the woman standing. The kids might have been, too, or might have been sitting down, and the woman was talking to them. I looked over at them as we went into the house, but we didn't go into the kitchen with them, and they ignored us, paying no attention.

The old woman took me instead to the left, to a table in another room. A huge rabbit-shaped cake was sitting upright, with light brown icing in heavy swirls. It didn't seem to have anything cut out of it yet. She talked to me, still happily grinning, as she went to it and made a cut up on the head, not quite enough to get the piece loose, as it still needed a cut down from the top. Then she reached down to get something to put it in, a piece of plastic wrap. She asked where I was from, and after a slight pause I said Arizona. She was asking something then about that, some nice conversational comment maybe, and apparently forgot where she had started to cut the piece earlier, and put the triangular serving blade under the bottom of the cake, where the bunched legs of the rabbit were. Still talking and distracted, she lifted up and tried to take the piece out, which hadn't been cut at all, and a big section broke off the cake, going up about eight inches, slanting to an edge at the top. She looked at it, startled, and said, "Ohhh!" Then, grinning again, said that I would just have to take the whole thing, referring to the large piece she had broken off. She put it in the plastic wrap, somewhat awkwardly, got it sort of cradled in it, and gave it to me. I thanked her and left.

I went out into the night and the soft rain, holding the cake that was awkwardly set into the somewhat bunched plastic wrap, which went around the bottom and up the sides some like a bowl, and not too much at the top. I was eating the cake as I went, and slowly walked back to the car.

I found it was the old green 1970 Chevrolet El Camino, a mid-size car that was half pickup truck. I had left the window most of the way down too, in the rain. I hadn't intended to be gone this long. Trying to find where the door lock was, I saw that it was in an odd place on the back fender, a foot or so from the wheel. I put the key in and turned it, and a window started to rise up from the fender that formed the side of the pickup bed. I think the window in the door also rolled up. I was startled, not expecting this, especially the window in the fender. I guessed it was some kind of automatic thing that had been built in, in case someone put a roof over the bed.

I got in and tried to shut the door, but it wouldn't latch. I wondered about that, thinking about a car I had that kind of trouble with, but it hadn't been this one. I wondered if this one had developed it, too. I seemed to be too crowded also, that might be part of it, I was too close to the door. I tried to scoot over some, without much success, and turned and saw to my surprise that my father was sitting there, and on the other side of him was one of my nieces. They were both younger than in real life, and she was still a child. Then I realized that this was one of the car models with a back seat and four doors (which didn't exist in real life), and I was in the back seat. I got out and went around to sit in the front. I had a lot more room, there.

I slowly backed off the dirt into the street, and turned so the back was pointing down the street. Another car was now trying to come from around the turn, and had paused. I put the car in drive, feeling tired and sleepy, but the car was still rolling backwards a little. I looked at the transmission markings and wondered if I had moved the lever enough, whether it might be in neutral instead. It was hard to tell. I moved it over some more, and after a pause, because of its age I guess, it suddenly caught and the car started slowly moving forward.

I drove around the curve and started looking for a way out of the neighborhood and back home. I sometimes ate my cake as we went. They were both somehow in the front seat with me now. My father suggested I share it with my niece, and, I guess, with him, but I had been looking forward to eating it and didn't want to. My niece started whining about wanting some, and started to cry a little, and my father was saying I should give some to her. I said, somewhat irritated, that I would find some place that was open and get her something there.

I went to the left and found after a little bit what seemed to be a main road, though it was just two lanes, and got on it, going left. We drove away, the neighborhood on our left, and very little our right. Soon we were driving through a long area that was largely empty, seeming to be on the outskirts of things. After a while, I found what seemed to be a very small shopping center and turned left onto it. A few other cars did too, not many. It was closed, and I think I was just looking for a place to rest, to sleep for a while, though I'm not sure I did.

Then it was getting lighter, toward morning. I started the engine and began slowly driving along the shopping center parking lot, trying to find a good place to get back on the road. There was a break in the curb, but it was raised too high from the level of the parking lot, which was mostly gravelly dirt in that area, and I thought the car would bottom out if we tried it. We seemed to be somewhere in Arizona now, on the outskirts of things, though it didn't feel that we had gone very far.

I finally got out somehow, turning right, going back the way we came. After a while I stopped at another small shopping center. It seemed to be in the afternoon now, on Sunday. I carefully drove through it with my car, through the entrance and into the building and then out into a large open area, a kind of large outdoor plaza, with the shopping center forming a big rectangle around it. Some kind of local celebration was going on, some kind of Indian-themed thing, with pots and ceramics and other things on display, and various minor games set up for the kids.

I drove slowly and carefully through part of it, along the edge of it. They had some little pots and ceramic figures set up in a partial ring in the way, though, a little ways into it, and I had to carefully thread the car through them. I turned right, then, and headed slowly into a space between buildings, heading out of the shopping center, but then turned around and headed back. My father was asking why I didn't continue, they might have had a shop somewhere on the other side where I could buy something for her to eat, but I said no, I wanted to try somewhere else. I didn't say any more, but I just didn't want to try searching around this place any more, it seemed too much work, and it bothered me to be in there with all this activity going on.

I tried to go back the way I came, but found that the ceramic stuff on the ground was now too much in the way. There was enough room to walk through, but not drive a car. I stopped and stared at it for a while, and started to go and then stopped again. There wasn't any way I could safely drive through it. Like before, it curved around an area with a tall thing in the middle, maybe a statue and fountain, but now there was just no opening big enough to get through.

I finally reached down the outside of the car door with my left hand, my right hand still holding what was left of the cake, and, still inside the car, picked the car up. With my feet sticking out through the bottom of the car, I then walked on through the display, and went through the entrance to the inside of the shopping center. I found though, that the way out was narrower than I remembered. Instead of double doors set together, they were now set apart from each other, with maybe eight feet between them. They were also being locked by some women. It had evidently gotten too late and the place was closing. It was still afternoon, but might have been around 5:00 now, and I guess the place, not being in an area with a large population, closed early on Sunday.

They saw I was trying to leave and one of them went toward a door to unlock it, the one on the left. I stared it it. It seemed awfully narrow, just intended for a person to go through. I finally headed for it, thinking it would have to work somehow, that I would make it work, somehow. While the woman held the door open, I went toward it, and I found the car was narrow enough now that I could walk on through, and I walked on through, happily.

Dream - Crashing the car, then saved, then a woman who was drinking

On Sunday, August 25, 2002, or thereabouts, while sleeping in the afternoon, I had a dream. The first part of the dream is lost, but later in the dream I was driving somewhere, perhaps from Fallon, Nevada. I may have been going to Reno, but the roads were closer to what exists going back to Arizona. The road was not a complete match for reality in any case.

I was driving the dark blue 1987 Oldsmobile and was extremely tired. The road led uphill and was only two lanes. Rain was falling. The road turned to the right and leveled out. I turned the steering wheel, but had to turn and turn for the wheels to turn enough. I finally had the steering wheel turned all the way to lock, and it wouldn't turn anymore. It was still not enough. For some reason, the car couldn't turn at a tight enough angle, and instead turned in a broad arc that sent it around the corner and onto the opposite side of the road. The road bordered a cliff at that point, and did not have a guard rail. Both wheels on the driver's side went off the road, and then the car turned nose down and tilted until the windshield was pointed at the ground. I saw muddy ground and puddles far below, rushing up very fast. I wondered how I was going to get out of this one and grimly thought "God be with me."

There was a period of blankness and then I woke up, still in the dream, and found myself parked off the side of the road. I was still in the same area, but the road now had a long, wide paved parking area at the edge along the cliff and a guard rail. I was parked at a slight angle facing the guard rail. Another car was parked a ways back, along the way I had come. I was concerned that the person in the other car was watching me, but I was also amused by it.

I was not as tired after my nap, but I realized that I had forgotten to pick up the Saturday paper before I left town, and had completely forgotten the Friday paper. It was too late now for the Friday paper, but I figured I should go back to town and get the Saturday paper. I was reluctant to do this, but turned the car around and did it anyway. It was now early morning.

When I got back to town, a relatively short distance, it was evening. I drove through the parking lots of adjoining small businesses, directly from lot to lot, looking for a newspaper machine. Eventually, larger businesses appeared, such as grocery and other stores. They had large doorways on the sides, near the front, and I slowly drove through them into the stores and inside along the fronts of the stores, still looking for newspaper machines. People were in the stores shopping and paying for things, but the stores were not especially crowded. I felt that the stores had been built to allow cars to drive through like this, and nobody seemed to notice me, but I became increasingly disturbed and decided to go back into the parking lots after exiting this store. I went into the parking lot and turned right, heading in the direction of the street. It was dark, and may have been extremely early in the morning, just before dawn.

At some point I was no longer driving the car. A Mexican woman came out from the store. I felt that I knew her slightly. She was going home after working there. At the sidewalk, there was a dark spray pattern, in a Christmas tree shape a few feet long, like a bottle or glass had been violently knocked over. The stain was dry, but I felt that it was relatively recent.

The woman, who was perhaps in her thirties, thought that her sister had left it and was concerned that someone would find out that she had been drinking again. The woman searched for a cork that she was sure was there. She wanted to find it to remove the evidence. I finally found a small cork, but it was really tiny and got away when I tried to pick it up. It bounced energetically several times, perhaps going eight feet in the opposite direction, that is, behind me. I was not able to initially relocate it, but finally did. I woke up before securing it, however.

Dream - Driving back home and also following the car in a small plane

On November 29, 2008, Saturday morning going into early afternoon, I had a series of dreams. In one of the later ones I was driving back home, and later in the dream was also in a small plane, following the car.

In the dream I was on a freeway, apparently in the dark blue 1987 Oldsmobile, driving back home from Nevada. I was in a city, or on the outskirts of one. I think I had already gotten to Arizona and was somewhere in the Phoenix area, somewhere on the north side.

I got to where several sections of freeway were coming together, crossing in a mess of lanes. The road rose up and the car slowed down. I hit the cruise control button a couple of times to give it more power and increase the speed, seemingly reaching down and hitting it from way up in the air outside the car. Indeed, it was like I was watching the whole thing from high above. I wanted to get past some other cars in the right-hand lane, some of which were turning off to the freeway to the right, but some were going or might be going to merge with my lane. I got past them, or some of them. My speed, which had earlier been around 57 or 58, and had been dropping to near 55, now increased to near 60 as I approached the top of the rise in the road. I worried some about getting caught by the police, but it didn't seem important or likely.

Suddenly I saw where booths had been set up in the lanes, with policemen in them. They were there to catch speeders, but in fact people couldn't get past them without slowing way down, whether they were speeders or not, and they seemed to be checking and processing almost everyone. I slowed way down. They were talking to each other and though I think I stopped there for a while, they didn't seem to be concerned with or care about me so I went on, still wondering about the situation and whether they would decide to come after me. I was not alone in the car now. There was at least one other person there, maybe another, too. I'm not sure if they were there before, but it seemed normal.

The road turned left, then, and went into some ornate tunnels. There were many lanes, some going the other way, with high walls going to the ceiling every couple of lanes. The ceiling was not very high, barely enough room for a tall truck.

I was also flying a small plane with someone, watching over my car. After the car went into the tunnel we discussed whether we could follow it, whether it was safe and whether there was room in the tunnel. I finally decided to go and do it, we had to follow the car. Apparently we couldn't be seen by anyone.

We somehow slowly swooped in, the wings somehow getting a little smaller, contracting enough to barely fit inside the tunnel. We got over the car, or almost over the car, and then saw something ahead. It was a tall truck filling the lane to the top. At first it seemed to be the back of the truck, but as we got closer to it, and it got closer to us, I could see that it was somehow coming our way, in the same lane we were in. It seemed very ominous in the dream, but it didn't quite sink in that the truck was going the wrong direction.

The dream scene seemed to flash several times, both at the time we initially saw the truck and as it got closer, and as the truck and the car and the plane got closer in things seemed to move in slow motion, and finally I saw that there was a huge ornate projection to the left that protruded way into the lane just above the cars, going almost to the ceiling. The plane wouldn't be able to get past it, and the truck couldn't either.

Everything was slowing to a stop, it was almost as if time was slowing down, and I slowly woke up. As I woke up or just after, while I was still a little in the dream, I decided that among my other powers I now had the power to shrink the plane to the size of a toy (why not?), and the tiny plane now flew high and to the side among the ornateness of the ceiling, out of danger of being hit by the truck.

Dream - Presents for my father, and then strange gnomes or leprechauns and animal people

In the middle of the night on October 17, 2008, I had a dream about wrapping presents for my father and carrying them around, and seeing gnomes or leprechauns and strange animal-people along the way.

In the dream, I went out to a huge, mostly empty parking and driving area that was dirt with a faint mixture of thin asphalty dirt and gravel on top. I think it had something to do with the military. It seemed to be around the middle of the day, maybe around noon.

A low building, possibly bluish gray, was associated with the parking lot. There wasn't much else around, maybe some isolated small buildings beyond the road and not part of where we were. It seemed like a rural area, but I'm not sure where it was or even what state it was in. Later in the dream, though, I was definitely in Nevada.

I went to where my car was parked, probably the dark blue 1987 Oldsmobile. There was a crude wooden table in front of it. I think I sat in the air for a while, but at some point I went over to the table. I had a legal pad, but it might have had white paper instead of yellow.

I had a lot of strange words written down in heavy dark block letters, several paragraphs on at least one page and part of another. I think they were in pencil. They were things that were partially or wholly in a different language. Even the characters were odd, possibly like Russian, but it also had odd symbols that weren't part of an alphabet. I think it was supposed to be in a code of some kind. I was puzzling over it and I think sometimes writing some. I might have even been adding to it.

Then I started to wrap a present for my father. The other members of the family were back in the building also wrapping things. It might have been for my father's birthday, which in real life was near. It doesn't seem to have been for Christmas.

There were two items that I had to wrap. I had some slightly greenish blue, shiny heavy wrapping paper with a slight iridescence. I was out at the old table and had the legal pad. It had only a couple of pages or so now. I was using it as something to set the present on. It had some lines drawn down the left side along the margin and across the top a similar distance from the edge. I drew some more as I worked. Maybe I was trying to keep the present a certain distance from the edge. I finally tore the remaining pages out. I guess I decided to use the cardboard back of the tablet as a backing for the present. I got the first present wrapped. It was fairly flat, perhaps half an inch or an inch thick, whatever the present was.

Then I had the second present to wrap. It was a small yellow-orangish tan bowl with almost vertical pleated edges. I wanted to make it more attractive and put something in it. I put some small red beans in it from a can, filling the bowl perhaps two thirds of the way. I didn't know if he liked red beans. I wasn't even sure how much I liked them. They looked good as a demonstration of what could be done though, and it wasn't going to be long till we opened the presents, maybe a couple of hours, so they were unlikely to spoil. I put some wrapping paper along the sides and then somehow attached it to the middle of the other present. I then wrapped some thin red ribbon around it and made a bow, though I kept the ribbon away from the top of the bowl. The others back in the building were getting anxious to go. I went back to the building and we left. I think my father was with us.

We stopped at what was apparently a drugstore, though sometimes it seemed more like a small grocery store. We went around in it and back and forth down some of the aisles looking at things. I think I was still carrying the present. My mother and at least one or maybe both of my sisters were in the group. I'm not sure whether my brother was there. I looked at some other things that I might buy to go with the present.

At one side of the store were some little things, including some kind of white figurines, elves or gnomes maybe. The others had gone off to a different area and left me behind. They had gone toward the cash registers and one or maybe two came back and were asking me to hurry up so we could go, then most or all of them came back and we started quickly going partially down the aisles and through the middle of the store looking at things. There was an area with a lot of wrapping paper and some tape. It was getting toward Christmas and they had a big display of it that ran around the end of an aisle or two there at the middle of the store.

I found there also a bunch of white or pale elves or leprechauns, larger than the ones I saw before and evidently intended to be hung like ornaments. They seemed to be made of some kind of thin glass. I considered getting one or more, but finally decided not to at this time. The others were in a hurry to leave and we left. I think the others or maybe just my mother bought something, but I'm not sure what, possibly food, possibly something to do with the gifts.

We were coming in toward Fallon, Nevada then from the east, from the direction of work. We were in at least two cars, going along in the section of road that ran near the Navy base. I'm under the impression that we had come from some kind of picnic. It was getting late in the afternoon now.

I decided that I needed to unwrap the present and took the wrapping paper off. I let the wrapping go and fall by the road a little ways after we turned the corner where the service station was. I was slightly concerned about doing that but it didn't seem to matter too much. At least my father had a chance to see it wrapped up, though it may not have been a close look. It still bothered me a little, but I felt it needed to be done, that we needed to move the process along quickly.

Still outside of town, I noticed off to the left in a big yard two or three people, including someone from work, maybe the short older man who had retired a while back, and I was trying to point him out to my mother, so she could see who I worked with. I saw some other people too as we went along, but they changed to some kind of largish leprechauns or gnomes the height of a small human. The car I was in was also changing, becoming more of a platform with me on it face down and then shrinking to hardly anything before coming at least partially back.

I parked it in someone's yard a short way into town. I was alone now and had been that way for a little while, since just before coming into town. I parked along where the yard dipped down near the street and then sloped back up some. Apparently the dip was used for drainage and so I hoped they wouldn't mind too much me parking there.

Some people were in the yard near the house. They had bone-white ramlike horns on the sides of their heads and goatlike faces. Other people were out around in the general area that were also strange, at least a couple of others also having horns on the sides of their heads, but darker and a little differently shaped. Some of the people seemed to be gnomes or elves or leprechauns or some type of partly animal person. It was very strange, but I felt that this was how they actually looked, that the human disguises they had previously used had faded away or been abandoned, purposely so.

I was walking quickly and looking out for somewhere I might get a newspaper, though I wasn't sure if I should try to get one now. I was still carrying the present.

I went past the street that leads to the south, toward Arizona, and wandered around. The people in this area looked more normal I think. There was a lot of redevelopment going on because of some military thing. The light was getting dimmer like it was around sundown or a little after. It felt more like early morning, though. I think I might have found and talked to my father briefly, or at least saw him.

I walked back toward the street that leads toward Arizona. The grocery store at the corner had the raised parking lot cut back some along the sides, with an angle cut at the corner, leaving sloping walls of dirt and crumbly asphalt. It looked like they were preparing to widen the street there.

I met a military person, apparently someone in intelligence, who talked to me in serious, earnest terms about the differences in prices between here and Indiana, giving a couple of items as examples, gas and some food item I think, where the prices on those items here were around half what they were in Indiana. I think the gas was 5 something in Indiana and 2 something here. He seemed to be expecting a lot of people to move out here and cause a boom in the area, or at least he was hinting at it. I wasn't sure if the low prices would continue if the demand picked up enormously, like it would if a whole bunch of people moved out here, but I didn't say so. (In real life I was probably listening to the Wall Street Journal news hour on the radio at that point.)

Dream - Part Two of the Forever Car

Thursday morning, November 6, 2008, I had a long dream, most of which is forgotten. Toward the end of it, in the part that I remember the best, I began searching for the legendary Forever Car.

In the dream, I drove around in an area that seemed to be something similar to the Reno, Nevada area, on the outskirts, in a loop between the new and old shopping centers. Some other people were with me sometimes and were at the far ends of the loop. Something was going on, but I don't remember what.

Now I was searching, though, for information on the Forever Car. Partway through the dream I had become aware, with a sense of wonder, that this was the previously unknown part two of the story of the Forever Car, and the person who was driving it was somewhere around there and I had to find him.

I finally found, with some of the other people following along with me, in a garage at the end of a long building in disrepair, a car in a concrete opening in the floor with a small van on a platform over it. I initially wondered if the Forever Car was underneath the van, that they might be trying to hide it that way.

My attention became focused on the van, though. It was partially dismantled, and on the face of it didn't look very remarkable. I walked around it, looking it over in wonder. Could this be the Forever Car? I became aware that I didn't know what it looked like, so I couldn't tell for sure. I thought I might be close, though, and that the man might be in the area.


In real life, the Forever Car was what I called the dark blue 1987 Oldsmobile 88, a four door sedan, in a project for a class at Landmark several years ago. I told the story of the Oldsmobile here in a post on August 10, 2007 called The Journey to 479.

Dream - Super-Neanderthal

On March 14, 2009 I dreamed about driving and road construction and cars I once had, and eventually about a person who was a super-neanderthal. (Neanderthal man is generally thought to be a side branch of early man, one that died out in the last ice age.)

In the dream, I was driving out in the neighborhoods near where I live, probably in the 1970 Cadillac, though it could have been the 1987 Oldsmobile. I was in the area slightly north and slightly east of where I live. It was night now, or getting close to it. It might have been late afternoon when I started. I had been at my house and was trying to get back there. I was trying to go south down a minor city street, but it had construction on part of it, as I knew. The construction was mostly south of a major neighborhood street, one I had to cross before getting home. I had done this before, earlier.

Now, for some reason, I was driving the 1955 Cadillac. I would have to go back and get the other car somehow. It was extra trouble. I parked by the road that had the construction, by the edge of the road, just before the neighborhood started and before most of the construction started. I was trying to walk home, going west down the neighborhood street I would eventually have to cross, then I somehow had the 1955 Cadillac with me, carrying it on my shoulders. It was smaller than in real life and seemed almost ghost-like. A few other cars were around, but not many. Perhaps one police car was nearby, maybe at the neighborhood cross-street I came to, but I'm not sure. I was concerned about what people might think, seeing me carrying the car, and whether it might be one more reason to decide to report me. I got it home and put it down in the strip of paved side yard near the fence. The car was just a faded brown blur now, semi-transparent. I went inside, then.

Then I had to leave again, and at some point became a super-neanderthal, though at first I was just looking at him. He had super-strength and was super-smart, though not nearly as much as Superman, but I felt that he did connect to the Superman story in some way, and had some kind of connection or similarity to the Bizarro Superman.

The neanderthal was dressed in clothes and was unshaven but didn't have a beard. I think it was kind of rustic clothes, a plain flannel shirt and pants with suspenders. The neanderthal was probably around six feet tall, maybe a little less, with his chest and stomach area very broad and projecting outward some. He also had some kind of jacket, which seemed too small to comfortably close over his chest.

He couldn't talk, just make some grunts, but he could understand what was being said to him, though most people didn't realize that and thought he was stupid. This gave him an advantage, because they could talk around him, not realizing he knew what was being said. He also didn't act like he could do much, or was even very strong.

He went from my house off to some place else, a restaurant I think, though it was somewhat laid out like the house, but in a larger way, and wandered around. He was carrying something with him, some little device maybe, perhaps even a camera, but I'm not sure.

Before he left the area, and was probably either just inside or just outside the restaurant, someone wrapped a narrow tan leather strap around his chest and shoulders, with it coming together and knotting at odd angles, forming a complicated network, to hold the device. He looked at it a little surprised and somewhat bemused, but happy that someone had cared enough to do it for him. I wasn't certain he was smart enough to take it off and put it back on again.

He was just outside the building now, on the concrete walk along the front of it, and facing toward the parking lot beyond the walk, with the person finishing it up.

Then someone brought out a little wheelchair for him. He looked at it a little surprised, but happy, and sat down in it, and was going to use it to go home in. He did finally make it home, back to the place I lived.

Dream - Collapsible cars and my mother the pirate

Around November 17, 2007, I had a dream about school, work, devices that could collapse cars to a small size and then restore them, and my mother dressed like a pirate.

In the dream, I was in a school, and had missed most of the second year, with only a few days left. It was a very big, square, low building and I apparently also lived in it. The instructor was going to let me pass anyway by doing a quick catch-up of the work. He was wanting me to do something with a camera, perhaps construct one, but I think I also needed to take some pictures with it. He also wanted me to later make a movie camera, but first he wanted me to thread film into a projector. "You do know how to thread a projector, don't you?" I didn't say anything, though of course I didn't know.

Later, I was driving back and forth to Nevada. I had earlier bought a device, which was apparently shipped to me from the car manufacturer, that could collapse my car to a collection of tiny circuit boards about the size of a small camera, that could be kept in a bag that came with it. The car could later be reconstituted by adding water. It would recreate itself perfectly, to factory specifications, fixing anything that needed fixing, but still have anything extra that I had been keeping in the car. I had been driving the dark blue 1987 Oldsmobile, but I also bought a similar device for the 1970 Cadillac. I also later bought, for the Oldsmobile, improved versions of the device, one that was only about a quarter inch thick and one that was absolutely flat, the thickness of a playing card. Initially, I think the cost was 900,000 and something dollars, perhaps 980,000 or 960,000 or 920,000. Later, I bought the improved device (the quarter inch thick one) for 780,000 dollars.

At some point I was going uphill in the dark in the Oldsmobile, up a narrow street with cars parked on one side. Eventually it became too narrow to drive past the parked cars, and I collapsed my car and carried it in the bag. I think I was using the quarter inch thick version of the device at the time. I got to the sidewalk and turned left to go to the entrance of a building. I was very late and had been expected hours before. It was some type of eating place. My father had been waiting in a circular sunken outdoor room to the left of the entrance. He had evidently been sleeping a lot of the time. I joked with the hostess and also with my mother, who had also showed up, perhaps after me. I said that my father would have to give back all his naps and the food he ate when he left. The hostess laughed. I had also a little earlier joked about it with my mother.

Then, I was driving to work in the Nevada desert. My mother was with me and also my grandmother, who had died over twenty years ago. Somehow, then, someone else was driving and I was hugging my grandmother and kissing her, saying how happy I was to see her. I reminded her of the times, long age, when I sometimes stayed at her house. I said that I was going to do it again, but as I was saying it I suddenly felt unsure if I would be able to. She was smiling, but she never said anything. Her gray hair was undone and fell in a long, narrow band most of the way down her back.

We turned onto the entrance road to the place I worked and stopped off the road not far from the gate. Somehow we now had two cars, at least one of which was a rental. I'm not sure any of them had the necessary ID sticker to get past the gate. My mother was carrying something in a bag, perhaps a gun, and also had a very small knife strapped to her leg just above the knee. She had to leave both of them behind before we went to the gate, because weapons weren't allowed. She was now much younger, perhaps around fifty or even in her forties, and was dressed in black leather with leather shorts. She looked almost like a pirate, perhaps even including an eye patch. She unstrapped the tiny knife and I guess put it and the gun in one of the cars.

I was going to let them stay in a low, square building that was an eating place that was a little ways past the gate, to the left. It had large ham sandwiches that I thought they would enjoy. I would be spending most of my time in a long building to the right, working. Originally, the eating place had been a much smaller affair. In real life, no such eating place existed.

Later, we were in the 1973 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon, a car that we sold long ago. My father was driving. We were going back to Arizona. I looked at the hilly, mountainous way we were on and wondered if we were in Arizona already. It seemed to me, though, that we had not left Nevada yet, and I finally decided that we were still there and thought that I might know approximately where we were. My father told me to look at the moon. The sky was very cloudy with light shining through the clouds. I looked in what I thought was the direction he was referring to, where a bright light was shining behind the clouds, behind me and to one side. I said that it was the sun, not the moon, and looked around to try and find where the moon might be. I saw a lesser light to the front, at the left, and decided it must be the moon, and said so.

What lay around the bend

About 10 to 12 years ago, something odd happened as I was driving late one night.

I was in Arizona on a road going into an increasingly mountainous area. The road was fairly empty, but there were occasional cars and trucks, sometimes coming in clumps. I went up a long slope, and then the road turned abruptly right, went a short distance, and turned abruptly left. Because of the mountains, I couldn't see around the curves. It was a way I had been many times before.

For some reason, I was very cautious and suspicious as I went around the second curve. As I came into a view of the road beyond, I saw a forklift carrying what appeared to be a telephone pole across the road. There was a long flatbed truck parked a ways off to the left of the road, with some poles on the bed and some on the ground. I think some may have been at least partly on the road, also.

I immediately stopped, since I was prepared for something being there, and sat in my car and watched the forklift slowly carry the telephone pole across the road to the right. It was going away from the truck, so it was evidently not concerned with putting it back on the truck. It all took place in darkness. There may have been a flashlight or two in use somewhere, but not much more. The road did not have any barriers set up, either.

Although it seemed to take a long time for the forklift to cross the road and get out of my way, it probably actually wasn't too long. I began to get concerned, though, that someone might come up behind me, maybe even some big truck, and run into me. Nothing like that happened, though, and eventually the forklift was out of the way and I drove on past it.

Good thing I had that suspicious feeling, though.

A nail, or something like it

Around 12 years or so ago, on a visit to Reno, Nevada, I pulled into the parking lot of a shopping center. As I chose a parking space, off by myself with few other cars around, I said to myself, "There's going to be a nail RIGHT HERE!"

When I got out of the car and looked, a few feet from a front wheel and somewhat off to the side I found a small nail-like rivet.

I suppose I must have been especially tuned to these things, as I had relatively recently been having tire trouble, though with bits of glass and not nails.

The Journey to 479

The following story is true, but very strange, and features multiple synchronicities and a prophetic dream that predicted an unlikely occurrence years in advance.

In the predicted events, the number 479 was featured prominently. The prediction concerned me personally, and was not about the world at large.

Toward the time of the fulfillment of the prediction, the number kept occurring in different forms, always in events that were related in some way to the prediction itself.

I will mention now that the numbers are miles, and that 479 needs to be multiplied by 1000.

Other things will be included in the main narrative, both as background and as their own little stories, some with their own predictions and/or synchronicities.

And it does need the background information, in order to properly understand and appreciate what happens later. Even so, much of the story will seem very unlikely to many people, and others may think I'm either extremely lucky or surrounded by guardian angels.

I have been lucky, at times, but I think those guardian angels are there, too.


THE JOURNEY BEGINS

In the late spring of 1988 I came into a situation where I had to do a lot of travelling. The car that I used then, a 1970 Cadillac Sedan DeVille, gold with a white vinyl roof, was old and had a lot of miles on it, and had some major problems. It was a car that I had purchased, used, in the late summer of 1973. Though it had made some trips in the past, it was years, now, since it had been taken out of town. There was some doubt as to whether it was up to it at all.

It did it, though, in spite of everything. The travelling, however, though initially thought to be short-term, became extended, and finally became indefinite. I had repairs done from time to time, but the repairs were frequently unsatisfactory, and new problems kept surfacing. The miles seemed to be accumulating at the rate of 50,000 a year or more, and I knew that this couldn't continue.

Over a year later, in the late summer of 1989, I bought an upscale version of an Oldsmobile Delta 88. It was used, a 1987 model, 4-door, dark blue in color, with a little under 22,000 miles on it.

I had originally intended to split the driving between the cars, so that each car accumulated mileage at a more reasonable level. As time went on, though, I more and more drove the newer car

Initially, it was a difficult transition. In spite of the deterioration of the older car, the newer felt like a big step down. It was much smaller and lighter, with a much less powerful engine, and felt much less immune to what the road could give it. It was years before I really felt comfortable in it.

The newer car, the Oldsmobile, had to last, though, in spite of the rate that the miles were now accumulating on it. By the time it was even paid off it would have more miles than the Cadillac did.

I didn't know how well the car would hold up, but in spite of the expected mileage, and in spite of the cars apparent light-weightness, it would have to last. I couldn't afford to buy another car while still paying off this one.

I tried to keep it maintained, and changed the oil frequently, but things happened from time to time. It had an early problem with a sensor, that occasionally caused it to abruptly run very poorly and usually die. If it did die, it had to set for a while to cool off before it could be restarted. The waterpump was replaced several times in the early years, and then never again. Two of the struts went bad, one was leaking and one collapsed. Replacing them didn't cure the bobbing ride, though. Much later, I had air-cushioned struts put on, which stopped the bobbing and improved the feeling of the car immensely. From time to time some of the fuel injectors had to be replaced. Much, much later, I had to have the oil pan replaced, because the threads were becoming stripped where the bolt went in. Lots and lots of oil changes had taken their toll.


JUST IN TIME

Once, over a period of days, it started running worse and worse. Initially, it just sometimes made a little jerk and cough while going up mountains. This became more frequent, and sometimes happened while accelerating on level ground. By the time I got home, it had become very worrisome. Lots of problems in the mountains, and then making it through the city and past all the traffic lights. The problem turned out to be half of the electronic distributor going bad.

Another time, it developed a problem starting when it was cold. The weather was cold at the time, but this hadn't bothered it in the past. Now, I had to let it crank and crank before it started. It also developed problems similar to what had happened when the electronic distributor went bad.

It was a very difficult drive home, but I made it. Going through the city was bad, though, and it was difficult to keep the car running. Once, it died when I tried to accelerate after stopping at a traffic light, and I had some difficulty getting moving again after restarting it.

I did make it home, though. A day or two later, we took it to the dealer. It was night and we were just going to drop it off there. It died in the dealer's driveway and did not restart. It turned out that the problem was a fuel filter that was mostly blocked, and that the strain of trying to pump fuel past the blockage had burned out the electronic fuel pump.

I had driven it all that way, past the deserts and the mountains, almost a thousand miles, maybe even more, and it died in the dealer's driveway.


THE LITTLE REPAIR SHOP

Then one night, when the Oldsmobile had 271,000 miles on it, I stopped at a service station to get gas. Afterwards, the car would not restart, no matter how much I tried. The engine turned over, maybe even a little too fast, but it would not start.

I had it towed to a local repair shop. I was in a small town, far from any big cities. It was left in a dirt lot by the small repair shop, while the mechanics tried to figure out what was wrong with it. Initially, they thought it might be the electronic distributor, but replacing it didn't solve the problem. They did eventually get it running again, but after it was turned off the original problem resurfaced. They thought, then, that it was probably the timing gear and chain. When they took the plate off the front of the engine, the timing gear had most of it's plastic teeth gone, and little bits of plastic were everywhere.

This occurred close to Easter, and I ended up trapped there in the little town for several days. I also ended up going with one of the mechanics to the nearest big city to look for parts. Then I had to wait for them to find time to repair it. Meanwhile, the car sat in the dirt lot, with a cover over the open front of the engine.

One night, I walked over to the local Safeway. It was cold outside and a little foggy. In the parking lot, a small young woman came up to me. She looked up at me and asked if I were an angel.

I am very tall and I was wearing a heavy coat, and at the time my hair was a little longer than normal. The fog and the lights in the parking lot probably contributed to the effect. It also probably helped that she had been drinking.

It seems that she was married, and now they were in a bad financial situation. Evidently the stress was getting to her husband, who sometimes hit her and had once thrown her down some stairs. I noticed that she had at least one of her front teeth missing.

I went with her to a phone outside the Safeway, where she called a friend, and then walked with her to the apartments where she lived. I waited, then, on the sidewalk while she walked up to the apartments. She was quickly lost in the darkness, and I couldn't tell if she made it to where she was going. I finally assumed that she did, lacking any information to the contrary, and left.

As the days passed, I kept checking on my car, and eventually it was fixed. It seemed to have suffered no ill effects from the trauma.


A DREAM OF THINGS TO COME

The recent problems with the timing gear concerned me, though, and I wondered what else might lie ahead.

Then, one night, when the car had 279,000 miles on it, I had a dream.

In the dream, I was told that two major things were going to happen to my car, and that the second one was by far the worst. And the problems would be made much worse by not maintaining the car properly.

The times that the problems would happen were given to me, in terms of mileage intervals. The first would happen 38,000 miles from now, and the second would happen 162,000 miles after that.

At least I believe that those were the figures I was given. I knew them at the time, but the passing of time has made my memory less sure. Even if they are not exactly correct, I know that I realized after I woke up that added together they made exactly 200,000 miles.

And 200,000 miles added to 279,000 miles made 479,000.


THE FIRST THING

479,000 miles is a long way for a car to go. I didn't know if it could actually do it, but there was no way to know for sure until I got there, or failed to make it. Other things were bound to happen along the way, too, even if they weren't major enough to warrant being predicted in the dream.

Time passed, and one time when I was home, my mother borrowed the car for a while. She complained, then, that the brakes weren't working properly. They were too low, and she had to really stretch to push them. I hadn't noticed any problem, but my legs are long and I would not have to stretch in order to reach the pedal, no matter where it was. My mother insisted that something was wrong, though, and didn't want me to go driving off in the car while it was like that.

I knew that the mileage was now somewhere around the mileage of the first prediction, and so I finally relented and left the car to be fixed while I drove the other one. I was mindful, too, that the dream had said that the problem would be made much worse by not performing the proper maintenance.

The dealer said that the brakes were almost entirely gone.

And so the first prediction came to pass, but the damage was minimized by getting the proper maintenance in time. If the maintenance had not been done, the outcome might have been very different, as the dream had warned.


HOW LONG?

One night, when the mileage was in the early 300,000's, I was driving along through the desert, wondering again how long the car would last.

I looked at the odometer and thought of the future. If the car made it to 479,000 miles, how much longer could it go? What mileage could it reach?

I saw the odometer in my mind, with a reading of something like 506 or 507 thousand. I felt that it was true, and that the car could make it that far.

I tried, then, to change it, to make an odometer reading up around 580 or 590 thousand. I couldn't do it, though. The image wouldn't come. I kept trying, and finally forced the image to come, but I knew that it was false.

So the car would make it to the early 500,000's, but for whatever reason would not make it to the upper 500,000's, at least not while I owned it.


ON AND ON

Although I spent many long hours driving, the driving was not the work itself, but a means of getting to the work. Driving was not my job. Combined with the job, though, it meant that I often spent a lot of time with little sleep.

With the passing of time I gained in stature at my job, and also made more money, but the money was not nearly as much as it could have been elsewhere. I kept hoping that something would open up that would let me work closer to home, but it never did. I was hesitant to leave, too, knowing that things would not be the same without me. There was no one there who could do what I did, and never had been. Not even close. I was also able to fix problems that other people couldn't. Sometimes, they couldn't even understand the solutions that I came up with. But they knew that they worked.

It was a lot of stress on me, though. All that driving with little sleep. And sometimes I got cooperation from people, and sometimes I didn't. And sometimes, though well intentioned, they worked against me.

Sometimes, while driving, I wished for it all to be over, to be done. I could accept almost anything, just let it be done. Almost anything.

Almost.


TRANSMISSION TROUBLES

As time passed, the car developed more and more of a problem with the transmission.

Once, long ago, when the car had less than 200,000 miles on it, perhaps around 174,000, I got so tired that I mistakenly shifted it into neutral and then reverse when the car was going around 30 miles an hour. It died, and I pulled off the road. I had just passed through a little town and wondered if I was going to be stuck there. I restarted the engine, though, and drove away.

Everything seemed to work normally, except that the shifts were a little duller and the car didn't seem to roll forward quite so easily; it seemed to slow down faster when I took my foot off the gas. As time passed it seemed to improve, though, and by the mid 200,000's it was not quite so noticeable.

Now, though, in the 300,000's, in extremely cold weather it tended to get lost for a brief time between second and third gears. It acted almost like it was in neutral, except it was a bit more draggy and there was a sound like gears barely touching each other, just hitting on the edges. Sometimes it seemed to help to push on the gas. Though the engine would initially just rev, sometimes it would then suddenly snap into gear. But sometimes it didn't seem to make any difference.

It was never in that state for very long, though, and when the car had warmed up sufficiently it didn't do it at all.

It started doing it more and more often, though, and in milder and milder weather. I often tried to let the car run for a few minutes before trying to go anywhere, rather than risk having it happen.

I eventually found out that adding transmission treatment improved it immensely. It almost felt like new, for a while. For a while.

One time I took the car to a transmission shop, and described the problem. They told me that there was nothing in the transmission that could make it act the way I described. I left it with them so that they could try driving it in the morning, when the engine and transmission were cold. The weather was relatively mild at the time, but it also sometimes happened now in such weather.

They were unable to duplicate the problem, though, so I drove on with it as it was.


THE CRASH

Once, when driving on the freeway through Las Vegas, I noticed a large flat-bed truck ahead of me. It had various things on it, including a bundle of white slabs sitting upright.

As I watched, the bundle came loose, and fell into the road in front of me.

I slammed on the brakes, and stopped in time. I heard a screeching sound behind me, though, and then WHAM!

I looked behind me, and saw that a pickup truck had run into me. It was evidently a commercial vehicle, and it had tall bumper guards on the front, bumper guards that were now somewhat bent. I saw the driver on the phone calling someone, and after a while the police showed up.

It turned out that the white slabs were just styrofoam, and one of the policemen moved it off to the side of the freeway, while complaining about the construction trucks.

The back bumper on my car was pushed way in, with a straight area between where the truck's bumper guards had hit, and sharply angled areas going out to the corners. The trunk lid was also pushed in somewhat.

Everything worked, though. All the doors opened and closed with no problem, and even the trunk lid worked.

The pickup truck driver's insurance company paid for the repairs, and I eventually got the car fixed, though I drove it for a few months like that.


THE LITTLE SHOP, AGAIN

One night, while driving along, I noticed that sometimes the car would react oddly to acceleration. It would have odd little variations in speed. It would seem to briefly bog down and then speed up again.

A couple of hundred miles or so later, I noticed a loud metallic knocking sound when I went by a big truck, like the sound might be reflecting off the truck back at me. I wasn't sure it was actually coming from my car, though. I hoped it wasn't.

In the days that followed, though, it became apparent that it was coming from my car. I finally looked under the hood to see if I could see anything. Everything looked normal, except that one of the big pulleys low on the engine looked like it had something sticking out a little on the side of it.

I took it to a local repair shop, the same shop that had worked on the timing gear years ago.

They fiddled with it for a while, listening to the engine with a stethoscope-like device, apparently thinking that one of the pulleys on the accessories was to blame. They couldn't find anything wrong, though, so they finally took the belt off and started spinning the pulleys by hand, but still couldn't find anything. I mentioned that I saw something earlier sticking out of the big pulley. It was hard to see anything now, though. One of them took the pulley by hand and tried to turn it. There was a loud clank.

So, they jacked the front of the car up and took the pulley off. The center of the pulley was made of rubber, and the rubber was torn in a line all the way around it. Without the rubber holding the rim in place, the rim was banging against the metal stops on the pulley. The pulley also had a device on it to control the engine timing, and with the pulley moving back and forth the timing kept changing.

One of the mechanics, looking at the damaged pulley, said that he had never seen that happen.

He said that I could probably drive it that way for a long time around town, but he wouldn't try to go anywhere with it like that. I knew that I had already driven it for hundreds of miles that way, maybe even for over a thousand, and thought for a while about the possibility of driving it home.

I knew, though, that if I made it home it would have around 407,900 miles on it. That sounded a little too much like 479,000. I was also mindful about the dream warning about the maintenance.

So, in the end, I had them repair it. And as before, we had to travel to the big city to get a replacement part for it.

It was done much quicker than the timing gear repair was, though.


THE CADILLAC BECOMES UNAVAILABLE

As I said earlier, I had intended to split the driving between the 1970 Cadillac and the 1987 Oldsmobile. As time went on, though, I more often drove the Oldsmobile and seldom drove the Cadillac.

Eventually, I stopped driving the Cadillac at all, except for emissions testing. There was just too much wrong with it, and repairs too often didn't seem to last for very long. At times, it seemed to be falling apart in front of my eyes. Sometimes, it did so literally.

So it sat there at home, with 255,000 miles on it, and I had no spare car anymore.

Much of the time when something happened, though, I seemed to be trapped in other places, either waiting for the Oldsmobile to be fixed or driving around in a rental car.

Sometimes I was able to borrow my mother's car, a car she did not have when this all started. Oddly enough (or not), it was an Oldsmobile Delta 88 also, a 1989 model, two years newer than mine. It was a much less upscale model, though. It was purchased for her by my sister, and it was already well-used and had over 100,000 miles on it. It was colored gold and had a slightly modernized, slightly more powerful version of the engine that my car had.

It also had problems of its own.


A PREMONITION OF DISASTER

My Oldsmobile was now well into the 400,000's, and the predicted mileage was now not so impossibly far away. I still had quite aways to go, though.

I started to feel a sense of foreboding, though. It continued over a period of several days, and I finally started praying, to "let this cup pass from me." That whatever it was would not happen.

One night, I stopped at a post office to use the phone. When I returned to the car, it would not start. The engine turned over, but nothing happened.

I had it towed to the local car dealer. They found out that the electronic fuel pump had burned out (again).

I felt that my prayers had been answered. Far better to have it happen in a town, than out in the middle of nowhere.


A SYNCHRONICITY OF NUMBERS

As the car approached the midpoint of the 400,000's, it developed a problem going up hills. The engine was getting too hot, and there seemed to be a film on the inside of the windshield. I had noticed, for years, that an orange dust seemed to form on the inside of the windshield when I used the defroster. I felt that the heater had probably been leaking a little, and it was now definitely time to get something done about it.

When I finally arrived at a radiator repair shop, the car had 447,799 miles on it.


AN END IN SIGHT

Meanwhile, things were deteriorating at work. I had big projects ahead of me, but it seemed unlikely that I would have sufficient support to easily complete them. Perhaps not even enough to satisfactorily complete them at all.

My car was costing me a lot of money, too, as well as time away from work. It seemed likely that I would need to get another car to continue.

But I didn't want to go through that again.

At some point I asked myself how long this would continue. And the answer came, that everything would be resolved in the late summer. That there was a feeling of peace associated with it.

If only I could hang on until then.


THE SCREECHING NOISE

Over a period of several months, I had become increasing concerned about a noise I sometimes heard, usually when I heard it reflected off of buildings. It was a kind of faint screeching-grinding noise, and I only rarely heard it, but I suspected it was there more often than I knew.

I finally took it to a car dealer and told them about the problem. I was worried that it might be something like the alternator bearings going bad. The person at the car dealer couldn't hear anything, though, and refused to replace it unless they found something wrong with it, in spite of the mileage. He was going to have his mechanic look at it, though.

They never found anything wrong with it, so I picked the car up and continued to drive it as it was.


THE SECOND THING

Time passed. It was spring, now. My car had 479,000 miles on it, in fact it was halfway to the next thousand. I had recently changed my schedule a little, which resulted in me being other places when particular mileages occurred.

The sun had set, and I was driving up a small mountain. I noticed, then, a lot of screechy, static-like noise. I thought at first that it might be poor reception on the radio, but when I turned the radio off the noise continued.

Then, a burst of sparks came flying out from under the back of the car, and flew away like fireflies in the dusk before disappearing. I reached the top of the mountain and started going down the other side. More bursts of sparks came out. The alternator light came on, and I started trying to find some place to pull over. I found a little place, just big enough for my car, and pulled over into it just as the car died.

I got a flashlight out of the trunk and opened up the hood. A huge wall of smoke came up and quickly dissipated. I peered down at the engine and saw a tiny fire in the alternator. I blew on it a few times, until it finally went out.

It was dark, now, and I was on the side of a mountain, maybe 30 miles or so from the nearest town, though there were farms and residences and businesses that weren't quite that far. Perhaps I could find a phone that was only 20 - 25 miles away. There was also a phone booth at the bottom of the mountain, but I had never tried it and I didn't know if it worked.

I decided to try to walk to the phone at the bottom of the mountain, and if it didn't work, to just keep on walking. Perhaps someone would pick me up along the way. It was cold, but I had on a heavy coat. It was very dark, too, so I used the flashlight when I walked, both to see where I was going and to alert passing cars that I was there.

It seemed to be very slow going down the mountain. It was very dark, so I couldn't see much around me, and it didn't seem like I was making much progress, even though I knew that I must be. Sometimes a car would pass going the other way, but there wasn't much traffic.

Finally, a car passed me and then came back. It turned out to be someone who knew me. He was on his way to work, on a late shift, and thought he had recognized me and my car.

So he picked me up, and took me with him on his way to work. When I told him what had happened and what I was doing, he stared at me and finally said that the last time he was at the phone booth someone had cut the wire. Later, he took me to the town.

The next day I had the car towed to the local car dealer, where they replaced the alternator, and, I think, the battery.

And time moved on.


JOURNEY'S END

In the late summer, everything seemed to come together, like events and people were puppets being pulled on a string. I was at a turning point, where major decisions had to be made. My life would change, no matter what decision I would make. I made the one that I always knew that I would. I resigned. My car was a few thousand miles away from 500,000.

Many years have passed since then. Both cars are gone. The Cadillac was sold with 255,000 miles on it, and the Oldsmobile was sold with 508,000 miles on it.

And everything happened as predicted.

And this is where the story ends.