Dream - Beating the Devil, maybe

On the night of Wednesday-Thursday, August 19-20, 2009, I dreamed I was in a large dark house, probably two or three stories, squarish. It was night. It was a huge house, but simply made, with a fairly stark interior, probably concrete or tile floors, and sparse furniture. It was similar to houses in some other dreams. Some other people were there, probably less than ten in all. Perhaps some were family members, but probably most were not.

I went from a room at one corner to deeper into the house, but a few other people came and got me, wanted me to see something, some kind of strange old book I think, maybe with a little dark box of some kind, perhaps eight to ten inches across. It was about something that had happened in the past, maybe 100 years ago. Somebody had either sold his soul or gotten in so deep into evil magic that it was hard to get out. Near the end of his life, which evidently occurred when he was middle-aged, he was having some regrets and didn't want to go to Hell, but the Devil was coming to get him.

He went toward the front door, through the dark living room. Someone who was apparently the Devil, though he looked like a man, was there, and took him outside, to a large square room with open walls, like a picnic area. It was some distance away, but it's hard to say how much, it might have been a few hundred feet or it might have been much more. It had low walls and a roof held up by pillars. The walls were of ornamental brick along the top, which might have been three feet or so, with either stucco under that or more brick or even stones cemented together. The pillars were probably of brick, and were set at wide intervals along the walls.

The Devil spent a long time on a cell phone, talking to someone. The man wandered around the area. There was some thought of trying to escape, climbing over the wall when the Devil wasn't looking, but the man didn't; it didn't seem likely to work in the end.

There was a broad lake to one side, pale brown, dead. Eventually the Devil took the man and was flying out over the lake. It was me living it, though, I had become the man, or was in his body. The change had happened earlier, back at the picnic area probably.

Then it was my grandmother flying me, but a disembodied voice, maybe two or even three, was saying to me that it wasn't really her, that it was really the Devil, and to poke out her eyes. It seemed it was important to inflict as much damage as possible, that it hurt the Devil somehow. As they told me to poke out her eyes, I had a vision of my thumbs going in and black goo squishing out, and I recoiled from it. I didn't want to do it, it might somehow really be her, and even if it wasn't I didn't want to do it. I felt that the Devil was trying to trick me, too, that he was trying to tempt me into doing something terrible.

A little later, we landed on a narrow spit of land sticking out on the other side of the lake, where it divided into two other lakes. Before we landed, it was no longer my grandmother but the Devil again. He went off a few feet and was talking to someone on his cell phone again. He came back and I somehow managed to shove him into the sand up to his neck. The voices were saying again to hurt him, to do various things to his head. The Devil kept on talking, to someone off somewhere far away that I couldn't see I guess. I hit and/or kicked him a few times, though I didn't do what was suggested. The Devil ignored me and kept on talking. I kicked his head off, which had momentarily shrunk quite a bit. It went a few feet off and returned to normal size. I went and stomped on it, smashing maybe half of it to dust, then started to try to smash the rest, but I turned around and the head had grown back, looking slightly younger, still talking.

The Devil then took me back to the picnic area. He went back to talking on his cell phone, wandering around a bit. It seemed the man tried to sneak out then, going under a pale net curtain, on the side away from the lake. The scene seemed to be condensed a bit, like it was more something in memory, and I was some varying distance from it, watching it.

After a while the Devil noticed that he was gone, but the man, some distance away now, said that since he out gotten out that the Devil didn't really have him anymore. Apparently there was something in the rules about things like that. The Devil seemed to accept it, but objected that he was still dead, and couldn't go back to his body, and apparently not to Heaven either, which was off somewhere in the direction of but alongside and past the lake.

The man went back to the house. There was some ritual that could be performed with the book, or a book, that could free him from his connection to Hell. He would evidently be alive, at least for a while, once he got inside the house, but the ritual had to be performed to solidify it, to make it permanent, though I had the feeling it wouldn't be a terribly long life extension, just a brief one.

Then I was back in the present day, and got caught up in it. The Devil came and got me; apparently just being associated with it had drawn him. I was taken to the picnic area for a while, then he flew me out over the water. I think he tried briefly to fool me with my grandmother, and even my mother, but it wasn't working and he didn't try very hard. Then we were at the spit of land for a little while, and then he flew me back. He wandered around the picnic area, then, talking on his cell phone.

I finally sneaked out under the curtain, and was a little ways off, perhaps eight or ten feet, when he noticed. He came and told me I couldn't do that. I went around the corner of the picnic area, getting on the side toward the house, and getting perhaps half the distance from the picnic area that I had been. I told him that since I had gotten out, then I was no longer under his control. The situation was the same as before; I couldn't go to Heaven and the Devil couldn't take me, but I wasn't really alive either.

The Devil took me back to the house, while explaining about the book and what had to be done. He seemed to be trying to be genuinely helpful. I think he was hoping that he would still be able to get me after I died, that though I might be temporarily saved from him, he could eventually degrade me enough that he could come again and take me when I was dying.

I went back in the house and told the people there about what had to be done. Not as many people were there as before, but some may have been in other parts of the house. Probably most of the ones left were women, young women I think. There was some talk of trying to get a priest to do it, but it was felt that there wasn't time, so the ceremony was somewhat nervously begun. I was lowered to the floor, or mostly so, my head and shoulders were held up a little, and a man began nervously reading from the book. It was in another language, Latin perhaps. As he read, the atmosphere seemed to change a little, with drifts of fog inside the dark house and unseen, but felt, presences. It seemed to be vaguely like an exorcism, but more of a dark ritual, one that was in some sense drawing spirits. Whether they were good or evil or something else, I couldn't yet say.


The dream seemed to end around there. It had a lot more earlier, but I don't remember it anymore. I had been listening to the radio that night, to the Coast to Coast AM show, which was on both before and after the dream. The show had something about lucid dreaming, and also something about spirits and maybe astral projection. Though I missed most of it, probably some of it got incorporated in the dream.

Dream - Dreams, synchronicities, grandparents, the radiator shop, the wedding, and the autism tour

On Saturday, July 26, 2008, late in the afternoon, I dreamed I was driving on McKellips or a street farther out, going way to the east. It was night. I was thinking about, even experiencing, strange dreams I had had in the past, some about my grandfather on my father's side and some about my grandmother on my mother's side. It seemed that at some point my grandmother was with me in the car. I had dreamed (in the dream) that she came to visit me in an astral projection, maybe I was in an astral projection too, and I had taken her around to a lot of places, showing her things, and we had spent a long time doing it.

Now I was going back toward Scottsdale and was almost there. I had picked her up somewhere or she had somehow joined me, and she was talking about how she had had a dream where I had taken her all over the place and showed her things. She was happy and seemed amazed at it. I was agreeing with her as she talked.

Then somehow it was a later time, and I was going back toward Scottsdale with my father, on the same road. I'm not sure who was driving, sometimes it seemed to be him and sometimes me.

I was telling him about strange dreams I had about my grandfather (his father), and my grandmother. I didn't remember much now about the dreams with my grandfather, but I assured him I had them written down. I didn't have it with me, though, which made me feel a little disturbed or bad, though I kept a happy air.

I told him briefly about what happened with my grandmother. I thought sadly to myself that I should have told her more about it. She was dead now, though, she had died maybe a few months afterward and had been dead now for several months, maybe more (in real life, she died in December 1984).

At some point we stopped and were no longer in a car, though he was with me for a while. It was daylight now, morning.

I walked along looking for synchronicities, trying to show him how this and things like it were happening with me now. We went along lanes lined with tall green bushes, almost like hedges except they were not trimmed. I saw a newspaper laying on the ground and leaned over and peered at it, looking for synchronicities. Nothing popped out at me, but I still thought something might be there. I hadn't the time or inclination to examine it closer right now, though. I was going to the radiator shop on Scottsdale Rd., and it was getting late, like it was taking too long.

I finally came out of the bushes to the side and back of the radiator shop, coming from the south. I was alone. I met Scott, a worker at the radiator shop, out there. Someone else was also out there working, some lesser worker. It seemed I had to go somewhere now, I don't remember why, perhaps it was to get something. I left with someone, a woman.

We went back out through the bushes, but then we quickly got past them and I saw with surprise that we seemed to have somehow taken a different way. It appeared to be a little to the east of the way I had come, though it also appeared to be the other side of 68th St., near Thomas Rd., which would have been to the northwest. The light was dimmer now, like later in the day.

We saw a big Chevrolet car, like a Caprice, maybe something from the 1970s. We were not far from the back of some eating place, it was a perhaps a couple of hundred feet away. A crowd of people were off near the back of the eating place, but no one was around the car. I thought the car must be the one I had left, which was a big white Chevrolet, though I didn't know how it got where it was. A part of me that was just mind was off a ways and slightly above and watching, and kept raging in frustration, "Don't they see the 'Just Married' sign on the back of it, don't they see that this is a wedding and this is the car the bride and groom will go away in, the car isn't even white, it's actually a pale blue, can't they see that?"

We went toward the car, talking wonderingly and looking it over. I finally decided that it was a light blue color, almost white but not white, and so it couldn't be the car I was looking for. We went toward the back and I finally noticed the sign. At first it seemed to be on the back window, but now it was mounted on a long, squarish, heavy metal tube going from a very small trailer, just two wheels perhaps two or three feet apart and a metal frame, toward an attachment low on or under the bumper of the car. It was a huge sign, and going back to the other side of it we could see that it said "Just Married". I was pulling at it to get a better look and I think the woman was some, too. The sign bent back and twisted some under the pressure. It was firmly mounted, though, and was not damaged, just showing a little flexibility. It was of some fairly stiff white material, shiny, with black letters. We left then.

I ended up going toward Tempe on foot. The woman was with me, I think. We were eventually going up someplace along or around University Drive, but it was like a wide winding passage with uneven, somewhat soft looking walls, like it was made of some type of fiberboard and paper-mache. We were going east, toward Rural/Scottsdale Rd.

We met a woman with a group. She was apparently giving a tour. She was talking about autism (in real life they were talking about autism on the radio, on KFYI, with host Jan D'Atri). There were posters on the uneven wall about it. I had been looking at them before we met her, and at a newspaper in a vending machine, trying to find some evidence of synchronicities. I didn't notice any, though. There may have been some, but if so they were not immediately evident.

The woman led the group into and through a large art/poster/book store, that was completely open to the passageway and blended into it. She was still talking about autism, and stopping at various things to show them to the people, as part of the talk/lecture.

Celebrities, or not

In the late 1960s, my family was visiting a town in northern Arizona, and while in a restaurant we saw a celebrity, an old man, sitting in a booth not far away. My father didn't know who it was, but recognized him enough to think it was someone he had met, and was one of his customers or potential customers. My father went over to his booth and sat by him and talked to him for a long time. I think the man was Ed Begley, Sr., and had been in some westerns.

A few years ago, while standing in line at a grocery store, a man a few people behind me thought I was a celebrity. He mistook me for Michael Grant, a man who used to host a local PBS news/talk show, Horizon, and he kept insisting I was him. I finally convinced the man that I was not Michael Grant, at least enough for him to say that I looked a lot like him and stop insisting that I was him.

Michael Grant (television)

A picture of me taken in November 2010

Dream - I meet Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans, and then later, my lab partner

On Saturday, July 18, 2009, around 9:15-11:15 PM, I dreamed I was driving to Nevada. I stopped a few places along the way, and got to somewhere up north, perhaps beyond Fallon and several miles to the side, and was staying in a small town. A lot of mountains were around, covered with pine trees.

I had some device with me, that I had picked up somewhere along the way, that I sometimes put on my left shoulder. The object as a whole had a somewhat flattened thin-walled steel tube look, bent a little, and rounded some at the ends. It was steel colored, but darkened and maybe a little grimy or greasy, and was maybe ten inches long and two inches wide. When I had it on my shoulder it was literally laying over it, with most of it down the front but part of over my shoulder to the back. On the side that was underneath was a seam, where one side of the metal overlapped the other. On the part that was on the back of my shoulder, the end of the device slanted sharply, was kind of laid down partway along the underneath part of the device, and had something like a bolt or tube encircled at a distance by the metal of the walls of the device, that stuck out a little, with the area between the walls and the thing in the middle being black, perhaps from a heavy coating of grime or grease, though I think it might have been that color regardless. On the other end, the one that hung down the front, the device was apparently just sealed off by the metal walls being folded together, in a smooth even way, and was somewhat rounded, something like the toe of a sock.

I went outside and put the device on the ridge of the mountain beside the house, for my mother to see the small thing on the end. I normally kept that side facing down, along the back of my shoulder, out of sight, hidden from people, but I had placed it in plain view now, sticking up in the air. I think that the end I was trying to show her might have had some electronic function, and could maybe somehow be used for signaling, but also had a more special significance. It was something important, something that could be used to give us some kind of power over other people, maybe even something like magic, and I wanted her to know that I had it, was successful in getting it. The device was small, and she was far way, beyond mountain after tree covered mountain, that went all the way to the horizon, but I thought it might be visible to her, especially if she used binoculars, as I thought she would. There was something about it, about the magic of it, that somehow magnified it in your awareness, when you focused on it.

I went back inside. Ivan T. Sanderson came in from what used to be my sisters' bedroom, talking to someone, giving him or her a reading or answer to a question. I was hoping to ask him about me. He was dead so would probably be able to give correct information. He kept talking to the other person, though, as I tried to get his attention. We were in what was my bedroom now, larger than in real life and shared with other people. Two largish beds were low on the floor, side by side with space between them. The dark green cover on mine kept lifting up in a big wave, which moved from the far top corner down the sheet. It did it over and over at slightly irregular intervals. I was trying to point it out to Ivan. I finally got his attention and he made a surprised comment on it. I asked him what it was and he was saying it might be a ghost, or maybe he attributed it to some other supernatural entity. I noticed that air from a fan seemed to be coming all the way from another room and was wondering if that could do it, but I'm not sure how much I said about it, if anything.

Two or three other people came in and were talking, one of them a blond woman. I noticed that someone had put a pillow to the left of mine, with a person's name on it. I hadn't expected to have to bunk with someone so soon, and had been hoping I could avoid it. I noticed the name on the pillow was the name of Dick Cheney's daughter, Liz. She was the blond woman, and was now in the space between the beds, turned mostly away from me, talking to someone. I kept trying subtly to get her attention, saying, "Look who is sleeping next to me," or "Look, someone is already sleeping next to me," or some similar thing.

She finally turned around, and realized I was the one she would be bunking with, and said in a forceful, somewhat insulting manner, "Oh no I'm not, I wouldn't sleep with you," or something like that, and took her pillow back and got her bag of stuff, which was by the bed, and moved off to a bed that I guess was on the far side of the room, though I didn't really see. I was glad she was gone, though I had some mixed feelings about it, and wondered if the replacement, who might be a guy, would be any better.

I went back to work. It seemed to have a bit of a shopping center combined with it. I picked up a snack that was basically a thin, breaded skin over a tiny ribcage that had bones like fragile wires, with a long half loop of something, perhaps white plastic, that went over the top and down the sides and beyond. It had some extra breaded skin at the top. I ate at the top while Ivan talked to someone who was apparently Bernard Heuvelmans. The thing I was eating had a brownish string loosely tied around it, in a loop from the top to the bottom, and I pulled it up, which easily broke through the ribs, breaking through and crushing the whole structure and pulling it up, and I ate the skin and crushed ribs, crunching them. Bernard looked at me disapprovingly, not liking the noise and thinking it denoted poor manners, though he initially didn't comment. Later when prompted about it, in a kidding remark by Ivan, he did say something about it being bad manners, and not done where he came from (which was France). I didn't say much about it.

I wanted to find something else to eat now, I was still hungry. I think I went to Engineering for a while, then back toward the other end of the building. I stopped in a small conference room that was where the men's restroom was in real life, and maybe was part of the restroom in the dream. The Engineering people were there, perhaps most of them standing, but a few were sitting on various things. I picked up a canister that was left there, that evidently had some more dried breaded skin in it. It was something left by someone in management. The other people had things too. They appeared to be similar, the ones I glanced at, but I didn't know if they were actually all the same. They were gifts of appreciation, left there for us; apparently the entire department was being rewarded.

I was nibbling at mine, and I think had it mostly gone, when a manager or supervisor I think, someone in power, came in from somewhere in front. I don't remember who it was now, but I knew him in the dream. He looked at what I had, then thanked me for it and put a large cookie on top of it and left. The people nearby were looking at it and at me, at least one with a little smile on his face. I was a little uncertain about what had happened. I hadn't brought him anything, this was something he had given out. I was feeling a little guilty now, though, about not bringing anything. As I picked the cookie up to eat it, the others were getting up and leaving. A little while later I went back toward town, which was Fallon, not the town earlier in the dream.

The way was somewhat different than in real life, with a much longer rise to the mountain going from town, and a more uneven surfaced road. I went back at least part of the way on a little stiff bar with rounded corners and a flat bottom, that had some mechanism, like a few tiny wheels underneath it, that could be used for travel. It seems it had to be pushed along, like a skateboard, to get it started, and then it would go for a while. It was much narrower though, only a couple of inches wide and an inch high.

It was only around two or three in the afternoon. It was cold and the road was wet in places, maybe with some partially melted snow in places too (in real life it was extremely hot that day, around 115). We were on the road leading to the service station, where it would turn and head toward town. The people around me thinned out. There were two or three places along the way that had some connection to work, that we needed to stop at or some people needed to stop at.

I went around the corner, going toward town, but then came back. Someone from work was with me, who wasn't too bright. I cautioned him that we had to go slow, that police might be hiding. He nodded a little, his eyes big, his jaws spread apart but his mouth closed. We went back around the corner a ways, to a nearby place, that was by the service station but on the other side of the road, the east side. It was evidently a bar, and the area in front of it was thick with people from work. I mostly stayed outside, though he went in. He eventually came back out, and slowly walked and drifted through the air in a big arc around the corner, taking my advice to heart about not going very fast. By all appearances he was drunk, though. I stared at him, and some other people did too. I felt that the police were also staring at him, from their hidden location, not sure what to make of this.

I then had to go back to work. I was starting to feel that I might have left too soon. A few other people were also heading back. One of them was the person who had invented the little device to ride on. He seemed to have suffered from hard times, though. He had been unable to get a patent for some reason, and was now being laid off from work. He talked to me a bit about it as we went along. I was having trouble getting it to work now. He seemed to having trouble, too. The device had shrunk to just a few inches long, and I was stretched out pushing it along with my hand, through what remained of the cool wet slush. It had resistance to movement, as before, when I pushed at it to speed it up, but it didn't seem to reach a point where it could travel on its own, and kept slowing down when I stopped pushing.

I stopped at a place along the way, where the road was still going beside the Navy base, though the base was quite a ways to the side, and the place was on the opposite side of the road from it, to the east, on the left. A short, dumpy middle-aged woman there talked in a somewhat critical manner about things, sometimes to other people and sometimes to me, then abruptly softened and reached toward my face with a crumpled ball of tissue, wiping at a sore that was apparently between the corner of my mouth and my nose, on the right side. I had been unaware of having one. She seemed satisfied about getting it clean, then turned away with the tissue, continuing to talk, in a softer and more matter of fact way, about things and work and what people were doing and what they expected of her and what they thought she was doing with her checks and tests, which were not really what she was doing as they had misinterpreted why the tests were needed.

I went on toward work, but then went off to the side to the right, somewhere after the road turned to the left. I went into a wilderness area, with occasional small trees. I found my lab partner there, looking the worse for wear, though he was happy to see me. He had been assigned to this out of the way place, evidently because they didn't want him anywhere and didn't know what to do with him, though he didn't talk much about it, just saying something about being assigned out here now and comically indicating his surroundings. He didn't seem to be too upset about it, just a little confused. There was a large, rough, light grayish basin there, like it had some kind of coating, that had an old book in the middle of it, some papers too I think. He went off somewhere for a while, evidently to do whatever he was assigned to do out here. I knew that people could rate him by marking along the rim of the basin and lower down, with the markings closer to the edge being more favorable, and markings along the inside, along the sides of the bowl, being more unfavorable.

I got something like a pale yellow pastel art crayon and started going along the inside wall of the shallow basin, rubbing the crayon back and forth as I went, making a broad blurry line along the middle there. Different places were supposed to denote different areas being evaluated, but I didn't pay any attention to that. Some other people had left earlier evaluations in different colors, in clearer narrower lines. Many of them, perhaps most, were little marks on the rim itself, but in some places the markings were clearly unfavorable. I came to realize, as I went along, that I should have been going more toward the outer edge than the middle. I hadn't wanted it to appear that I was just giving him a maximum grade, thinking it would look too much like I was just showing favoritism, but it had turned out to look more like a so-so grade, or worse. I had most of it done, though. I went back over it, trying to spread the color out more to the outer edge. I didn't know how this would be checked out by someone, I guessed they would have to come out here on occasion to look at it. My lab partner came back, and then a person came to look at the basin. I don't think they were very happy about it.

I went back to the woman I had met earlier, to complain about it and try to set the record straight. Someone else was already there, though. After talking to me very briefly, apologetically, saying that she had to talk to the other person first, she went off a ways with him. While waiting, I found a little old book or manual, with soft darkened pages, that also had evaluations. It had a section that had a dark red line going around the edges of the pages, a line that had been left there earlier as an evaluation; perhaps part of it was left there at an earlier time by me. I tried to add to it now, going along the edge, making the line darker and more noticeable. The woman came back. I talked to her, trying to defend my lab partner, and she got irritated. She said that people didn't understand, that she didn't care about what grades they got in school, it didn't mean anything, what she cared about was the ability to actually do the work. I was trying to reply, but somewhat stumbling over it, that he really knew things, and really knew how to do things. She looked back at me, her head lowered a little, frowning, but seeming to have softened, just a little.

I finally went back toward work then. It was getting later, though, perhaps close to five, and I was starting to wonder if it was really worth it, and how I would account for the time spent away, but decided to count it as really part of work, since it seemed to deal with work at times. I think I met someone important from work, a man, perhaps a military person of fairly high rank, with gray hair and who stood stiffly erect, and spoke in a very businesslike manner. He seemed at least partly in favor of me, though. I'm not sure I actually made it all the way back to work, it seems he was at some place along the way, somewhere off the road to the right.


Note: Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans were friends in real life. Ivan T. Sanderson (1911-1973) was a naturalist who used to spend a lot of time collecting animals, and became interested in reports of animals that were unknown to science. He became interested in UFOs, too. Bernard Heuvelmans (1916-2001) was a zoologist. He was also interested in unknown animals.

Ivan T. Sanderson wrote a lot of books on unknown animals and some on UFOs. Some of the books are:

* Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life
* Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks at UFO's
* Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs
* Things
* More Things
* Investigating the Unexplained: A Compendium of Disquieting Mysteries of the Natural World

He also wrote books on known animals, including:

* Animal Treasure
* Living Treasure
* Caribbean Treasure
* Living Mammals of the World

Bernard Heuvelmans wrote several books too, including:

* On the Track of Unknown Animals
* In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents


Wikipedia entries on them:

Ivan T. Sanderson
Bernard Heuvelmans

Dream - Cars and fake cars, rock displays and fountains, and barking, painted, seal-like creatures

On Friday, July 31, 2009, around 2:30-6:25 AM, I dreamed I was at some place a little like my old elementary school, and perhaps where the school is, though it and the surrounding area were a little different in the dream. I was in something like the multipurpose room, but it was laid out the other way, north-south, and was some kind of grocery store, an older style one, with simpler shelves and displays. It also sold other things, and had a long tall counter, with a few people behind it, along the east side of the room. I was there a long time, with someone else, perhaps two people. My mother might have been one of them, but someone else was also with me. I mostly wandered around the store by myself. There was some worry about rain and flooding, and it became important to leave soon.

A little later, not long before I left, I went to a wooden replica of a sports car, apparently a Lamborghini or Ferrari or something like that. It was made of two rough, somewhat splintery, light brownish orange wooden halves, put together around the bumper level or just above, so that it had an upper half and a lower half. It was nearly life-size. I pulled the halves apart, pulling the top one up some, doing it a time or two, then a little later started taking the top section apart in small splintery sections, though it had appeared to be carved from a single piece of wood. I was a little surprised that it was coming apart. The pieces almost seemed to be breaking/peeling off, but they were fairly regular in shape, like it was intended to be that way. I had been trying to show someone the car before we left, perhaps my mother, perhaps someone else, then I was outside trying to walk home.

I remember earlier going to the place, walking up there toward it in the dark, with someone with me, perhaps 15 or 20 feet to the right, and us talking some. It was still dark when I left. One or two people were out there with me, some distance away. We sometimes talked. I was trying to walk home through the neighborhood, but they wanted to go a different way and were in more of a hurry. They left, though I'm not sure they went together. I think one or more of them might have ultimately used a car.

I wandered back and forth a bit, without getting very far west. The houses were small with small yards, in rows that ran east-west. They got much smaller then, with the alley between them not even wide enough for any but the smallest cars. I started going west, then down a street that was almost aligned with the school, a little north of center. Things expanded again and the yards became huge.

Several houses down, on the left side of the street, I came across a small car parked there. I think it was initially empty, and I looked it over and fiddled with it some, even looking inside it and feeling things inside it and fiddling with them. Someone else was nearby and it was bothering them, and they were trying to talk me out of it. I don't know if the person was one of the people who had come with me or was one of the people who had been in the school/store. I think it bothered them that I was doing this to some stranger's car.

Then a young dark-haired woman, who long ago was one of my teachers, came out of the house to the left and got in the car. I'm not sure what school I knew her from, it could have been my elementary school or high school or even DeVry, where I went to college. Perhaps she was even a combination of some teachers. She got in the little car and fiddled with things, trying to get it ready to go and started up. She had a smile on her face and seemed only vaguely aware of me, then she talked to me about what she was doing in a somewhat absent minded way. She seemed to age a little after a few moments, perhaps becoming around thirty or in her mid thirties, and had a little bit of a hassled look, though she was still smiling. At this point she may have looked a little like Mr. Monk's dead wife, Trudy (from the "Monk" TV show), though with dark hair, but she still looked more like one of my teachers. She finally got everything like she wanted, I guess, and left.

I wandered off, going some to the west and then turning to the south and going through the neighborhood, partly between houses I think, getting to a minor cross street that looped up and ran north-south for a while before turning back to the west. I felt that some people were after me now, in a small way, maybe disturbed by my wandering around and through the neighborhood.

I came across an area that was more open, with wide spaces between buildings, which didn't always seem to be houses. I was going south still. Not far to the east, a little ways behind the buildings, the land went into a rounded slope heading down to a creek or ditch or canal. The land here seemed to be mostly rock, though some places had dirt. At least a couple of places had rock displays, flat, somewhat irregular rocks stacked on top of each other in a rough square, perhaps six or eight feet on a side and perhaps a couple of feet high. The displays had a few buildings between them and were to the back, with old, worn, colored walks leading back to them from the main walk that ran in front of the buildings. They were wet, either from rain or an associated small fountain or both. I think I went back to the first one and then back to the second. I started picking up some of the irregular decorative slabs, cleaning water off of them.

A young relative came up, perhaps a cousin, a teen-aged girl, and I talked with her about about the displays. She helped with cleaning the water off some. We weren't just wiping water off, a little bit of wet dirt and grit was also being wiped off. Then she went off somewhere, perhaps to a car to go somewhere else. I think she had originally came in a car with some other people, with someone else driving. The car was parked maybe one or two hundred feet away to the southwest, though I think it moved closer, more directly west.

A little later, a car pulled up beside and a little behind a building a couple of buildings back to the north, and one or two people got out to do something in the buildings. Some kids were left in the car, maybe with one or two adults. One of the kids pointed toward me and was saying, "Say, isn't that the person people were looking for?" After continuing a bit with it, the kid was finally able to get the adults' attention and the car came closer, I guess after the people in the building got back in, though I'm not sure all of them did.

Then a young woman in the car started throwing things at me, sometimes hitting the rocks and sometimes hitting me. I think one of them hit me on the left temple/cheek area. They seemed to be rags or paper towels that had been wadded up and dipped in a small can of white paint. It was drizzling rain too, and the paint was running off in thin diluted streaks. I started wiping it off the rocks. I recognized her as a former girlfriend, not of mine, but of the character I was now playing, which seemed separate from the real me. It seemed ironic that she was doing this. She obviously hadn't recognized me, and I wondered how long it would take until she did. The car came much closer, pulling up beside me perhaps only six to ten feet away, and she was still yelling at me and saying how she was going to contact the authorities, and was still throwing wadded, dipped in paint things at me and was about to throw another one, when the cousin came back and quickly went over to her and explained the situation and told her who I was. The woman stopped, then, looking at me a little uncertainly, but with recognition. We talked briefly, then, though I don't think I got too close to the car.

Then I went further east, to where the dark rock went in a sharp rounded slope downward. It was still drizzling rain. The slope turned almost vertical, then mostly flattened out, though it continued downward in a shallow irregular slope, apparently eventually leading to a lake or perhaps the sea. Beginning on the sharp slope, and in a huge mass on the more level area below it, were large, very fat gray seals or perhaps manatees (though they had seal-like heads). A small can of white paint had been thrown out on them, perhaps a more tan one, though I'm not sure. They were making almost continual barking sounds and moving their heads and upper bodies this way and that, sometimes moving to different positions, milling around a bit, and moving the small can from one animal to another with their noses, the can moving downhill from one animal to another but also going back and forth to the sides. A lot of the animals had white streaks of paint running down them, mixing with the rain. It finally seemed like almost all of them did. They were a protected species, whatever they were, and there was concern in the town about their welfare. I could even hear a distant discussion, people far away somewhere, closer to the downtown area I guess, talking about them. I hoped the paint was nontoxic and wouldn't hurt them.

Dream - At a mall, a tiny toy Superman fights a toy super-villain

On Monday, June 15, 2009, at approximately 5:00-7:35 AM, I dreamed I was driving, maybe around locally, more or less, then was in something like a mall, which had a hotel as part of it. My brother and mother and some other family members were there too. We were all much younger, though perhaps not all to the same degree. After some discussion, we separated, and went different directions in the mall. The mall split off in several directions from where we were, near one end, with a branch going off at an angle from the end, and some short branches on the other side at or near the end, most sticking out at right angles, though one at the end had a slight angle to it.

I went down the main aisle of the mall, looking at things as I went. I think I was concerned with getting some food. I made my way to the end, or at least one end, then went back, though along a different branch, one almost parallel to the first, but a little higher and somewhat shorter.

I made my way to the end of the branch, to a large carpeted room. It had some low tables and padded furniture, like a waiting room, and a tall counter was along one side, the one the opening from the mall was by. Some people were behind the counter, perhaps some food vendors and other people. The room also had some association with the hotel, which was behind it and also ran along behind and attached to the mall.

I left the carpeted room, though, and went to the other end of the mall, then went back to it. Near the room, I came across a tiny toy Superman, about six inches high, and picked it up and carried it in. Some other toy figures were standing on the carpet, some together in little curved lines. They were all very lifelike. Some people stood around watching, some behind the counter and some out toward the edges of the room, and there may have been a few in front of the counter or in the room.

Something happened, some device got turned on, and gravity got real heavy for some reason. It was something turned on by an enemy of the toys, another toy, a super-villain. The toy figures were pressed into the carpet, bending over, huddled together, the increased gravity trying to pull them down. As time went on, they became more dragged down, many of them laying on the carpet, pressed deeply into it. The air seemed to be different too, to darken, and a lot of the surrounding area seemed to fade out into a grayness, or to simply disappear entirely from sight. The toy figures were groaning, sometimes calling out to each other or for help. They hoped that someone, maybe the toy Superman, could do something, could save them, but there was some worry about whether he could handle it, whether he would be affected too much by it himself. A toy figure was kidnapped, too, though I'm not sure when it happened.

Superman managed to leap over to the other end of the room, which narrowed to a short hallway leading to the door. Beyond the door was a big open area with an elaborate fountain. A voice was talking about how easy it was to have so-and-so do it, to have them apply the stuff and do the work so you could concentrate on what you needed to do (probably an ad playing on the radio, which was on in real life).

A tall giant figure in a bulky padded gargoyle costume was tending the fountain, adding figures and statuary to it. Apparently it also acted as a central figure in it and could emerge suddenly from the water in a frightening display of power. It was actually life-size or a little larger, but was giant compared to the toy figures, which were around six inches tall. It might have had the toy Lois figure, and someone else, maybe Jimmy, though Jimmy also seemed to be in the area and taking pictures.

Superman came and got into a large robot-like figure made of solid cardboard with a huge rounded chest, splitting it open in a straight vertical line to get inside and then joining the sides back together again. Then, wearing the giant cardboard robot suit, he confronted the gargoyle. It was thought that Luther took Lois, and that the gargoyle was somehow connected with it or knew about it. I was worried that Superman would fight it when it didn't really seem to be part of it, just peaceably puttering with its fountain.

Superman, in his cardboard suit, had come up behind the gargoyle, which turned to face him. They stood there and talked for a while, in low tones, Superman questioning the gargoyle and the gargoyle responding. I couldn't hear what they were saying. Superman seemed satisfied with the gargoyle's answer, though, and went back to where he had gotten the cardboard suit, and split it open again and flew out of it. Then Jimmy was worried that he hadn't gotten the pictures, that something was wrong with his camera, so Superman got back in the cardboard so Jimmy could take the pictures, then got out again and flew around, looking for the kidnappers.

My brother and I went somewhere, then, and got some cheesecakes, with my mother and sisters and perhaps other family members helping. My mother and sisters were much younger, perhaps how they were in the mid 1960s, and my sisters were still children, though it's possible they had been children earlier in the dream, too. My brother got two cheesecakes that were fresh and I got two that were frozen, and there were another two that were picked up somewhere else, maybe a store associated with a service station. The cheesecakes were all large, and they were going to be eaten at a party that was supposed to happen shortly.

We all went to a house, taking the cheesecakes with us. Other people were also there. Most of the people, the family members and others, seemed to be very busy, walking around and doing things and talking to each other. A lot of them were in the large living room, or that area, though some went back and forth to other areas of the house, such as the kitchen or dining room, and some seemed to stay mostly in those areas.

The frozen cheesecakes were set out now, and were being eaten some already. The fresh ones weren't put in the refrigerator or freezer, but were also left out, waiting until Lois and the other person were rescued.

After talking with my brother some, discussing things, I left, and I think he did too, and also some other family members. My brother and I were leaving in separate cars, and going to different places. My mother and my sisters were going to go together, I think, in a station wagon, that was either the 1964 Chevrolet or the 1973 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser. I think it might have been the 1964 Chevrolet. The party wasn't going to happen until later, in the evening, which was still a little ways off, so there was still some time to do things, and it seems most of us had things to do, though part of it may have had something to do with the party, with getting things for it. My mother wanted to get supper for my father, though, at least as part of what she needed to do. She had gotten pretty concerned about it, that it was getting late and she had to hurry. I was under the impression that the place she was going to was several miles to the south and west, at the south side of Phoenix, and it seemed to be somewhere we had lived long ago, perhaps even the house in Missouri in 1966. Quite a few people were still going to be here, though, getting things set up and ready for the party.

I think I may have wanted to get something, though I'm not sure whether it was for the party or not. I felt uneasy about leaving the cheesecakes out, even before I left, and kept looking back toward the room as we were leaving, and when talking some to my brother just outside it. We didn't actually have an exact time for the party, because we didn't know when the people would be rescued, and it might not be as soon as we thought.

I drove away, in the white 1965 El Camino I think, but I continued to worry about the cheesecakes, wondering if I should go back and put them in the refrigerator. I went several miles away, to the northwest, perhaps over into Phoenix, to a large service station with covered bays, with an associated large convenience store/restaurant. I sat there outside it, in the car, still worrying.

Overhead, Superman was still flying around, still searching, looking through things with his super-vision, but he hadn't found anything yet. I sat there, in the car, watching him. It was a little after sundown now, and it was starting to get dark. A feeling of depression was settling in over me, a feeling of resignation, of defeat. It was possible he might rescue the people soon, but it didn't really look like it. If he did do it soon, it had better be fast.

I wasn't sure what was going to happen with the party. It seemed likely that some kind of party or get-together was going to happen, it had been planned and set up, and lots of people invited, but it was going to take a lot of the joy out of it, to not have the people rescued. I had already considered the possibility that the rescue might be delayed some, and had pictured the people at the party talking to each other and discussing it, and then the rescue occurring sometime while the party was going on, maybe late in the party. It now looked like it might be after the party entirely, maybe days later. We might have to have a small second party when it happened.

I should go back soon, I thought, and tell them what was happening, and what was likely to happen. It was something they should know, and would want to know.

I started to drive back, still sometimes watching Superman fly around, the times when he was visible. When he wasn't, there was just the trip back, and the increasingly darkening sky.

Dream - The large hooting animals on the small island, and the juvenile versions of them in the big building

On Monday, August 17, 2009, around 3:30-6:30 AM, I dreamed I was out in the north Atlantic Ocean, coming back, possibly around Nova Scotia or New England. There was a very small island, maybe only 20 or 30 feet across and 10 or 12 feet deep, black and rocky looking, humped up a bit, in an irregular way. Waves were splashing against it and sending spray high into the air, and water was washing over it.

Some strange sea mammals were there, packed close together on the small island. They were extremely large, and pale colored, a very pale pinkish orange. When standing on four legs, with their heads raised, they were probably around eight to ten feet long, and the legs might have been six or so feet long. Their bodies were large, long leathery cylinders hanging in an oval shape; their legs were also leathery cylinders, and very long, expanded and drooping slightly around the ankles, with some wrinkles at the knees. I think their necks were probably skinny cylinders, though I don't remember for sure anymore, and I think their heads were basically cylindrical too, though I'm also not sure about that. The island was crowded with them. Their bodies moved around, twisting to the side and back, and leaning forward some and then back, frequently standing on their back legs but sometimes dropping forward to briefly stand on all fours.

I was on what seemed to be a fairly big boat, apparently a research vessel. The person who had been my lab partner in school, and who later worked with me in Nevada, was with me. I asked him what they were. He acted like he was familiar with them, and said they were elephant seals, I think. In real life, elephant seals look nothing like that, but in the dream it didn't register. I was a little doubtful, though. A plane or helicopter was on the other side of them, coming in low and close, trying to film them, and they were making an odd sound and rearing up, trying to get it. I don't remember the actual sound anymore, it was a kind of loud hooting sound I think, like something birds might make.

I stopped there for a little while, and got out and was writing what they were on the side of one of them. Whatever I was using was maybe a foot long and tapered to a point on one end, and had some weight to it, like it had some metal in it. It not only wrote it in pale brown, it impressed it into the skin, making indentations that formed a groove. The groove would stay there in some form for years, maybe for the rest of the animal's life, long after the color faded or wore off.

It seemed very important to me that the name be there, that what they were should not be forgotten. The animals were just now starting to come into the public consciousness, though the government had known about them for a while. I could foresee an extended period of time when the public would be interested in them, perhaps for decades, but that this would eventually fade, until they were largely forgotten. The animals were long-lived, though, perhaps as much as 80 or 90 years or more, and if some people should come here a long time from now, and find the animals here, a mystery to them, they could still know what the animals were by seeing by what I had written, and the name of the animals would not be lost.

After writing the name, I also wrote something in smaller letters under it, something more specific, at least two words, perhaps the scientific name. I also did at least part of it again on the hip and upper leg, writing in a downward direction with smaller letters. The animal seemed to tolerate what I was doing, but was milling around a bit. The island was packed, so it was difficult to move too far. It was starting to get a little concerned, though, and had a kind of "why is this happening" expression, so I left and went back to the boat.

I don't remember why we were there. I think we may have gone out on some kind of military thing, that something had happened up north, some kind of situation, and had to be checked out. Then, on the way back, we went by the small island and the animals. It seems that the ship was scheduled to go by there, when it could, as part of a regular check on them, but I was on the ship because of what had happened up north.

After we got back to land, I went into a large multistory building. My lab partner probably went with me, though I'm not sure now. Some other people were there. It's possible some members of my family, such as my father or brother and maybe even my mother, might also have been there or came there or I was going to see them later or go with them later. I'm pretty sure some members of my family were there either when I came or came with me or came after I did.

There was a very big room in the front, very wide, like a lobby, it basically ran across the whole front of the building. In the center at the back was a small counter, with one or two people behind it. A little to the right of center at the back was a rectangular indentation, perhaps six feet high or a little less and maybe eight feet wide and perhaps 15-18 inches deep, covered with ceramic tile. It also had a ridge at the front at the bottom a few inches high. Inside it were several of the creatures I had seen on the island, but much smaller. I was told these were juveniles. They were standing up on their hind legs and facing outward, making higher pitched hooting sounds, faster and more insistent than the adult animals.

Several feet to the right of them was a door that led to the inside, and a ways to the right of that, at the edge of the room, was a heavy red curtain in an angled wall, that also led to the back, by a different route. I think it also led to some stairs, but I think the door did also, to different stairs, as well as to what lay behind the lobby. There may have been some kind of theater back there, as well as other things. Some food was available to the left in the lobby, as well as little places selling things, not actual full rooms, just counters and wire racks, though some may have been small rooms that lacked a front wall. The place seemed to be a government place though, one that was at least partly secret, that had offices and things, back in there and on the upper stories.

I went through the door to the right of the creatures for a little while, though I didn't go very far. I came back out and the people I was with or going to be with were urging me to leave, we had to leave now. I started to go toward the doors and maybe got halfway there, but the insistent high hooting from the creatures kept worrying me. I went back and looked at them, wondering if they should be released, if it was time to release them. It wasn't up to me, though, and I wasn't sure what I could do about it. I finally reluctantly turned and left them, and went toward the glass doors that were the exit.


I wrote the dream down the night after it happened, and forgot some details in the intervening time, though even right after I woke up I didn't really remember much more in terms of activity. I know the dream was much longer, particularly in the beginning, and there may possibly have been something about Nevada, maybe staying at some place there, but I'm not sure.

Dream - Riding in old experimental cars in Russia, drawn there through watching movie footage

On Monday, August 24, 2009, around 2:00-6:30 AM, I dreamed I was driving on large hills. It was cold and slushy, sometimes with damp, partially frozen slush covering part or most of the road, sometimes with tall ridges in the middle. Sometimes it was night and sometimes it seemed to be almost night or perhaps just before dawn. We had more than one car, two and maybe three. The person who was the Engineering Manager where I used to work was in one of them. He was having trouble with the build-up on the road, really worried about it, scared of it, particularly the ridges, some of which seemed about a foot high. I sometimes went over them, though I tried to maneuver the car so that a wheel was over them instead of the middle. This wasn't always possible though, the road sometimes curved some, plus I moved the car gradually back and forth looking for better parts of the road, plus sometimes a car would come from the other direction, and I couldn't always keep the ridge under my wheels. I couldn't move too quickly, too, because the car might lose traction. Although I thought the front of the car would scrape on the ridge, perhaps breaking or scraping off the top of the ridge if it wasn't too hard, the car went over the top of the ridge without any noticeable problem. I didn't even hear or feel scraping, except for perhaps for just a tiny bit initially, though the ridge should have been far too high to drive over without hitting it. Later, sometimes the Engineering Manager seemed to be in the car with me, in the passenger seat, cringing, and sometimes he wasn't, being instead in a car ahead or behind, sometimes far enough distant that it wasn't visible.

The slush and snow went on for a long time, with the road going through it, and sometimes up and down hills. The scenery initially, besides the large hills and the snow and slush, seemed to be dirt with low vegetation and some trees, not big ones. Later it was much the same. We eventually got to where it was apparently slightly warmer, and there was little or no slush. We were out far away from the cities, out in the wilderness somewhere, though even earlier we were on the edge of things.

Getting out to where there were small towns or settlements, we stopped somewhere to get something to eat. It was part restaurant, part convenience store. I think my father might have been there too, at that time. Perhaps he was with us later too, in a different car.

As we continued on, the hills got more gentle, more like slopes, and it was a little warmer and the land mostly dried out, becoming more dirt. We reached some place far out away from places. I think the roads were even dirt by then. Someone else showed up too, about the time we got there. It seemed we got involved with something, and I think I may have gotten somehow to Nevada, perhaps to someplace north of Fallon, though earlier it seemed to be in Arizona. I got involved in doing something there, though I'm not sure what now. This may have actually been the area with the restaurant/settlements, instead of someplace farther out, I'm not sure now.


I was made aware, though, of people filming a documentary in Russia, and Siberia, of cars being sent out with television cameras, filming as they drove, going through the countryside, day after day. The land was mostly empty, sometimes with vast areas of low, mostly green vegetation, usually on the long slopes. Sometimes the cars drove over large hills and even mountains, though.

I was drawn to watching the footage, taken from the cars as they drove. It tended to be night at first, though sometimes it seemed early morning, and it tended to be mostly overcast. Sometimes we saw or went through small towns or settlements, generally just a few buildings, with small widely scattered homes out in the countryside. I'm not sure I ever noticed the driver, maybe a glimpse of hands on the wheel. The camera was pointed to the front, sometimes looking toward the sides some.

I seemed to be there, watching the drive through Russia, from a camera in the car. It felt like I was a passenger, able to look out to the side as well as seeing the road ahead. I was in different cars at different times. We were away from the cities, in the countryside, which was almost entirely unpopulated. Sometimes I would see other cars. We went over mountains and up and down long slopes. It was cool in the car, tending toward cold. I could feel it. Outside the roads were wet, sometimes with a little snow or slush, especially higher up. It felt very peaceful, in the car, being driven, watching the scenery. It went on for a very long time. Sometimes my attention would go back to what I was doing, back where I really was, and I would do things there. Then after a while my attention would go back to the cars in Russia, perhaps being reminded of them by someone where I was, and I would be drawn back to them, and would be in one of them, again being driven along. I spent extremely long times there. It wasn't like watching scenes on television of it, this was the raw footage being shot, before it was condensed for the documentary. I was there in real time, while it was being shot, and the long drives went on forever, for hour after hour. I was aware of this while it was happening, that I was seeing the long version, and that what would be later shown would be specially selected clips from it.

Sometimes, especially toward the end, I would see secret weapons or machines, out in the open, just one at a time usually, with a few people associated with them. The machines tended to get more futuristic as time went on, but still with a primitive look. Most were apparently left over from the old days, but some were still being worked on in a small manner. They seemed to be mostly on the order of rocket or bullet shaped tanks or cars, armored, with rivets showing, with projections on the front that were apparently rockets or guns, some were bristling with them. They were now apparently considered only marginally secret, something on the order of curiosities, and a small amount of national pride seemed to be associated with them.

Later I went back mostly to doing things where I was, still sometimes drawn back for a little while to the cars in Russia, as they went driving along, filming. Some fantastic machines were showing up where I was, too, but these were more advanced, and manned, more disk-shaped with wheels, bristling with projections, going fast, very dynamic. They looked vaguely like the thing Han Solo drove in Star Wars, though more of a ground vehicle, but still able to fly and sometimes doing so. A few showed up, singly, at different times, clearly visible in the bright sunshine. One of the machines showed up at an underpass, out in the country, came up very rapidly and paused, there under the intersection and partly out, then zoomed on. A few other people were with me. We were concerned about them, but though they seemed vaguely threatening, they didn't seem to be really concerned about us. We seemed to be working on some kind of project, something to do I think with making preparations and fortifications against them, protections against them. We were doing other things too, roadwork and some kind of construction I think.


When I woke up, I was sitting in a chair in front of the computer, with the radio on, and it was cold, cold enough to feel chilled. It had rained a few days ago and the temperature had dropped, with highs in the 90s. Now, early in the morning, with the air conditioner (evaporative cooler) apparently still on, it felt too cool, and I wrapped the towel, that I had as a small substitute blanket, around my shoulders and felt warmer.

Dream - The house in the barren wilderness, the gate that wouldn't latch properly, the coming storm, and the former name of Gabriel Warlock Strange

On Saturday, July 25, 2009, around 4:00-7:30 AM, I dreamed I was going across a largely barren landscape, from one isolated bar to another. The bars were simply made, with furniture simply cut from a powdery dark wood, and straight simple small bars/counters. We stopped there for food, I think. We had started out from some house, I think, that was itself fairly isolated. The land was barren, a wasteland, partly flat dirt and partly extremely low sparse dark vegetation, apparently grass but looking more like some kind of moss. It was cool and overcast, dim, a feeling of bleakness was over things. The whole family was traveling, perhaps in more than one car.

We got to what was evidently something like a farmhouse, though I'm not sure there was really a farm. It was getting dark. We were going to leave there too, it was just a place we were stopping for a little while. Far out in the back, perhaps 80 to 100 feet away, near the corner of the fence, which was tall and made of spaced wood boards, like some country fences, though about six feet high, was a gate. Beyond the fence was more barren land, mostly flat like the rest of it.

The gate had to be latched properly, but it was difficult to get the latch to stay together. We had been out to it earlier and opened it, now I had to check on it to make sure it was staying closed. I found that it still wasn't closing properly. A little girl went out with me, perhaps 10 years old, a relative of some kind. She stayed back by the house, on the small back porch, watching me. It was fairly dark, with a light at the back of the house providing some illumination. We had to leave soon, a storm was moving in fast, and it was very windy. The wind was making it harder to secure the gate, and it kept moving back and forth. I had two sets of gloves, one a dark heavy rubber and one that was white and much lighter weight, and cloth. I had put on the white gloves to do it, but it bothered me because I should be using the heavy rubber gloves instead. There was some problem with them though, either I couldn't find them right away or couldn't get into them for some reason.

I was having a lot of trouble with the gate, and it was taking a lot longer than I hoped it might. The little girl sometimes called out to me from the small back porch, talking to me, and I yelled back replies. Finally, still working on the gate, I told her to tell my mother, who was in the house somewhere, that she needed to hurry up and get ready to leave, because we had to leave soon, before the storm came. I was hoping to outrun the storm, but we would have to move pretty fast because the storm was moving quickly.


The former name of Gabriel Warlock Strange / GabrielWarlockStrange, Charles Brian Smith, came up in the dream, either faintly spoken, like something carried on the wind, or as a faint thought, disconnected from what was happening, back when we were in one of the bars along the way. I was talking to a few people at the time, some of which may have been family members.

The dream had a lot more in it, particularly earlier, and some more along the way, but I don't remember what it was.


In real life, I had earlier been working on a post for my blog that had a gate near the end, "Vanquishing the beast", and the previous day had talked to my mother about our back gate, which had a problem with the latch and it looked like someone had tried to get in, since the board laying on the ground in front of it was pushed back in a small arc.

GabrielWarlockStrange, before his death, was a poster on the unknowncountry.com message board. He died on June 18, 2009, but at the time of the dream I had known about his death for less than two weeks. He had been in poor health for a long time, many years, and sometimes mentioned it in his posts.

Gabriel Warlock Strange was his real legal name, he had changed it to that. He dropped the spaces for his user name on the message board, and other users frequently abbreviated it further, mostly commonly to GWS.

I had another dream about him a few years before this one, in which I was wandering through a large multistory building and came across him busy at work building an elevator that would go into outer space. I suppose that could be interpreted as building an elevator to Heaven, but he had a 12 part theory of how the universe worked, that he sometimes talked about, so it may be related to that too.

There was also another dream with him in it, a couple of years or so before this one. It had robots and people with metal insides and strange demonic things and a ranch and a celebration and presents, as well as shopping at a grocery-drugstore.

In real life, he had been working on a time travel novel involving a couple of characters, an ape and a sentient computer that looked like a briefcase, that were running away, traveling from the future to the past. They arrived in our time, our present, and were getting into various situations with people here. He posted on the message board the part of it that he had written, and then posted more as he wrote it. Then he had computer problems, as well as increasing health problems, and had to borrow someone else's computer to make posts, which tended to be few in number and did not include more of the story. He had written some more of the story on paper, he said, and I think was looking for some way to get it scanned into the computer, but apparently never did so, and was unable to get it posted before he died.

Dream - I go to work for the last time, then step off into empty space, drifting through the air to the other side

On Friday, June 12, 2009, late in the morning, I dreamed I was taking a shower, in some kind of business area or maybe shopping center. It was in a very large shower stall, probably twice as big as normal, with heavily textured sliding glass doors, I think, very large ones. Other people were around, walking past, this way and that.

My slippers were outside the shower, but after a while I brought them in, I think because I was worried about leaving them out there, but I'm not sure. I was hoping they wouldn't get too wet in the shower, but they ended up getting more wet than I was comfortable with, and dark dirt was washing off them, from the soles I think. I put them back out of the shower, but then changed my mind and brought them back in. I was concerned now about the dirt, that once wet it could be a problem and come off and leave tracks, maybe get on the tops of the slippers too, so it had to be washed off even if they got a little wet. I was tired and sleepy, and everything seemed to be moving slow. It seems I might have even sat down or kneeled at some point, too tired to continue, wanting to rest for a while.

I was sitting down, putting the slippers on, and I still had to finish with my shower, when the shower room shrunk around me, and I became aware I was sitting in a car and had been taking a shower there, inside it. The windows were slightly fogged on the inside and damp, and sometimes seemed much taller and flatter than the windows on a normal car.

I seemed to be parked by the edge of a broad sidewalk that ran along the side of a mall. People were walking back and forth along it, but not great numbers of them. Ahead of me, at the far end where the mall turned a corner and went in front of me, a few more people were walking, and I saw what appeared to be a guard, an overweight person in blue pants and a light blue shirt, with some kind of tag sewed to his shirt. He was frowning in my direction and talking into a little handheld device.

I still hadn't finished my shower. I wanted to finish it, but decided I wouldn't be able to. It was not a good place to be taking a shower, and though most people just walked on by, sometimes looking at me, sometimes not, it seemed I was attracting enough attention to get the guard notified, or at least I assumed that might be the case. I couldn't be sure he was actually talking about me, but I couldn't take the chance that he wasn't. I was somehow now partly dressed though, wearing some odd pants and shirt that I wouldn't normally wear. They seemed soft and almost flannel-like.

Another guard was on the sidewalk not far from me, and seemed to be receiving communications from someone, maybe from the first guard, or it could have been relayed from someone else. I thought it might be about me but I didn't know, and he wasn't paying any attention to me. He was looking in the general direction of the first guard but not at him, more just a general look down the way of the sidewalk.

I got out of the car, which might have been the 1970 Cadillac, though it's hard to be sure, it seemed to have a darker interior and so might have been the 1987 Oldsmobile. I walked down the length of the shopping center toward the first guard, probably walking on the asphalt instead of the sidewalk. I went by him and through glass doors into the shopping center. I think he turned slightly my way, still frowning and talking into his radio, but didn't say anything to me.

Inside, there was a dimly lit room, large and seemingly open at the ends to the shopping center or to other rooms, like it was something set up in the aisle without any walls beyond what were already there. A few people were there at computer workstations on dark table-like surfaces. The computers were dark and oddly shaped, with extensions going up square pillars.

I went to my computer, my workstation, and the table that was my desk. The computer was separated into various odd components, it was made that way. It had a small flat screen mounted on the square pillar, with dark wires going down to odd dark little devices, then to more devices on the table. A few people were passing through the area, in both directions, and a few people were at the computers. It seemed sad and bittersweet. I had come back now, after I'd left, but it was really all over.

I tried to log out, but then I found that the keyboard was separated into several dark rectangular pieces, with a couple of them on the square pillar under the monitor, which was mounted high on it. None of the keyboards had many keys. "Oh, that again," I thought. There didn't seem to be nearly enough keys to do anything useful, and I didn't see how I could log out. It would be bad to leave it that way and have people find it like that in the morning. I looked at it, somewhat amused, and decided to just turn it off. As I reached toward a small dark button toward the upper right corner of a keyboard on the pillar, perhaps the second one away from the screen, I noticed that I had somehow managed to log out anyway. I saw the white letters on the black, DOS-like screen, saying so. I continued to reach for the button anyway, and pushed it with my fingers. I pushed two buttons, actually, as there were two grouped close together, and when I pushed the one I wanted I also partly caught the one beside it to the left. The computer immediately turned off, with maybe a small chirp, and the screen flashed and went dark.

I picked up my giant plastic space shuttle model, that I had in the dream. I didn't want to leave it behind. I wrapped my left arm around it, holding it next to my body, sometimes also holding the end with my right hand. The model was probably about five or six feet long. Some people were coming in for the next shift. I recognized some of them from Nevada. Some of them looked at me a little funny, but they didn't want to really look at me. They knew I was going away and would not be back.

I walked back out through the glass doors and found I was now on a tall concrete platform with a lot of stuff on it, some in big dark boxes. I was on the level of a second story. It seemed to be late afternoon, though earlier it had been more toward the middle of the day, maybe late morning. Water was running off the edge of the concrete platform, just little shallow puddles of it, making tiny streams and drips as it went over. Far below, a middle-aged woman stood a little to my left.

I decided to move to my left and step off and glide down, as I could sometimes do these things, though I was intending this time to somehow just step off and stretch my foot down, not really letting go until I was standing on something. The water increased, and was coming out from more places. A lot was coming out from under the boxes and stuff, so it was hard to see what was happening. There was just a narrow space left open along the front, with occasional breaks in the stacks of boxes and things, and it was hard to find a dry spot to step in. I tried to carefully swing around and move to the left, trying to step in a dry spot, and accidentally splashed some water out over the edge where the woman was. I looked and she had quickly moved off, going under the overhang I think. I wasn't sure if she was hit, she might have been but I hoped not. It couldn't be helped now anyway.

I stretched my right leg out far over the edge, hanging there in space, partly holding onto something, but I was so far out that I essentially made a commitment to it, it was too late to turn back now. I swung my leg slowly around, trying to find someplace to put it, but there was too much water now. Most of the platform had water pooled out on it, running off in shallow little streams and dribbles. I finally swung slowly farther and farther toward the other side of the platform, and went all the way over to the corner, where there were some small dry areas, but was still mostly covered by thin sheets of water slowly dribbling off of wet spots around them. I was probably still standing at least partly in wet areas. From there I looked out again on the sunken broken concrete far below me. It rose away in a very gentle slope to where it became level with the ground. On each side were rough, irregular dirt cliffs with thin, half-dead yellow-green grass and areas of broken concrete.

I swung my leg far out and drifted through the air, going across the open space very slowly, the broken concrete of the ramp passing slowly under me. It seemed like a slow, peaceful process. As I went, I looked for a place to land, finally deciding on the top of the dirt cliff on the far side, about halfway along the ramp. I found my brother there, looking much younger, a few feet from the edge. He seemed to be waiting for me.

Dream - At a large glowing building, after the breakdown of civilization

On Thursday, June 25, 2009, in the morning, I dreamed I was at the place where my elementary school is, but it was a big white scientific/hospital/research place/store that was very wide and several stories in some areas. It tended to be set back from the broad parking lot in steps, and on slightly higher ground. The inside tended to have a soft glow, even from the walls, and some of the objects even seemed to glow some, though some were darker. The building seemed to glow some too, as viewed from the outside, like light softly shining through slightly frosted glass. The building even had a glass-like appearance.

Some areas had books for sale or display, but they didn't look like normal books, in some places being indistinct, softly glowing, irregular somewhat flattened things, partly darkened, almost like books burned around the edges and softly glowing from within with pale light. They were mostly spaced some from each other too, setting out on long shallow glowing shelf structures with the book covers facing out, though in some cases they were a bit closer spaced and even with the spine outward. In one of the inner rooms they were behind counters, stacked more normally and looking closer to what books normally looked like, though still a little odd. I went in there a few times.

Something strange was going on, some kind of disturbance, though I think at least part of it was outside, in the outside world, and filtered through to affect what was happening in the building. It was some kind of strange disaster I think, and after a period of confusion where not much was controlled, some kind of repressive military-style control slowly settled in place, with black-dressed troopers searching for people who had committed offenses, and death was the punishment for stealing from the place, even for stealing small items. Earlier though, when the period of confusion was in effect, people did pretty much what they wanted, and there was a lot of stealing. I even came in and took a few things. It didn't seem all that important anymore not to, like things had broken down almost completely and civilization was falling apart, at least to some extent and for a while, though the people in the building maintained a little bit of control.

What I took was on the small side, a couple of things like flattened wadded heavy plastic, like the plastic used for inflatable toys. They were around the size of a closed billfold or a little smaller. I'm not sure what their function was. They were on the wall behind a counter in the area in front of a major entrance, in a recessed window-like area in the wall, which was white like most other places. The objects themselves were more of a gray-green. I carried them around for a long time, even hiding them temporarily in the building, in a place deeper in and to the right, that seemed partly a store and partly a huge bedroom, reminding me somehow of the master bedroom in my grandmother's house in Arizona, though many times its size and mostly white. I put them behind a counter there that was near the front of the room. Some books were on shelves there under the counter, arranged like books on shelves normally are. Some people were looking for me by that time, but only in a vague sort of way, not really knowing who they were looking for, just looking for someone who had taken things.

I also later got the things outside to the car. It was night. My brother was there also, and worried about me or us getting caught with it. He was also there earlier in the dream, when we were first going in the building I think, or one of the times, but we were separated most of the time from each other. Toward the end, I think I managed to get one of the things back in, to the counter near the front, and maybe put it behind the counter. I still had the other one, though, in the car I think.

There was some darkish rectangular thing mounted on a wall somewhere. It might have even been outside the building. It was maybe 15 inches high and 20 or 24 inches wide. It was smaller when I first saw it, maybe less than half that size, but it grew to the size of a desk mat, and looked much like one. It appeared to be just thin plastic, though, like the kind used in inflatable toys, and some parts were even thinner, even trash bag thinness.

I pulled off a long dark strip of it from a panel on the right end of it. The plastic I pulled off was very thin, almost like carbon paper. I was going to take it inside and try to represent it as the other item, maybe folding it up. It almost seemed like somehow it was at least akin to the missing item. We were outside now, near the car. My brother was nervous and didn't see how this was helping, and worried about me being seen doing it and being seen holding it. I was holding it up in front of me, with it hanging full length. The thing I had torn it off from was something that also belonged to the building, and so we could get into trouble for taking it, too, and even killed for it. A black garbed trooper carrying some kind of big gun in both hands was only around 15 feet away, and seemed interested in us, though only in a vaguely happily curious way. My brother kept worrying, though, about getting caught.

The dream was fairly long and had a strange feeling about it, a kind of peaceful dreaminess a lot of the time. More went on in it, but it's hard to grasp exactly what.

There seems a vague association with earlier dreams where I was outside in a broad area at night, with scattered little buildings or structures and I had to make my way from one side of the area to the other, or nearly so, sometimes going in the odd little buildings. Sometimes magic was involved in some way, and sometimes some kind of task had to be completed, sometimes that night, and sometimes people or beings were after me, and strange monsters, maybe even ogres or dragons, might be about.

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 - Racing along a high, icy road

On Wednesday, April 15, 2009, probably somewhere in the 1:00-5:00 AM area, I dreamed I was driving in Nevada. It was night. I think it was just getting dark when I was setting out. I think my father was with me, also. I was going from Fallon north to gradually increasing elevation, then turning right. There was only one way back from here though, and one lane, not even a lane going here. The lane going back was already clogged with cars, all the way to the road I was on. I couldn't see what the problem was. I went past it to the other side of town. The whole thing was just a thinly developed area with scattered homes and businesses, but there wasn't any other way back. I was concerned about the time, that it would take too long, and I might not get back in time. I may have been concerned about going to work. I continued driving around, then somehow I did get back, at least in a way.

Then I was headed from Fallon, I think, but on the other side of it, going south, and had gotten past or to the first mountain, then I think I was heading back, going with some other cars down a mountain across a broad valley heading to another mountain. There was some kind of problem with the road I think, and maybe police cars waiting further on, that even came this way checking on the cars. There was a backup of cars even here.

Then I seemed to be much farther away, looking at the road from the air and the car going along it. The road was raised high above the ground on a narrow man-made ridge, and the whole area was covered with snow. The road had hardly any cars, and they were very widely separated, with long stretches between them. I saw the car I was in racing along the road, along the narrow snowy icy ridge high above the surrounding land, between mountains and heading toward the next one, and thought how dangerous it was, and how lucky I had been not to get into an accident.

Dream - The woman with the wooden station wagon

On Tuesday, September 15, 2009, in the morning, possibly very early in the morning, I dreamed I was driving in Nevada in the Fallon area in the dark, later driving in the rural outskirts to the south with a few other people. Someone with me, a girl I think, wanted us to sing an old Sonny and Cher song, but with vulgar language added. I didn't sing the vulgar language, though. There was something earlier about going to a room or rooms I was staying at too, and other things, maybe a car lot or junkyard. I think my father was there at times too and maybe my mother. I think it was a fairly long dream, generally pleasant.

Then I was in a big house with big some rooms. Two very large, very long tables had been set up, almost filling portions of two rooms. The tables were covered with various food dishes, fairly simple ones, mostly in plates or shallow bowls. The tables themselves were dark and simple. My aunt, my mother's sister, was there, and I think my mother and younger sister, and possibly my brother. I was trying to find something that my aunt would eat, making various suggestions. I think I found something like soft pretzel sticks and something else, and then a little later some small bananas, then I left to go home. The place was some distance from it.

I had gotten paid now and it was easier to buy things. I was going to get gas and pick up some more groceries. I bought a bunch of groceries at the service station, a paper sack of them. I was tired and operating mostly on nervous energy. I quickly threw a bunch of things in the sack, sweet rolls and maybe some more bananas and some other things, maybe some kind of meat too. I saw a loaf of Rainbow bread, but it had a small tear in the bag. I examined it closely and worried about it a bit, but decided to go ahead and get it. I intended to go to a real store later, but I wanted to pick up a bunch of stuff to keep us going for now. I was very tired. I took it to the counter and paid for it, then went back to the car. I had parked it at the pumps without thinking, since I normally get gas, but I just wanted to grab some groceries this time. I had stopped and looked back at it, but decided to just leave it, and hurry up and get the groceries. I felt bad about blocking the pump and hoped they wouldn't be too mad. I was too tired to get back in and repark it somewhere. It seems I did take the groceries home, and my mother and some other people were there. She was glad to see me, but then I left again and went to a different service station, somewhere in Phoenix. It seemed I was getting gas this time. It was a small station.

When I got back to my car, I saw a woman at a nearby pump who had a wooden car. It was large and boxy and very simple. It sat high off the ground on wooden 2 by 4 inch boards that acted as legs. At first they didn't seem to have wheels, but later I saw tiny dark rollers under them. The car was roughly a tall station wagon configuration with a short hood. It was mostly empty inside. The seats were just a wooden platform. It didn't seem to have an engine. Though sometimes it did seem to go under it's own power, other times it used foot power. I started talking to the woman a bit. She got finished and went to get in her car, and asked if I wanted to go with her. I finally decided to get in. I noticed a police car a little ahead and to the left, at another pump, and worried about it a bit. The car didn't have any seat belts, and he might decide to give us a ticket for that. The car was kind of odd, and potentially noticeable because of that, but since it was obviously a homemade thing I hoped he would give us some slack. He came back to his car and finished up, and mostly seemed to ignore us. The woman kept talking in a somewhat tired, matter of fact way about various things.

We started going and pulled out onto the street. I was sitting at what would normally be the driver's area, and she was on the passenger side, but she did most of the driving, though at some point she suggested I take over, and I drove from where I was without having to move. At some point she joked about having taken a Republican position on something, and hoped I wasn't mad about that. She was apparently a Democrat, though. We eventually got to a house somewhere, apparently hers, but then started to pull out in the street and leave again. It was morning now, though it was night when we started, and the light was still fairly dim. She was driving now, and was driving earlier when we got here I believe. I was still worried about getting stopped by the police, this time more because the car was so odd, and they might think it didn't meet regulations and was somehow unsafe. A police car was starting to come by at the left, as we waited to pull out onto the street.

The dream faded into multiple scenarios then, with us getting stopped by that car or another one, and the officer calling in and asking about it, and another car coming in from the other direction, and another officer on the radio saying that he had stopped some other car that was similarly odd at an earlier time, and the judge threw the case out, so it probably wasn't worth getting involved in, to just let it go.