Dream #1

A recent out-of-the-blue email from someone I haven't seen in many years has initiated a flurry of emails with old friends from my hometown, which led me on my hard drive to rediscover this old dream I had sent one of them a few years ago for freelance analysis. Let this be the year of capturing dreams.

Here is the dream that resurfaced for me today, which I woke up from and wrote down May 31 ,2005:

My family was all at my grandma's, but then I remembered it was my high school reunion that night, so I left for a while to go there. I went to where a bus was supposed to pick up people. On the bus I fell asleep and woke up when we got there. Got off the bus and it was a fun park -- water rides and so forth. The reunion was there. But everyone inside was dressed up like it was a 50s prom, with tuxes and dresses in pastel colors, and I had worn terrible clothes, my worst t-shirt, and my glasses, no contacts. What was I thinking? I thought. I walked around a while, but decided it wasn't my scene. I couldn't find my shoes, but decided I hate my shoes and needed new ones anyway. I'd go buy some.

After much searching, I worked my way out of the complex in my socks somehow and ended up coming up an escalator that dropped me in a common area between three bars, and they seemed to be gay bars. Some guys kept motioning me to come over and sit with them at the bar, and in a dream you are supposed to go, but I forgot that and for some reason I thought, no, it's a sidetrack and walked away. But then I changed my mind and went back, but they were gone (what were they going to tell me?). So I went outside.

It was a mall type building, in a city. No clues there but a lot of traffic. I went back inside and came out a different door, into a neighborhood. Then I remembered I was looking for a shoe store -- I walked toward a house and saw two girls talking.

"Excuse me, could I use your phone?" I intended to call my brother. They let me in the house. "Where am I?" I asked.

"Conorville."

But the girls disappeared. Instead I was stuck talking to their mother. Then another guy came home, looking like, I don't know, weird and tanned and wrinkled, then some more guys came in and brought over a plate they were holding together and started talking to the mother. "Look, we got this off the top of the cake!" On the plate was the top half of a sandwich, kind of oozing. She seemed interested. I looked around and a kid was putting up a poster that said "Right-wing church - MEETING TONIGHT."

I left and started walking again through the neighborhood. All the mailboxes at the end of driveways were shaped like greyhound dogs and were moving, running in slow motion. Then I saw I'd gone in a circle and was back at that house, and I spotted one of the original girls -- she lived above the garage.

"Hi!" I said. "You were going to let me use your phone."

She was standing on a ladder that had been leaned up against a blackboard. She turned to me on the ladder and smiled and said, "Here is what it will cost." On the blackboard she wrote: $28. I was looking through the contents of my pockets when I woke up.