Sean M. (a childhood friend who lived on my street in Yakima) and I are driving way out in the country. Nothing around but rolling hills, dirt roads, and the occasional house. He’s got a new white car and wants to show it off. It’s not a sports car, but a brand new, big American four-door station wagon thing. We drive around aimlessly in the late afternoon, then get out and walk for a while, until we get to a record store. There’s a cute blonde girl working there who I start talking to. She says that it’s lucky we stopped by that day because she normally works in the Vancouver store. I agree that it’s lucky, and tell her that it’s great to meet her. I tell her that Sean and I have to get back to get his car, but we’ll come back after that. “That’ll be great,” she says, and we part ways.

The dream’s location changes. It’s now late at night, and Sean and I are back at the car. It’s right where we left it–underneath the carport near an abandoned farmhouse–but the doors are open and the dome light is on. I walk toward the passenger side. Sean looks inside, then quickly motions with his hand for me to stop.

“Shit,” he hisses. “There’s meth all over the place.” He jumps away from the car and speaks a command into the remote starter.

“What did you say to it?” I ask. He doesn’t respond, but the car suddenly starts itself, turns on its lights, and sort of locks itself in armor and drives away.

I’ve never seen anything like it. “Wow, that thing has a self-destruct feature? Crazy!”

The car drives itself away, turns down the driveway and out to the nearest road, where it turns right and heads down the road a bit. It then turns around, back the way it came, and drives itself off the top of a hill. Apparently it’s supposed to explode, but it doesn’t explode, so it drives back to where we are still standing dumbfounded, with wide eyes and slack jaws.

“What the heck?” I yell, punctuating each command with a hand gesture. “Tell it to ‘go away’ or ‘go away and explode’ or whatever. Do something.”

“You’d better get outta here,” Sean warns me. “I’ll stay here and figure this out.”

“Right,” I say, a little sarcastically. “I’ll just go back, with no I.D. and no money. Wish we’d thought of that before. We could’ve grabbed our stuff.” I turn and walk off down the deserted dirt road.

I walk along the road for quite a while, until it becomes a highway, and suddenly I become very sleepy. For some reason the guard rail of the highway is made of grocery carts, so I climb into one and try to take a nap. By this time it’s about ten in the morning, and it seems that word of the meth-filled car has spread, and the street is filled with cars that are apparently on the lookout for us. I’ve been sleeping curled up with my face buried in my folded arms, and I’m wearing a baseball hat [which I normally never wear; it’s the one that’s in the back of my car in real life, the one they gave Steph and me when we played the show in Bend] so I’ve so far gone unrecognized. I continue to doze, but I keep an eye on the traffic too. A fire truck creeps by, and all the guys on board crane their necks to look at me suspiciously, but I manage to keep my face hidden, and the truck drives away.

A traffic jam is forming, and the drivers are starting to get impatient. A dad tells his wife and young kids in their stopped van, “Everybody, we just need to be patient, okay?” A woman in a four-door car pounds the steering wheel and decides to go around the jam by pulling into the turn lane. She revs the engine and pulls out, only to be sideswiped by a passing van. This causes a chain reaction, and a number of small fender-benders occur. [See? Yet another car crash dream!] With all the chaos happening, I feel safe enough to climb out of the grocery cart and walk off across the field toward a nearby store to get some food.

The dream changes again, and I’m coming out of the store. The girl I met in the record store is walking in at the same time I’m walking out. She smiles at me a little, but doesn’t quite recognize me yet. I call out, “I remember you, you normally work at the Vancouver store!”

She smiles more broadly and says, “I thought I recognized you, but you know, a girl has to be careful these days.”

We walk to a nearby restaurant, where we each get an old-fashioned vanilla milk shake. We don’t talk much, though, and we still don’t know each other’s names. I hear sirens outside, and I feel that she may be in danger if someone sees her with me. I tell her I need to go take care of a few things, and I walk off.

“Okay,” she says, “see you when you get back.”

The dream changes yet again, and this time I find myself in the middle of the city, in a very run-down old house. It seems to be a residential facility of some sort, where the state puts people they don’t know what to do with; homeless people, orphans, drug addicts, et cetera. I wake up in bed wearing a white T-shirt and boxer shorts, neither of which I was wearing the previous day. Through the closed door, I hear people who sound like case workers talking to each other in the next room, sotto voce.

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know. He was brought in yesterday. No I.D., no money, no wallet, nothing.”

“How strange.”

I get out of bed, put on a pair of jeans that I find on the floor–also not mine, though they almost fit me–and go out into the next room to look for a sweater or something, because it’s fairly chilly. The curtains in the room are closed, and there is no furniture except some short, gray metal file cabinets and an old, wooden desk. There are hardwood floors, dark yellowish walls, and olive green curtains, all of which are very run down and dingy. There are four or five people in their forties and fifties sitting around the room on boxes and file cabinets making idle conversation. It seems that they know how to conduct themselves here, and that they have been all here for quite some time, perhaps months. They ask me a lot of questions, but I’m still cold, so I ignore them and go into a side bedroom to look for a sweater.

It’s even darker in there than in the main room, and there are piles of old clothes strewn about the floor. I rummage around and find a sweater that’s green and brown and white. It’s a bit too small for me, but I put it on, not realizing in the darkness that it has a green, gauzy skirt thing attached to it. I walk out and everyone starts laughing.

“What is it?” I ask, look down, see the skirt, and then I start to laugh too. One of the case workers laughs and shakes her head. I go back into the bedroom and take the sweater thing off. I stop in the bathroom, and before I step out, I look in the mirror to find that I’m still wearing the ridiculous baseball hat–must’ve slept in it too–and that my hair has grown clear down over my ears on the sides, and that I’m wearing old wire-frame glasses. ‘What is this place,’ I ask myself, ‘and how long have I been here?’ I go back into the room and lie down on the bed to collect my thoughts. One of the women from the other room, an attractive black woman in her forties, lies down on the bed next to me, facing up.

“Touch me,” she says. “Here.”

She rolls over on her side slightly to face me, and pulls up her skirt a little bit to show me where her stockings have been pulled down slightly, revealing a couple inches of her bare legs. I touch her there for a while, but then I think of the girl I met, and decide I should probably stop. I tell the woman this, and she agrees, but then sighs loudly with exasperation.

I get up, take a deep breath, and walk back into the main room. One of the men seems to think this is a support group, and as I walk past he asks me, “How thin do you want to be?”

I stop, and laugh a confused laugh. “I never really thought about it. No more so than I am already, I suppose.” I turn away and walk into the kitchen, where I see two older women and the record store girl. I walk over next to her, put my hand on her shoulder and say, “This is amazing; I can’t believe you’re here too.”

She smiles. “I know it! But this is the only place I can go to take care of my colonic disorder.”

The other two women laugh to each other, shake their heads and turn away, but I feel a genuine concern for her. “How long have you been here? Are you doing okay?” She gives me a we-can’t-talk-about-this-here look and walks outside to the yard, so I follow her out.

This is the first time I’m able to really look around at my surroundings. The house is very run down, about a hundred years old, in a not-too-ornate Victorian style, originally painted light green. Surrounding the house is a huge grassy yard, with an overgrown tree which covers the yard and part of the house. Sticking out of the roof of the house is an enormous rusty gas pipe, which turns out to be extremely long, and I can see that it runs in a straight line clear up to an abandoned refinery–think of Gasworks Park in Seattle–on top of the hill in the middle of the city, a couple of miles away. Somehow it occurs to me that the city is Paris, but I can’t be sure. One of the case workers comes outside to supervise the girl and me, so we decide to separate. It occurs to me that I should try and call a friend to figure out what to do next, but of course my phone was in Sean’s meth-filled car, so I don’t have it anymore. I decide to just speak into the air, instead of using a phone, and I “call” Joan.

“Joan? It’s me. I’m in this crazy ‘residential’ place. It’s a long story, but nobody knows who I am, so they sent me here.” She suddenly appears in the air next to me; apparently that’s the way phones work in this dream. I continue, “Whoa. You’re. . .here. But you’re. . .in your fifties or something; you don’t look like yourself.”

She scoffs a little at that. Her apparition has long, permed hair, she is about forty pounds heavier than she is normally, and her face looks very saggy and strange. I ask her, “How long have I been gone? I have no idea. But I look very strange; everyone here does, even you do, right now!”

Joan doesn’t seem the least bit fazed by all of this. “Everything will be okay,” she says. Something tells me she understands, and that she’s been through this before.

The case worker hears my side of the conversation, but he can’t see the apparition I’m talking to. “Oh, my Lord! Who are you talking to?” I ignore this question and continue talking to Joan, and he starts gesticulating wildly, pointing at me with one hand and motioning with his other hand for someone to come quickly and help him deal with me. The girl across the yard sees what’s happening, runs to my side, and slips her arm around my waist. I am instantly comforted, and I get the feeling that she’ll be there, both now and for a long time to come.

That’s when I woke up.

* * * * *

This dream only lasted an hour or so in real time, but the story seemed to last for hours. I got up at 6:00 a.m. to write it all down. It’s now 7:30, and I’ve been writing all this time. I need to take a shower and go to work now.

[edit: I’ve edited this a couple of times, to patch some things up, fix some awkward grammar, make the tense match, and hopefully make it easier to read.]

Such a crazy dream. Love to know what you think about it all. If you made it clear through to the end of this, you are a saint and a true scholar, and I really appreciate you!