This is me recording a dream so if you find those boring, scroll on, no problem. If you want to peek inside my brain, read on. (I am *not* looking for interpretation, though, so don’t do that; obvious parts are obvious, personal parts are personal.)
It started as a promisingly boring dream: We (V, J, and I) were in the living room and I decided we needed to clean the house. I noticed we have several of those large rolly ball toys, so I suggested we make a space for them downstairs and put them together. V agreed, so I took a large plastic one downstairs. We had also discussed how we keep our spare batteries on these things, so that would mean we’d need to go downstairs to get batteries, but we have a LOT of spare batteries, so there are too many to keep them upstairs.
When I got downstairs, I realized we had a lot more room than I’d remembered, and there was already a nice, mostly vacant space that I’d already started organizing, so I put the toy down there and started thinking about how better to organize the area. That’s when I noticed an alcove off to the side, next to the stairs, where there was a bunch of electronic equipment with blinking lights and such.
This prompted me to try to figure out what that was all about. It occurred to me that the equipment had been running non-stop for something like twenty years, pretty much the whole time we’d had the house, and I asked V about it but she didn’t know what it was for either.* I looked in the manual, but all I could figure out is that it had something to do with home security and HVAC control for when people are away on vacation.
I was going to put the rolly toys on the floor in this alcove, but then I realized the floor near the wall was REALLY canted, so it wouldn’t be a good place for storing flat things. I did sit at the computer terminal to try to figure out which parts I could turn off, because I was concerned about electrical waste, but then I decided I had other things to do and I’d have to come back to it.
There was some sort of electronic device that was on the floor that was clearly broken and not attached to anything, so I moved that to the very narrow alcove between this alcove and the stairs, where there were already several vases and candleholders that I meant to ask V about… were they garbage? Were we keeping them?
That’s when I noticed that there were a lot of people in the basement, because apparently V had advertised a rummage sale where we were trying to sell anything of value in the basement. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, especially since some of the things up for sale were these collector items of mine that it was considered a faux pas to sell because they were connected to the spirit of their owner.
I was also upset because we had done so much work to make sure the basement was secure. There had been a few places where the floor was in danger of collapse, but we’d cordoned those off. Except, a lot of people were in the side room where there was gap in the threshold where you could literally see the dirt several feet below, and you had to step over that threshold to get into the side room.
The side room itself had a wood plank floor and looked a lot like a room from Greenfield Village, except very large, maybe 20 x 20. That’s where my soul collectibles were, and people were checking them out. I saw one man in particular, and I invited him outside by the door in the room’s wall. That’s when I noticed that the wall had several windows, even though we were supposed to be eight or so feet underground.
Anyway, I told the man, “Come outside with me, I want to show you something.” And while he was suspicious, he followed me outside.
“What is it?” he asked after the door closed.
At some point, my dream POV shifted to third person, and the two of us, both men, were standing outside in the yard, a standard suburban backyard. But there was no door anymore, and there was ominous music suggesting I was about to do something terrible.
I told him he had to follow me to the side of the house, into the kitchen. He said he didn’t want to. I said he had to, it was pointless to argue or fight, there was no way out of this situation and the three of us were very hungry.
We both took this to imply I was going to slaughter and eat him, but he just seemed resigned to that because there was no way back the way we’d come, so the two of us (still in third person) went into the side door.
We walked into a restaurant that looked like a Chinese place but served deli food, and was particularly famous for its corned beef. He asked about the third person; I told him that we were meeting my mother, who absolutely adored the Reubens here.
But the host showed us to the long hallway in the back, with a short ceiling, and I realized we were really meeting my daughter, not my mother. The hallway was a dining area meant to look like a train, and the idea was that kids could eat there with their parents and pretend they were going on a trip somewhere.
We sat down, except now I was also there as a woman, sitting next to my daughter and an 11- or 14-year-old boy (he changed in age, back and forth). The boy was in romantic love with me (the first person woman me, since now I was there twice), but I told him it wasn’t appropriate. I let him cuddle me while the other three waited for the pizza that was the only thing that could be ordered on the train ride.
Even though this was a fixed restaurant painted like a train car, with concrete windows painted like a cheesy Italian restaurant, it jostled and made noises like a real train. After a while, I noticed I was in the back seat of a car driving out of a parking garage through the priority prepay lanes and into the night, driving through an urban streetscape.
At this point, I realized I was dreaming and got really upset because I was confused about what was happening. Everything had started out so normal, and was I still in the restaurant? Was I in a car? Who were this people? Why was I two people, both of whom were in this car?
I told everyone that I just needed to be alone, and then I was sitting on a metal chair in the middle of a nondescript room with a concrete floor, and I couldn’t see more than a few feet around me. And I was crying, really crying, feeling emotions at a depth that I rarely feel in dreams, feeling so overwhelmed and lonely and wondering where I was even going with my life. I was saying all these things, and part of my monologue was about how I didn’t even know if I was still just talking in my dream or if I was really talking, and I’d never know because I knew I was sleeping on the couch (V and I are both sick, so I’ve been sleeping on the couch).
And that’s when I woke up.
This was a very vivid dream overall, but despite that, it still hit me how VERY vivid and real my emotions at the end were.
* This part was likely inspired by me noticing, again, that there’s a spoke detector thing in our ceiling that we’ve never installed or put batteries in, but which still has a blinking green light. I assume it’s wired into the main electrical system and hence doesn’t need its own battery, but I’ve never examined it closely.