Strange Dreams

So I don't talk about dreams - they tend to be personal email from the un- or subconscious, but last night was just . . . strange.

My dreams don't normally have a vertical component. I rarely (and by rarely I mean once every two months or so) have a dream where I'm flying, or falling, or even looking up. A lot of my memorable dreams involve architecture, cities, and streets. So I'm an engineer at heart.

Last night was a series of very strange dreams, in that they continued and evolved through numerous scenes, and were all set among the mountains. A lot of people I knew were gathered in a town much like Concrete, Washington, a valley town on the Skaggit River framed by two great rills of mountains, with the river and a single main road down the center. We were in the basement of an old whitewashed church, which in addition to a movie theatre beneath the chapel, had a wet bar with mirrored tile and various prop sets, including a dungeon. I went for a walk and found myself going up the side of one of these mountains, which was being either excavated or the valley in front of it was being filled. It was all dirt, no stone, like a sand castle that has been scooped out, and yellow orange dozers were moving around.

I returned to the Church, where everyone was paying for the meal. I gathered the money, when a former WotC co-worker informed me I had forgotten the tax. I had not decided how much money people were paying, and people were just leaving money so I didn't know who paid. I yelled at the co-worker, and that brought me awake, angry and seething (which is a rarity as well).

The dream resumed after I got back to sleep. Still in the mountains, but our old high school (Mt Lebanon) was in it now. The interior of the building was TSR, and I was trying to clean my old cube (second floor, main building) when the Vice President of Sales from WizKids came in with gift bags and set them down, so other people came into my messy cube in order to get them. I took the last gift bag, and realized that it held something belonging to a friend, a magazine. In the magazine was a photo of a church basement with the dungeon. A young englishman informed me that his band had done the photo shoot, and they had to bring in their own vermin. I knew he was lying - that rat on the mantlepiece had been ceramic.

So I went off after the friend, and noticed the mountains surrounding the school - tall, narrow peaks truncated at the top, with greenery reaching almost to the plateaus. My friend (his identity changed as I walked) was ahead of me. He had to get to where he had parked his car. Earlier in the dream (either really earlier or filled in in the middle of the dream as a flashback) he had been plunging to his apparent death in his underwear, when he came up with an excellent tire commercial. He survived the fall, and now was successful and had a car, which he had parked as far away from the school as possible.

I finally had caught up with him (Kate was with me at this point, bundled against the cold -as we moved away from the school it got chiller). Now the magazine was an electronic handheld device, like a TV remote. Kate noted we could have walked there through the woods instead of across the parking lot, but I was too old and heavy to make it down the trails. And I awoke.

This was a weird dream, and like dreams, means something that is obvious to everybody else but is opaque to me. Probably work- and career-related. But the fact it hung with me through two awakenings, and dealt in imagery that is odd for me (We're talking dramatic, New Zealand, LOTR/Xena mountains), it bears mentioning.

More later,