Dream Log: January 9, 2002

This was a lengthy and complicated dream, but unfortunately I can only remember pieces here and there.

Along with my roommate/coworker and some other guy, I was driving over to someone's house to watch some pirated DVDs. The house was way out in this hilly area, and didn't seem to belong to any of us. It was large and fancy, but the yards around it were messy and the front gate looked imposing but was open. We had apparently broken some traffic law on the way there and were somewhat uneasy, both about that and about the pirated DVDs, but no one seemed to be following us, so we figured everything was cool. We parked the car and went inside.

At this point the plot seemed to shift, and I discovered that we were not there to watch movies. We had some nefarious deed to do, stealing something, I believe, or maybe even bumping someone off, and we had to climb way up through the house into the bell tower to do it. This took a long time, as we picked out the route.

We nervously accomplished the task and were about to leave when we discovered that without our noticing, the police had come up and surrounded the house. Clearly we were wanted men and they were authorized to use deadly force against us. These were not normal Police either, they were the gas mask-wearing SWAT guys from the film Brazil.

Fortunately we seemed to know the building better than them and made our way out of the building with out getting spotted. This also took a long time and was cause for much stress. We had almost reached the car when one of us realized that we left something in the house. This person tried to go back, but gave up when he realized the place was crawling with cops. Strangely they didn't seem to have noticed our car, over by some disused water heaters and a brush pile.

We jumped into our car and sped for the getaway. Just then an ambulance was pulling into the gate though, and he apparently knew who we were because he sped off after us, trying to bring us to justice I suppose.

At first the road was some dirt back road, but soon we reached a major rail line that had one track running in each direction on either side, and a space between them that was big enough to drive down, although switches that connected the tracks crossed the center everyonce in awhile.

We drove very fast over this bumpy and clearly unsafe route, the ambulance following behind, trains passing us on either side. Fear gripped us. I tried to persuade my roommate, who was driving to go under a moving train to get us more in the lead, but he decided, quite logically, to stop and wait instead.

Eventually we escaped from the ambulance that had been dogging us for so long, and since we still had the DVDs, we stopped at someone else's place and watched one. It turned out to be a Japanese language instructional video. The one phrase it taught me before I woke was "Watashi-wa Ayumi-chan" which it translated (correctly) as "I am Ayumi-chan."

Reasons to have this dream:

• While I have never watched a pirated DVD, we do watch alot of DVDs at my house.
• I have never had to commit any such nefarious deed, but I suspect tension over the situation in Afghanistan was responsible for this.
• I had watched part of The Fast and the Furious with my roommates before I went to bed. This movie features fast cars racing, including two scenes in which a car goes under a tractor trailer.
• Another of my roommates has Metropolitan Street Racer for the Dreamcast, and the one race course I've seen him play has street car tracks which you drive over.
• I speak Japanese. However that phrase is odd and incorrect, because you wouldn't use an ending like 'chan' to describe yourself.

It was really odd...

I was with my mother, in some sort of apartment building, low-income housing or something like that. We were there helping people clean up their apartments. I remember having to go into the basement, which was like a regular household basement, cement floor and walls, and the like, and both of us being scared to go down there. But we went down, and there were two pinball machines in the corner, brand new ones, but made to look like old-fashioned ones.

I nudged one of them, cause I could see the ball was stuck on it, and then it made some noises. The woman from the apartment we were in started talking to us through the floor/ceiling between us - the basement ceiling also looking like a regular house basement.

We went back up, and I had to take some of the trash out to the dumpster, it was dark, and I saw some sort of animal, one that shouldn't have been there, like a horse or something. I went back in, and was helping clean up some more. I looked out the window, and it was like looking down from a third story apartment. There was a camel out in the parking lot now, walking around. There shouldn't have been one, so I started looking out even harder - and saw a bunch of animals come running up, like the zoo had let everything loose. There were elephants, and horses, and lions... lots of lions. The animals were running around, fighting with each other and such.

I said something about the animals being out, and then went to the sliding door of the apartment. I looked outside, and saw all the animals around, and then quickly opened the door, jumped outside, and shut it again, climbing under this shelter-like thing right outside the door, like a board leaning up against the wall just under the bottom of the door - with open sides that I was watching the animals through. Suddenly I realized they could get to me and I got scared, and opened the door and ran back inside, since the animals were all around.

I closed the door, but just then I saw the woman living in the apartment screaming as a big lioness was standing over her. I grabbed Rachelle, who was now there instead of my mother, and we ran out the apartment door into the building hallways. There were lions around, so we went running up the stairs, and around the halls a few floors up. We'd go to another stairwell, and see lions at the bottom, and keep running to other stairwells.

I got to one and there was a lion right there ready to get us, so we climbed over the railing and started climbing down the inside of the stairwell toward the first floor. Suddenly, the lion from up above jumped down the stairwell, so we climbed back up, and took off down the hallway, running into some random apartment.

...then I woke up.