I haven't been working on my story in ages, so when I fell asleep last night I requested a dream that would inspire me in that arena. This is what I got:
Barbara and I, along with two of the same four guys from a dream I'd had months ago in which I crashed a car into a hole on the way to a cozy snowy cabin, took a train to "Eugene" or some such. All of the guys in that dream were black and very tall. We didn't get off in time, but were ushered off south of town and had to walk in ourselves in the dark. We went to a late-night restaurant where some boys I went to high school with were - not ones I'd been friends with, and I'm not even sure if they recognized me at first. Once they did, they (jokingly?) held me to some old stereotypes. As I tried to prove them wrong, I unthinkingly grabbed a bite of their food and shoved it into my mouth, only to discover that it was bacon. It took ages for me to get all of it and then it's residual flavor out of my mouth. I felt like I'd polluted myself almost beyond recovery.
I left the restaurant with only one of the guys we'd come with on the train; Barbara and the other guy vanished around this time. We found ourselves on a bluff overlooking a huge, beautiful stone bridge, on which another black guy was laying, writing and reciting poetry. An earthquake was scheduled to happen around 3 in the morning, so one of the guys and I raced down to move this brother from the bridge. It was a nerve-wracking experience to be on it, even though it wasn't so high above the water that we would die. The poet was very hard to move. He was almost like a sleep-walker, and very much in his creative groove, unwilling to break it. The water rushing below the bridge was inky and dark blue in the night; the scene was reminiscent of Arequipa.
Day time came, sunny early summer, and I was driving home on country roads with ripening fruit trees and twisting happy rivers. I spent the remainder of a dream with a guy who was almost faceless - his presence was steady, but I can't for the life of me tell what he looked like or who he was supposed to be. It was in his company that, driving into town through some loosely interpreted version of the historic neighborhood, I blinked us into the 1980's. We were both totally aghast. It was as though the world before my eyes had melted down into nothing but its colors, balls of color, and then reformed into an identical scene in another time. We drove through the streets feeling out of place; our car was from the 90's, and we hoped no one would notice. Needless to say, my home town was not what it is in reality - it wasn't even anything from my dream-map - but it was much more beautiful and curious and inspired. We pulled over at a store that isn't really there west of where the north co-op should be, on a densely green, tree-lined street. We went inside to find a myriad of people fully immersed in the 80's, a clothing section that was fully stocked for the 80's, and food options that were woefully straight out of the 80's as well.
Outside of the store, we collided with a group of people (at least one of which I know in reality) from the present, and that broke the spell. I tried to tell them what I had done, and they were fascinated. The girl I do know told me candidly, "I have always known you have special powers; I don't, I am just the sort of hippie-dippy person who believes in them." Her daughter was with us, and I had some personal interaction with the little girl that I wish I could remember better. I attempted to do it again, but only succeeded at bringing us back to the 90's. Still, that was quite the show. We managed to stay in that decade for quite a while, wandering around town, until I got it in my head that we HAD to go back to the 80's so that I could go to my childhood home, so I could explore it again, so I would show the strange guy I was with all of the exact locations that I experienced paranormal phenomena in, so I could feel as an adult what the vibe there actually was.
We made our way to the neighborhood, but I was completely unable to push us back into the 80's again; we were kind of trapped behind a physical and metaphysical force-field about three houses up the street. It was an earthy old house with a wide wooden deck in back. From there we could see that there was a narrow cement bike path running behind the houses, and I could see that the back yard of my childhood home was unfenced and open to it. I wanted so badly to just go back there, but the guy was very reluctant, and I found that his "no" was somewhat paralyzing. (This neighborhood was similar to the one with the huge street party in near Lake Washington in the dream where I ended up becoming immortal and taking off in a yacht to the San Juans, but couldn't convince anyone for my life to come along with me).
My life kind of fell back into a normal rhythm after that. I had to return to work, with plants and the berry field, messing about with sandals and seedlings, my co-workers and being on time. Around this point, Ian and I traveled back down to that stone bridge from the beginning of the dream, and, also at night, he killed my favorite cat. He had his reasons for doing it - ceremony, ritual, who knows? I couldn't watch him do it. I fled the woodsy place by the river and, sobbing as I wandered through the streets, came to terms with the fact that my cat's buoyant, fun energy would live on the in universe - it would be reincarnated in some way and we would not actually lose it. Still, I was heart-broken and shaken.
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