There was a circle of people. Each person had an arm on the back of each of his two neighbors. I was standing in the center of that circle. One word came to mind: "Beyond".
I was watching a movie with my parents. The movie was set in a small fictional seaside town in South Jersey that only appears in my dreams. The part of the town that I usually see is a long straight road running alongside a body of water for some distance and a road leading off at a right angle from the first road. There is a little open-air mall at the end of the second road. In the movie, there was a huge sign bearing the name of a national computer store chain. My mother said that the movie certainly was up to date considering that that particular store only started opening this summer. I remarked that the store was only about three quarters complete and that a portion of the store was still being built.
All of a sudden, I found myself inside the computer store in the cables section. (Ho hum.) Then as I was walking around, the store changed into a warehouse full of wire cages. There was a row of cages with my name and state of origin on it. (It said "NY", which is no longer correct.) I figured the cages were meant to hold personal belongings, and in fact my stuff was already there. There were lots of people strolling around and gawking at stuff that wasn't theirs. There was no privacy at all. Some people came and moved some of my wire cages to another location before I could say or do anything.
Then the warehouse changed into a market. (How many times does the scene have to change in one dream?) I walked the length of the market through a section where vendors were selling prepared food, and found my wire cages again.
Then the whole area changed into a bus terminal. There was a little van that the USPS had set up and there was a postal worker inside that van selling stamps. There was a long line of around twenty people waiting to buy stamps and send packages. And predictably I had a sudden urge to buy stamps.
I wasn't in this dream so it was like watching a movie. A family was traveling on vacation through Colorado. They must have had a lot of baggage because they were bringing along, in that order, a car, a huge motorhome occupying both sides of the road, a rhinoceros, an elephant, and a stationwagon. Except for the wagon, all the other vehicles and the two animals were all painted in a red, white, and blue stars-and-stripes pattern. Also, the animals weren't that slow. They were moving at thirty or forty miles per hour.
Needless to say, there was a long line of traffic stuck behind this strange group. Eventually, the family arrived at a rest area and decided to take a break. So, the three vehicles and two animals pulled over by the side of the road. The rhinoceros couldn't stop properly and ran into a lamp post. It winced a little.
All the drivers who were impatiently waiting behind this nutty family suddenly had an unimpeded road and zoomed ahead. But a state trooper was waiting and went after them with sirens and flashing lights. Another state trooper remained behind to chat with the father of the family. The father asked for directions and made some small talk to be polite.
Meanwhile, the rest of the family were at the restroom. That is an overstatement since it was merely an inlet of water coming through a rock tunnel from a lake. It was disgusting. Let me tell you those weren't fish floating in the water. The mother lay down in the water and sighed. (Ewww!)
I was in what looked like the interior of a large hotel on a guest floor. The carpets were brownish orange and the walls were beige. Although generally habitable, the place appeared to be in a slight state of disrepair and needed some cleaning. I wandered around aimlessly, chatting with several passersby. I took the elevator down several floors and up several floors again, and even visited the restrooms briefly although I did not use them. It was an pretty uneventful dream.
In this dream, I was actually trying on a pair of trousers and they were green. Yuck!
I was sitting in a lecture room taking an advanced university course on a subject that I can't remember. There was a student sitting out in front who looked like a young Erik Estrada. He kept interrupting the lecturer to ask silly questions even about material that the lecturer had just covered mere minutes ago.
I was sitting on top of a model train with a friend named Pete. Both of us were about a foot tall. We were travelling through a series of green felt hills on that train. There were little fires here and there and the train sent out blasts of water as we passed them. For some reason unknown to me, the water was hot. I suggested to Pete that he shrink down further so that he could enter the engine and so he did. In the meantime, I grew to normal size and got off the train so that I could watch from above. Then the word "scalding" entered my mind (in a broken typewriter font). I realized then that Pete would be scalded if the train descended into a valley that was flooded with the hot water from the train. By then, the train was out of reach so I searched for a switch that would it. Unfortunately, I could not find any such switch. Then I woke up.
I was standing in a clearing in some New England-like woods. Then the scenery dissolved and I found myself in some sort of store with lots of racks and shelves but no merchandise. A disembodied voice to my left said, "Let's see where the animals go." Then a bunch of children in various Halloween costumes (about two weeks too late) came running through. I remember what two of them looked like. One was wearing a mask and cape and the other was in a grey mouse fursuit. The others went by too quickly for me to see them clearly.
Then I turned around and found myself in the dining room of an unfamiliar house. The table was set for over twenty people and a family had gathered around for a festive evening meal. I walked over to the next room, which happened to be a bedroom. Someone from behind placed his arm over my shoulder. I grabbed the arm and tried to flip him Judo-style but couldn't, no matter how hard I tried. I turned around and saw George Foreman! He was standing there smiling the same way he did in those Meineke commercials.
I remember four dreams from that night. In the first dream, I approached my mother who was sitting in her dark blue car. She had a bunch of fruit on her lap and was busy peeling and cutting them. The fruit was slightly bigger than a grape, and had a brown peel and translucent white flesh. I reached out to get one of the fruit and she cautioned me that the fruit was poisonous and had to be cut a certain way to remove the poisonous portion. I saw that she was indeed cutting off a portion of each fruit approximately one third away from the stem and discarding the remaining two thirds. It was then that I also noticed a dotted line around each fruit where the cut was to be made, and for some unknown reason, some of the fruit had the word "wired" written on them. Then as I looked around, I saw many other people sitting in cars and cutting the same type of fruit. All the cars were parked perpendicular to the street along a beach. The background scenery was only apparent right at the very end of this dream.
In the second dream, I was at my parents' home. I was sitting at the dining room table with my mother. There was a pile of fruit on the table. This time the fruit was greenish red and about the same size and shape as an apple although more rounded. My mother warned me never to accept these fruit from anyone since they have a nasty side effect of making one age considerably if consumed.
In the third dream, I was standing on a traffic divider at an intersection. The strange part is on two sides, the traffic divider looked like a room. There were two walls, a desk with a little bookcase, and two wastebaskets. An elderly lady, who looked like a crossing guard, came over to me from across the street and, before I realized anything, she had handed me one of the fruit from the second dream. I ate the fruit while she made her way across the other half of the street. I looked at my left hand and there were no wrinkles so I concluded that the fruit had not affected me. Then when I looked across the street towards the other side, I saw that the elderly lady had become a young lady and she was skipping and dancing happily on the sidewalk.
In the fourth dream, I needed to go but not too badly yet. There was a Mobil gas station. Two men were sitting on deck chairs on the sidewalk and both of them were pointing at two portable toilets that the gas station had presumably set up for the public. The stench emanating from those toilets was horrible so I decided that I didn't need to go at all.
I had a dream where I was writing a great piece of code on SCO Unix (not my most favorite Unix variant) when I got the munchies. In an instant, I was transported to a strip mall. There were two diners: one almost right in front of me and another at the end of the row of stores. So I began debating with myself which of the two diners was the better choice and with that, I woke up.
I was conversing with a cartoonist. He said that if he stopped cartooning, he wouldn't get any more coupons. (How ridiculous.) While he was saying that, he showed me a copy of TV Guide opened to a page where his comic strip appeared beside a fast food coupon. (Hint: golden arches) That strip looked like a Garfield strip.
Happy Thanksgiving. This must be a dream caused by overeating. In this dream, I was reaching out to get a book that was lying on the floor. That book looked remarkably like the HTML Sourcebook. While leaning over from my chair to pick up the book, I overbalanced and landed on my side. I woke up and found myself lying in that exact position.
It was a dark night and I was walking home. It started to rain so I opened my umbrella. Then both the rain and the umbrella disappeared. I walked round a corner, taking a shortcut through the parking lot of a little hotel. (my dream memory said it was a Holiday Inn) Two people were sitting at a table in the garden and having dinner. There was a tall hedge alongside and from behind the hedge, there was a lot of yelling and screaming, and pieces of food were flying over the hedge. I went around and saw a party of around twenty people who were drunk and not behaving themselves. Not wishing to confront them, I made my way up the street that ran perpendicular to the first street.
Then all of a sudden, night turned into day and instead of finding my home as I expected, I found a long row of stores. For some reason, I thought my car was parked somewhere along that street. After walking all the way to the end without finding my car, I started walking back. It was then that I saw a deep uncovered gutter just beside the sidewalk. A girl, whose face I recognize, was running up and down trying to find a way to cross that gutter. I came across a little stone bridge and started crossing it myself. The girl ran right up to me and managed to keep herself from falling into the gutter only by grabbing on to my left arm, which happened to be remarkably strong at that moment. She didn't say "Thank you", so I said that for her, and in reply, she cheekily said "You're welcome". Then I saw the neighborhood handyman back out of an alley in his Yugo. He waved to me as he passed by and I waved back. Then I woke up.