Dream Journal

There’s a city. It’s “San Francisco” in my mind but a smallish metro area in reality. My house in the dream lies further away beyond some woods, separated from the town by residential streets. There are great gullies and ravines below the roads, filled with trees and shrubs, so that the roads form bridges. We called the areas under them the underworld or dark lands. Beneath that was a large corporation called the Golden Rhino, a reference to a gang in a video game I’d been playing. Forces were set up against me here. I kept going down into the lower areas and kept being turned back by people. They purposefully did all they could to make me lose my way.

I’m at a neighbor’s house, asking questions. The sky quickly gets dark, and I end the conversation and run to my house. I mean to enter my house, but instead enter a red SUV in the driveway. A tornado comes suddenly overhead and picks up the car, whirling it about in different directions. I brace myself as it pulls the car through the woods towards the city. The windshield breaks. I hold on tightly, hoping I’m not killed. Yet I also know that this is part of the puzzle, that this tornado was sent to pull me off-track, to distract and confuse me, and deposit me in the city, like before. It does.

The tornado drops me in “San Francisco,” with one of the guards watching over me. It’s a stiff, upright, floating figure with a dark reddish semi-transparent aura. I briefly stop in a bar, then continue my journey back to my house. In some places, cracks at the side of the road reveal the underworld beneath. I wonder what the city was built upon. I feel that some old mystery lies in the brush and forest beneath, something as old as the dinosaurs.

Finding Jeff, Jess, and Chrissie, I jump in a car with them and drive down a ravine under a road. Soon we find an opening in a rough rocky cliff and leave the car rolled onto its side on a ledge outside. “If I didn’t know this was a dream, imagine the distraction of this!” I thought, imagining the implications of physically reacting to this scene (surely a dream of car accident, rescue, and the financial implications of a car wreck — in short, a stupid dream, a physical expectation dream). But we leave it, walk into the inclining cave to find two rigid, distracting members of Golden Rhino, who hand us very interesting print-outs of waking-life topics. I call out their game in front of my friends. “They distract us and confuse and trick us in any way they can to keep us out, to keep us from knowing.”