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I was at work, but it didn't look like work. It was my work area, but not the one I’m used to. The area looked different. There was electronic equipment all over the place. There was a meeting with all the managers, and all employees were supposed to go to it, but for some reason I chose not to go. I stayed in my work area and was the only one in it. I wanted to get out of the building but I couldn't seem to find a way out. I walked around to different areas, looking for a way out, and I came across all types of equipment on tables that were like the science tables I sat at in Mr. Penny's class at the high school I went to. Suddenly I came across a door that was about two feet wide, and real tall. It was more like an opening than a door. The opening was sealed off by something dark, like a dark slab of wood or something that was darker than the wall around the opening, except for the lower three feet or so. I could see through that and I saw one or two pairs of legs. I crawled underneath this opening and I was in the cafeteria at where I work. I wasn’t in my regular work clothes. Since I was in the cafeteria, I considered having an early lunch. In the cafeteria there were other openings similar to the one that led me into the cafeteria. There were several openings throughout the cafeteria at different spots along the wall. They were by some rounded pillars that were vertically slatted with three inch long slats of light brown varnished wood. They reminded me, for some reason, of the large door that divided the two halves of the gymnasium at the elementary school I attended and also of the junior high school I attended, when it was all scrunched up on one side. I looked through one of these doors and saw a class in there and I had the feeling that I was on a college campus. I can't really remember being outside, but I remember a vision of walking among buildings on a university campus. I saw the class through the opening so I went in there and when I did, I realized it was dark. There were rows and rows of students sitting and they were all watching a man on a stage giving a lecture about something, although I can't remember his voice or what he looked like. The crowd was about five hundred students large. I think that when I came into this auditorium that I may have disrupted the proceedings, but if I did, I kept quiet and the lecturer continued on. When I looked back to where I had entered from, there was a door ajar and the bright sunlight of the day outside rimmed the threshold of the door. I immediately walked towards the nearest row of seats so as to not bring any more attention to me than I needed to. I entered one of the rows and walked past the first person seated there, a woman whom I have never met. The next seat was open, to my relief, so I sat in it and pretended to be one of the crowd. I was acting like there was someone after me and I had to hide in here, although I can't remember anything like that. When I sat down, I noticed that sitting about two or three seats to the right of me were mom and dad. For some reason I did not want them to notice me so I bent my head down to hide my face. I was wearing a baseball cap and I think the woman to the left of me gave it to me to wear. She also put on a similar hat. As I sat there, trying not to be noticed, dad walked towards me. He was smoking a cigarette and he took it out of his mouth because he was done with it. He then crushed the cigarette out on the front of the wooden arm of the chair next to me. The seats were all joined together, like theater seats. I think dad then walked back to his seat and he didn't notice who I was because it was dark, I was wearing a hat, and my head was bowed. I remember the woman next to me facing away from me, out at the open floor there between her seat and the door I came in through, a space of at least sixty feet. She started reading a suicide note she held in her hand, a wrinkled piece of paper about three inches wide by six inches long. As she read her note, her voice was amplified and it came out over the loudspeakers in the auditorium and all the attention in this place was now on the woman reading her suicide note. I think she was crying as she read it. She talked about how she was going to take valium or meth and she referenced a man as she talked, as if this man was the reason for her contemplating suicide. Suddenly I was able to see the guy she was talking about. He was in a room somewhere and I got the impression it was a hotel room. I remember seeing a table he was sitting at and a double bed in the background. He had black hair, over-the-ear and collar length, and had a beard and wore dark-rimmed glasses. He held a phone to his ear and talked through it, as if he was communicating to this woman as she read her suicide note. There was something about the woman falling asleep, or the man falling asleep, and because of this the man said, "Now you know why I chose meth," as if meth would make the woman or himself fall asleep. He smiled when he talked.
I was downtown Puyallup with Charles and Ron. For some reason, whenever I walked I had to lean forward at almost a ninety degree angle because if I stood anywhere near upright, then I would be thrown backwards. I walked like there was a strong wind blowing at me and it would cause me to tumble backwards whenever I stood upright, although there was no wind. I just didn't bend over, I actually had my entire body tilted at an angle to the sidewalk, a way in which no one can actually walk. In addition to this, I had to grab at the sidewalk to pull myself forward or I would get nowhere. I reached with my hands and grasped onto whatever there was, always holding onto the sidewalk and being tilted facing the ground or I would tumble backwards. It was extremely frustrating. Charles and Ron didn't seem to have this problem, nor did anyone else that walked around, just me. There was a barber shop next to a tavern and a restaurant and I entered it, either by myself or with Charles and Ron as well. I don't think we were getting our haircut or anything and I don't know what our purpose was to go in there. However, as soon as I entered, the need to walk at a tilt completely disappeared. Whatever force there was that made me walk that way apparently was only outside the barber shop in the open air. The barber was an older man of about fifty with silver gray hair and I think he had a customer sitting in one of his barber chairs, some guy who was balding and had a moat of hair around his scalp like lots of men do that lose their hair. Later, we had left the barber shop and as soon as I walked out the door, I had to nearly lie on the sidewalk and hold on tight or I would tumble backwards and God knows when I would have stopped. I had left a hat or something in the barber shop so I had to go back in and get it. It was a black hat, was round and had a round brim on it. Again, the need to lie facing the sidewalk and scoot along diminished as soon as I entered the shop. I remember the barber smiling at me, but for the most part he and his customer ignored me. I'm pretty sure this was the barber shop where I always got my hair butched at when I was a young kid. When I was back outside and pulling myself along the sidewalk, I remember seeing Charles and Ron about fifty feet ahead of me on the sidewalk and I tried to keep up with them, or wished they would at least wait for me, but neither of these happened. Charles looked back at me once I think, but he kept on walking.
I was traveling along a river with some people. I don't know what river it was or who the people were that I was with. We hiked along on the steep, narrow bank and we came to a place where there were some slight rapids and a drop of about two feet that led to a pool beyond as the river continued. We had to jump in here to continue and maybe we had rafts or inner tubes or something. I don't remember getting in the water but there was one of us, maybe me, that was in the water, on a raft or inner tube or maybe just treading water. This person was in the water just beyond the drop of the rapids and looked up to the rest of the party, as if waiting for them to join him. Later we came across some rocks, traveling upstream where before we were traveling downstream. The rocks were along the bank of the river and there was one large boulder in particular we came across that was about five feet high and three feet wide. It was almost egg-shaped and the bottom one-third of it was buried in the dirt on the river bank. There were comments made about how the rock shouldn't be pried loose so we wouldn't fall into the water, like we were climbing as cliff instead of walking along in the water. Nevertheless, I pushed at the rock with my feet and it came loose and tumbled into the water. The river at this point was about forty or fifty feet across and the water was very deep, so deep that you couldn't see bottom. As the rock tumbled into the water, we could all hear it as it tumbled downward into the depths of the river, rolling over and over on the rocks of the river bottom. Although the rock rolled into the watery depths and out of sight and we couldn't see it anymore, we could hear the boulder continue to tumble on and on and it was clear that the river bottom was much deeper than we would have guessed. The sound of the boulder cascading to the river bottom never ended and it amazed us all that the river could be so deep, especially since the opposite shore was only forty or fifty feet away. Somebody there threw in a smaller rock, a rigid one about eight inches in diameter, and it also tumbled into the depths for what seemed like forever. I looked downstream and saw someone hiking along the river, walking from one rock to another in the middle of the river, about sixty feet away. It was Traesup Beckenridge. He would walk to one rock in the middle of the river, large rocks about three or four feet of it sticking out of the water, then he would either stand there for a few seconds or he would sit down. After hesitating for a little while, he would walk to another rock, getting closer and closer to us. Since I don't like Traesup at all, I walked further upstream so I wouldn't have to be around to confront him when he reached the rest of the crowd. I was real quiet, not telling anyone I was leaving them. I just quietly hiked away and out of sight. As I did, I came across a steep part of the bank which I wasn't sure I would be able to climb down. It reminded me of the rock that Hingis Drawersmith and I climbed along when we hiked along the Mashell River last year. Anyway, I managed to shimmy down a thin barkless light tan tree, about six inches in diameter. I went down the tree for about ten feet which led me to solid ground again and I continued my hike along the river. Soon I was away from the river and I was walking along a dirt path. To the left of me were some dark woods, but it wasn't an eerie kind of dark. There was a waist-high barbed wire fence that separated the path from the forest, and I think there was just one single strand of barbed wire to this fence. I think the fence may have also been old, the barbed wire being crooked, not in a straight horizontal line. In front of me, about a hundred feet away, was a building to the left and beyond that was daylight. I was under the canopy of a forest and ahead of me near the building was the way out into the woodless world. I get the feeling that there was a long fence across the path's end and the lighted world beyond, a fence that was like the pasture fence that I remember as a kid, the one by Trent and Gerry's tree house. I think there may have also been someone there by the fence on a horse, but I don't know if the person was really there or if I just felt like there should be, and I only thought I saw someone there on a horse. The building was a one-story, low to the ground pale white model. It reminded me of a building that would be at a park where people gathered with their food and tables and kegs of beer and such. Anyway, I was walking along this dirt road when suddenly Sherman Midge, my car insurance agent, was walking alongside me. We were discussing our auto policy and how Lisa and I might change companies. I remember seeing one of his thumbs and it was big and rounded, with an awkward nail that needed to be cut real bad. This is not how his nails actually look, however. Anyway, we were discussing the policy and we ended up standing by a counter which reminded me of the counter I was at when I went to the Megadeth concert with Ron when we bought some sodas after getting our T-shirts. This counter may have been inside the building at the end of the path. Sherman told me some details about switching insurance companies, such as how we would have to pay $310 or $308 up front and I made some remark about how there is no way we were going to pay that price, or how that was the wrong thing to tell me. I was being kind of rude.
All I remember about this dream is driving my Mazda MPV and driving up a hill, like the hill at Edna's parents place at the Nisqually River. I was concerned about not being able to get up the hill all right, so I flipped the switch on the transmission lever and I was then in four wheel drive and the van seemed to have better traction, or I couldn't really tell and it was just psychologically implanted into my head that the ride was better. Something like that.
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