the steep hill to nowhere; hurtful jokes

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a car with my step-grandmother and my mother. My step-grandmother was driving. We were just coming home after having taken care of something. We were on the highway. We were now somewhere near a confluence of highways. We were trying to figure out what was the best way home.

My grandma may have taken one of the highways by accident, maybe because she'd been distracted by the conversation all three of us had been having. But my grandma had come up with the idea that we were, after all, traveling on the correct road. This may have had to do with the fact that this road was higher than the other roads. In fact, this road may have been a bridge across a wide river.

But at some point we may have decided that we needed to turn off on another road, or we may have been surprised that this road led us in a direction we hadn't expected. Somehow, we ended up going up a hill that was totally unexpected to me.

The hill was incredibly steep. I didn't know if the car could get up the hill. I even feared that the car might tumble over backwards and roll back down the hill. But nobody else in the car seemed surprised by the height and steepness of the hill.

I thought we must have been meant to go up this hill. But when we got to the crest of the hill, the road completely dead ended. The road just ended in mid-air. A thin metal barrier kept cars from driving off the road and plunging far down to the river below.

My grandma decided to pull us into a u-turn. We scraped along the barrier. I was afraid we were going to fall down into the water. I was also disappointed that I hadn't been able to stop us somehow from wasting our time on this road.

Now we were heading down the high, steep hill. But I was tremendously afraid to look at the downward slope. I had no idea how we could control the speed of our downward movement. I was now even more afraid that the car would end up just toppling down the slope.

Dream #2

I was out in some area that looked like a rooftop with my mom and step-grandmother. My grandma and I were in a "car," even though I don't think the car was really there. My mom was out somewhere else. On the rooftop, there was a star-like configuration of black, fake leather seats like dentist's chairs. Just to the left of that configuration there was a house-shaped structure made of cinder blocks: like the structure that tops a stairwell as it exits onto a rooftop.

My grandma and I were driving the "car" around the house-shaped structure. As we drove past the star-shaped configuration, I noticed that each seat had a couple clumps on it. One clump was large, like a couple of wet blankets, maybe inside or covered by something like a wet paper bag. Another clump was a clump of wet, brightly pastel colored yarn.

Something about these clumps made me think of some mass murderer who had been in the news. Maybe the news had reported that the police had found something like these clumps in the mass murderer's house. But for some reason, the memory of this murderer made me start joking with my grandma about the murderer. We then also remembered some kind of voodoo ritual that involved brightly colored clumps like this. So in our jokes we began combining the story of this mass murderer with stories of voodoo rituals.

My mom was getting really upset by these jokes. My mom told me and my grandma to stop making the jokes. But I laughingly disregarded my mom and kept making the jokes.

We rounded the structure and passed the seats and the wet clumps again. This time the clumps, especially the clumps of yarn, were really wet and mildewy. They were kind of gross. For some reason, this made me think more seriously of voodoo rituals. I made a comment to my grandma about how nobody would seriously use a voodoo ritual to kill anybody. I was saying this more because I wanted to rid myself of a feeling of guilt and to remove any suspicion from myself than because I didn't really believe in voodoo.

Now I was starting to feel bad about having said all this stuff in front of my mom. After she'd said she didn't want to hear anymore, I'd only continued saying things because I thought she was being overly sensitive, and I didn't want to give in so easily to her sensitivity. But now I thought that maybe she was really, reasonably, upset by what I'd been joking about.

We rounded the structure again. This time as we passed the seats, my mom lay on one of them. She looked really exhausted and depressed. She even looked like she might die. I was really upset. I thought that the things I'd said had been responsible for putting my mom into this condition. Now I was really sorry for what I'd said.