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.

roadblock and white chocolate

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was riding in a car with my mom and my oldest nephew. My mom was driving, and my nephew and I were in the backseat. We were driving up onto some bridge over a wide blue river which possibly ran through or at the edge of some big city. I was reading to my nephew from some book that I liked. But I couldn't tell whether my nephew liked the story or whether he was bored by it. He may have been half-laying against my left arm while I read to him.

We were trying to get through. But at one point, not too far up onto the bridge, the road was blocked. It seemed to take us by surprise. We almost crashed into the place that was blocked off. The area looked like it was under major construction. There were big, thick, wooden posts standing up all through the area. We may have tried to get through, but there wasn't even enough space between posts for our car to get through.

My mom pulled the car backwards, then turned it counter-clockwise to get heading back down the bridge. I may have been insisting to my mom, before we'd gotten to the block, that we could get through this road on the bridge. But now I had to admit we couldn't.

As we were turning, I saw a triangular, metal-pole swing-gate which was blocking off yet another road going in the direction we'd wanted to go in. This swing-gate had a metal sign on it with a black figure of a man, like are usually seen on traffic signs.

The figure had one of his hands reached out, and a circle, not originally part of the sign, floated over the man's hand, like some kind of magic orb. It looked like the circle had been naturally rusted into the sign, and that it was just luckily placed. But I also thought that a group of punk-rocker-like kids had put the orb-like symbol onto the sign, as some smart-alecky reaction to the road being closed.

We had turned around and were driving at a pretty normal speed again. I had finished reading the first story to my nephew. I thought for sure he'd want me to stop reading. But now he asked me to read him a book of his.

I was surprised and pleased. But I also felt bad. Maybe my nephew really had been bored hearing my stories. Maybe he'd have been happier if I'd read him his own stories from the beginning.

The story he had me read him was titled A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. I opened the book and started reading it. It was like a children's picture-book retelling of the classic story.

I was about halfway through the book -- that may have been where I started the book. But the picture, which ran across both pages, was a cartoony image of a kind of icy, antarctic landscape with a pink sky in the background. There were a few baby dragons all over the place, with two baby dragons in the foreground. One of the dragons was black and looked like the main dragon in the movie How To Train Your Dragon.

I wondered what the heck this stuff had to do with Mark Twain's novel. But I figured that maybe I'd remembered the story wrong. I thought that maybe the story involved a time machine and the main character travelling up through time, through different time periods, before finally reaching King Arthur's time. I thought that that would be like dramatic buildup to the main attraction.

So I started reading. The story seemed to be more about the dragons than anything else. The story seemed to involve one of the dragons "huffing and puffing," like the wolf in "The Three Little Pigs."

At some point my mom asked me and my nephew if we wanted some white chocolate, or if we wanted another white chocolate. I knew she meant something like an ice cream bar on a stick, or a Fudgesickle, except made out of white chocolate. I could see an ice cream bar on a stick, with vanilla ice cream, coated in white chocolate.