Strange dreams
I'm adjusting my sleep schedule. Whenever I sleep at odd times, I have very odd dreams. Last night was no exception. I'm curious to know if I have dreams like this all the time and don't remember them or if I only have dreams this odd when my sleeping schedule is messed up. More may have happened in this dream before this that I just can't recall now, but I remember...
I was getting into a telephone utility vehicle, the type that are converted from pickup trucks with a small cherry-picker in the back. For some reason there are a lot of scale inconsistencies in this dream. I was getting in the passenger side and moving to the back area (which doesn't exist on the real trucks). The back area, while somewhat crude (it is a work vehicle, after all) was very spacious. It had plenty of room to seat me and the 8 other utility workers comfortably, with tinted windows on either side. From inside it was similar to a large, extended conversion van. On the outside, it maintained its utility pickup truck exterior.
We all must have been trainees or something because none of us were in uniform. The ages ranged from 18 to 45, men and women (women carrying their purses). It was almost like someone went to a shopping area or a mall and grabbed the next 9 people who walked through the door. That would pretty well describe the attire of our group as well. We were responding to a major... something. It wasn't dangerous, but it would require all 10 of us to repair in a reasonable amount of time.
We started down what looked to me like 52 in Ohio, along the Ohio River, but as we were going, I realized there were palm trees. So, it was like the Ohio River, if the Ohio ran through southern California - pristine streets with glistening white curbs protecting the immaculately sodded parkways with palm trees spaced perfectly every 100 feet.
Looking out the window behind me, I saw the Ohio River. We were approaching the off-ramp to Ashland, KY from the east. I saw a single barge being pushed by a single boat. This was strange in itself, but not the strangest thing about it. Here's another scale inconsistency, the barge and boat were scaled down so that the 12 to 16 people in it could sit comfortably, buckled into bench seats along the insides of the left and right side, and back. Even stranger, the barge was filled with river water up to the passengers' chests. There they sat, in a tiny barge, mostly submerged, in casual vacation dress with only the slightest hint of distress on any of their faces.
I nudged the shoulder of the man next to me, who looked very similar to American Idol contestant, George Huff (but wasn't supposed to be him in the dream) and pointed to the barge. "Take a look at that," I said, astonished.
"Yeah, why anyone would take the barge tour on a day like today is beyond me," he replied, unalarmed. "Far too windy. Just look at that chop. I'm surprised they're even running it, today." I looked harder, noticing that the wind was blowing the wave-tops over the side of the barge, slowly filling it.
As we approached the Ashland ramp, the truck's engine sputtered and died. We pulled over onto the shoulder next to a parkway on the lower road. In real life, there's no parkway there at all and the traffic flows in the opposite direction. Without the engine running, there's no air conditioning. The 9 people in the back of a truck/van (whatever it was) quickly realized that it would heat up pretty quickly on this 80 degree day in the full, 1 o'clock sunshine. The rest of passengers filed out the door behind me while I came around to the front passenger door, opened it, and asked the driver what was wrong.
"Engine died," she said, half eaten donut in one hand, CB mic in the other. She was slightly impatient about me talking to her while she waited for a reply to a message I didn't arrive in time to hear her send. She had what looked like a technical map on her lap, drawn by a plotter printer, most likely some sort of system grid map. Surprisingly, the woman was also dressed in casual shopping or vacation attire. She seemed to know she was in charge of our... outing?... mission?... whatever, though she seemed to have as little training as we did.
"Go ahead," squawked a middle aged male voice from the CB speaker. The voice had an obvious, yet elegant Kentucky accent and road noise could be heard in the background. She picked up the map from her lap with the pinky of her left hand, trying not to touch it to the donut pinched between her thumb and first two fingers on the same hand.
Holding the map in front of her face, she drew the mic to her mouth and shouted, "We're having a bit of a problem here," fumbling with the mic and having a difficult time coordinating the timing of her message with the pressing of the button on the side. She had obviously never used a CB before. "What?" squawked the CB with a slight chuckle as though the man was sharing the amusement of her lack of CB skill with some unseen person on his end. Shouting louder and slower, "WE'RE HAVING A BIT OF A PROBLEM HERE," she repeated. He replied, mocking her volume and pace, "I CAN HEAR YOU JUST FINE. Are you at the site?"
"No, we're at... um..." she said, looking briefly at the map in her hand and then hastily putting it back down on her knee, randomly pressing the key (send button) on the mic, not sure whether it's standard practice to keep transmitting while she looked or let go. She frantically shuffled through the papers on the passenger's seat in front of me, mostly email printouts and wiring diagrams from my quick glance. Pressing the button again to continue her sentence, with no new information, but merely for sentence continuity's sake, she realized she had smeared donut all over the map on her leg in her haste to put it down. "We're um... shit... um..." she said, clearly having trouble.
I put out my hand and offered, "I know exactly where we are if you want me to talk to him." She scowled at me as though I was questioning her credentials as group leader. Of course, on the inside, I knew this woman couldn't lead, or communicate her way out of a paper bag, but I didn't mean to convey that in my offer to help. She found the map in the stack on the passenger's seat and with more confidence, keyed the mic and said, "Um... we're somewhere between... Chesapeake and... um... Ironton."
"ahaha... Ok. Heh. Gimme a few. Hehehe," replied the man, now clearly unable to control his laughter, even for the sake of politeness. Hanging the CB mic on the ceiling hook, she opened the drivers side door and stepped out, coming around the front of the truck to address the people on the parkway, who were continuing the conversations they were having in the van and fanning themselves with various things.
"OK... Help is on the way! We just have to sit here and wait it out!" she reassured. I remember thinking to myself that the man never stated that help was on the way. He may have just needed some time to finish whatever he was doing at the time before he could continue the conversation. In fact, with the windows rolled up on the pickup truck and all the doors now shut, the man may be trying to talk to us right now and we'd never know. Not only that, the distance between Chesapeake and Ironton is at least 15 miles. That's pretty vague. Yet, after her disapproving look a moment ago, I didn't dare say anything, now.
Time elapsed and it was now a bit after 7 o'clock and the sun was on the horizon. Every time one of us encouraged our leader to try to contact someone on the CB again, she reassured them that help is coming and we just needed to be patient. This had gone on for the past few hours and she hadn't budged. As I sat on the parkway I heard a few of us talking about making a break for the truck to try to call on the CB. A younger guy was talking to the George lookalike about how if she'd just let him, he could probably fix the truck himself. Finally, I stood up and announced, "I'm going to look for help," and started walking up the road, rush hour having passed and the traffic thinning again.
"Sit down. He'll be here any minute." she commanded. "Hey! Do you want this job or not? Come back here!"
Turning back toward her but continuing to walk backwards I shouted over the traffic, "Ya know. At this point, I just want to go home. As do all of us. He's clearly not coming and someone needs to do something. It's clear you're not." I looked at the group. They were all smiling, partly at my telling her off and partly because they knew that things were actually being done to get them home. "I'll be back with help," I told them. I turned my back on the group and clearly scorned woman and continued to walk. She said something to the group, trying to save face and possibly vilify me. At that point, I really didn't care what she was saying.
Time elapsed again and I was completely alone on a highway. It was probably 10 or 11 at night. I'd been walking for hours. The highway I was on was a lot like the AA in northeastern Kentucky, but instead of pines, it had what looked similar to an Arizona desert mapped onto the Kentucky hills - red rocks and dirt with an occasional scrub bush. The topography was still clearly the AA, though, with its long road-cuts interleaved with long bridges over deep valleys. The only sounds were those of my footfalls breaking the auditory carpet of insect calls and the occasional howl of a distant coyote. As I came to the first bridge I looked out over the edge.
Something struck me as odd about this bridge. It was very surreal, almost like a toy. I reached the middle of it in less than 20 steps despite its emense size. As I looked down into the valley, I saw faint dots of light at the bottom. I looked harder and realized that there was a road that ran under this bridge in the bottom of the valley. The lights were the dim pairs of headlights on cars that had been pulled to the side of the road. They were all just sitting there, 7 vehicles, randomly spaced out over the quarter mile or so before the bridge, abandoned there with their headlights on, batteries almost dead. I went to the other side of the bridge. There were abandoned cars down there, too, again with their lights on, batteries almost dead, but facing the bridge. I went back to the first side to confirm that all the cars on either side were in the approaching direction.
As I looked again over the first edge, I heard a howl very close to me, probably just around the side of the hill on the right. I heard something on the side of the hill disturb a rock and strained to see what it was as the rock rolled down, but it was far too dark to make anything out. As I was straining to see what was stalking me, a utility vehicle just like the one we had been traveling in crested the hill on the road coming from the direction in which I had come. It had its headlights off, but it's parking lights (ambers) on. As it came up to me, it quickly pulled over to the side of the road near where the road-cut dipped down into the valley, and stopped. I started walking towards it. The engine shut off as soon as the truck stopped and the door swung open and out jumped a woman. I heard something disturb another rock on the hill and what sounded like a coyote howl. This howl was different than the last. It sounded more like a warning of danger rather than a hunting call. I was starting to fear whatever was that was out there, trying to keep my imagination and thoughts away from bogeymen or werewolves in a more reasonable form like wildcats, wolves or bears.
"Chip!?" the woman said in a stage whisper. "Yeah?" I replied in kind, now jogging toward her. I thought that it was either the group leader or someone else from the phone company coming to pick me up. To my surprise, it was Kristi, an ex-girlfriend of mine. She ran to me and whispered, "Come on! It's way too dangerous for us to be out here right now. We have to get out of here right now!" She made a feeble attempt to grab my arm and let it fall as she ran to the left side of the bridge, where the hill dipped down below the road into the valley. At this point, there was another very drastic scale warp. I looked back toward the valley on the right, where the noises were coming from and realized that if you looked out far enough, there was a set of huge, brown, wooden doors that reached up to the sky. In the sky where the stars should be was a cream colored drop ceiling. Looking back down to the valley, I realized that the whole thing was a model on the floor of my basement in my parents' house.
I reached down into the valley and picked up one of the vehicles, which I now realized was the size of a matchbox car. I was impressed at the work someone had gone through to get the headlights to light up. I looked in the windshield and saw that inside the cab of that tiny truck were two human bodies, clearly dead, and decomposing. I was thinking how gruesome it was that someone would model something like that, just as the air that had wafted in my direction upon bringing the truck to my face brought the stench of rotting flesh to my nose. The shock of the smell made me instinctively drop the truck to the ground. The people weren't models. They were real, rotting, tiny people. What happened to all of them in this model valley, I could only guess, but one thing was for sure. Kristi was right. It was very dangerous to be here right now.
I heard another sound coming from the hill. I looked up and realized that the sound hadn't been coming from the hill, but rather from the doorway to the laundry room behind the hill, which was now no more than 6 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter. Something was shuffling around in there and sounded like it was haphazardly coming this direction. I looked back toward Kristi who was going around the hill on the other side of the road. "COME ON!" she whispered urgently. I quickly followed in the nearly pitch black basement. I realized that we were probably dealing with something supernatural considering all the strange things that happened in the last minute.
As I came around the hill where Kristi was I saw her brushing all the junk off my bean bag chair. "So what are we supposed to do? How can we get away from that thing?" I asked. She laid down on the bean bag chair in the fetal position, taking up half the chair and leaving the side toward me empty. "We just have to go... under the sea." she replied, staring straight ahead with wide eyes as though she was concentrating on something very hard or chanting in her head. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do. She clearly purposely left one side of the chair open. Was I supposed to sit down or stand there? Was I supposed to lay down in the fetal position with her? If so, was I supposed to face her, or put my head by her shins, making a yin-yang shape? There was clearly some sort of logic to what she was trying to do, whether ethereal or scientific. I was still contemplating what I was supposed to do when Misty came in the room, waking me up with the noise of the door.
I was getting into a telephone utility vehicle, the type that are converted from pickup trucks with a small cherry-picker in the back. For some reason there are a lot of scale inconsistencies in this dream. I was getting in the passenger side and moving to the back area (which doesn't exist on the real trucks). The back area, while somewhat crude (it is a work vehicle, after all) was very spacious. It had plenty of room to seat me and the 8 other utility workers comfortably, with tinted windows on either side. From inside it was similar to a large, extended conversion van. On the outside, it maintained its utility pickup truck exterior.
We all must have been trainees or something because none of us were in uniform. The ages ranged from 18 to 45, men and women (women carrying their purses). It was almost like someone went to a shopping area or a mall and grabbed the next 9 people who walked through the door. That would pretty well describe the attire of our group as well. We were responding to a major... something. It wasn't dangerous, but it would require all 10 of us to repair in a reasonable amount of time.
We started down what looked to me like 52 in Ohio, along the Ohio River, but as we were going, I realized there were palm trees. So, it was like the Ohio River, if the Ohio ran through southern California - pristine streets with glistening white curbs protecting the immaculately sodded parkways with palm trees spaced perfectly every 100 feet.
Looking out the window behind me, I saw the Ohio River. We were approaching the off-ramp to Ashland, KY from the east. I saw a single barge being pushed by a single boat. This was strange in itself, but not the strangest thing about it. Here's another scale inconsistency, the barge and boat were scaled down so that the 12 to 16 people in it could sit comfortably, buckled into bench seats along the insides of the left and right side, and back. Even stranger, the barge was filled with river water up to the passengers' chests. There they sat, in a tiny barge, mostly submerged, in casual vacation dress with only the slightest hint of distress on any of their faces.
I nudged the shoulder of the man next to me, who looked very similar to American Idol contestant, George Huff (but wasn't supposed to be him in the dream) and pointed to the barge. "Take a look at that," I said, astonished.
"Yeah, why anyone would take the barge tour on a day like today is beyond me," he replied, unalarmed. "Far too windy. Just look at that chop. I'm surprised they're even running it, today." I looked harder, noticing that the wind was blowing the wave-tops over the side of the barge, slowly filling it.
As we approached the Ashland ramp, the truck's engine sputtered and died. We pulled over onto the shoulder next to a parkway on the lower road. In real life, there's no parkway there at all and the traffic flows in the opposite direction. Without the engine running, there's no air conditioning. The 9 people in the back of a truck/van (whatever it was) quickly realized that it would heat up pretty quickly on this 80 degree day in the full, 1 o'clock sunshine. The rest of passengers filed out the door behind me while I came around to the front passenger door, opened it, and asked the driver what was wrong.
"Engine died," she said, half eaten donut in one hand, CB mic in the other. She was slightly impatient about me talking to her while she waited for a reply to a message I didn't arrive in time to hear her send. She had what looked like a technical map on her lap, drawn by a plotter printer, most likely some sort of system grid map. Surprisingly, the woman was also dressed in casual shopping or vacation attire. She seemed to know she was in charge of our... outing?... mission?... whatever, though she seemed to have as little training as we did.
"Go ahead," squawked a middle aged male voice from the CB speaker. The voice had an obvious, yet elegant Kentucky accent and road noise could be heard in the background. She picked up the map from her lap with the pinky of her left hand, trying not to touch it to the donut pinched between her thumb and first two fingers on the same hand.
Holding the map in front of her face, she drew the mic to her mouth and shouted, "We're having a bit of a problem here," fumbling with the mic and having a difficult time coordinating the timing of her message with the pressing of the button on the side. She had obviously never used a CB before. "What?" squawked the CB with a slight chuckle as though the man was sharing the amusement of her lack of CB skill with some unseen person on his end. Shouting louder and slower, "WE'RE HAVING A BIT OF A PROBLEM HERE," she repeated. He replied, mocking her volume and pace, "I CAN HEAR YOU JUST FINE. Are you at the site?"
"No, we're at... um..." she said, looking briefly at the map in her hand and then hastily putting it back down on her knee, randomly pressing the key (send button) on the mic, not sure whether it's standard practice to keep transmitting while she looked or let go. She frantically shuffled through the papers on the passenger's seat in front of me, mostly email printouts and wiring diagrams from my quick glance. Pressing the button again to continue her sentence, with no new information, but merely for sentence continuity's sake, she realized she had smeared donut all over the map on her leg in her haste to put it down. "We're um... shit... um..." she said, clearly having trouble.
I put out my hand and offered, "I know exactly where we are if you want me to talk to him." She scowled at me as though I was questioning her credentials as group leader. Of course, on the inside, I knew this woman couldn't lead, or communicate her way out of a paper bag, but I didn't mean to convey that in my offer to help. She found the map in the stack on the passenger's seat and with more confidence, keyed the mic and said, "Um... we're somewhere between... Chesapeake and... um... Ironton."
"ahaha... Ok. Heh. Gimme a few. Hehehe," replied the man, now clearly unable to control his laughter, even for the sake of politeness. Hanging the CB mic on the ceiling hook, she opened the drivers side door and stepped out, coming around the front of the truck to address the people on the parkway, who were continuing the conversations they were having in the van and fanning themselves with various things.
"OK... Help is on the way! We just have to sit here and wait it out!" she reassured. I remember thinking to myself that the man never stated that help was on the way. He may have just needed some time to finish whatever he was doing at the time before he could continue the conversation. In fact, with the windows rolled up on the pickup truck and all the doors now shut, the man may be trying to talk to us right now and we'd never know. Not only that, the distance between Chesapeake and Ironton is at least 15 miles. That's pretty vague. Yet, after her disapproving look a moment ago, I didn't dare say anything, now.
Time elapsed and it was now a bit after 7 o'clock and the sun was on the horizon. Every time one of us encouraged our leader to try to contact someone on the CB again, she reassured them that help is coming and we just needed to be patient. This had gone on for the past few hours and she hadn't budged. As I sat on the parkway I heard a few of us talking about making a break for the truck to try to call on the CB. A younger guy was talking to the George lookalike about how if she'd just let him, he could probably fix the truck himself. Finally, I stood up and announced, "I'm going to look for help," and started walking up the road, rush hour having passed and the traffic thinning again.
"Sit down. He'll be here any minute." she commanded. "Hey! Do you want this job or not? Come back here!"
Turning back toward her but continuing to walk backwards I shouted over the traffic, "Ya know. At this point, I just want to go home. As do all of us. He's clearly not coming and someone needs to do something. It's clear you're not." I looked at the group. They were all smiling, partly at my telling her off and partly because they knew that things were actually being done to get them home. "I'll be back with help," I told them. I turned my back on the group and clearly scorned woman and continued to walk. She said something to the group, trying to save face and possibly vilify me. At that point, I really didn't care what she was saying.
Time elapsed again and I was completely alone on a highway. It was probably 10 or 11 at night. I'd been walking for hours. The highway I was on was a lot like the AA in northeastern Kentucky, but instead of pines, it had what looked similar to an Arizona desert mapped onto the Kentucky hills - red rocks and dirt with an occasional scrub bush. The topography was still clearly the AA, though, with its long road-cuts interleaved with long bridges over deep valleys. The only sounds were those of my footfalls breaking the auditory carpet of insect calls and the occasional howl of a distant coyote. As I came to the first bridge I looked out over the edge.
Something struck me as odd about this bridge. It was very surreal, almost like a toy. I reached the middle of it in less than 20 steps despite its emense size. As I looked down into the valley, I saw faint dots of light at the bottom. I looked harder and realized that there was a road that ran under this bridge in the bottom of the valley. The lights were the dim pairs of headlights on cars that had been pulled to the side of the road. They were all just sitting there, 7 vehicles, randomly spaced out over the quarter mile or so before the bridge, abandoned there with their headlights on, batteries almost dead. I went to the other side of the bridge. There were abandoned cars down there, too, again with their lights on, batteries almost dead, but facing the bridge. I went back to the first side to confirm that all the cars on either side were in the approaching direction.
As I looked again over the first edge, I heard a howl very close to me, probably just around the side of the hill on the right. I heard something on the side of the hill disturb a rock and strained to see what it was as the rock rolled down, but it was far too dark to make anything out. As I was straining to see what was stalking me, a utility vehicle just like the one we had been traveling in crested the hill on the road coming from the direction in which I had come. It had its headlights off, but it's parking lights (ambers) on. As it came up to me, it quickly pulled over to the side of the road near where the road-cut dipped down into the valley, and stopped. I started walking towards it. The engine shut off as soon as the truck stopped and the door swung open and out jumped a woman. I heard something disturb another rock on the hill and what sounded like a coyote howl. This howl was different than the last. It sounded more like a warning of danger rather than a hunting call. I was starting to fear whatever was that was out there, trying to keep my imagination and thoughts away from bogeymen or werewolves in a more reasonable form like wildcats, wolves or bears.
"Chip!?" the woman said in a stage whisper. "Yeah?" I replied in kind, now jogging toward her. I thought that it was either the group leader or someone else from the phone company coming to pick me up. To my surprise, it was Kristi, an ex-girlfriend of mine. She ran to me and whispered, "Come on! It's way too dangerous for us to be out here right now. We have to get out of here right now!" She made a feeble attempt to grab my arm and let it fall as she ran to the left side of the bridge, where the hill dipped down below the road into the valley. At this point, there was another very drastic scale warp. I looked back toward the valley on the right, where the noises were coming from and realized that if you looked out far enough, there was a set of huge, brown, wooden doors that reached up to the sky. In the sky where the stars should be was a cream colored drop ceiling. Looking back down to the valley, I realized that the whole thing was a model on the floor of my basement in my parents' house.
I reached down into the valley and picked up one of the vehicles, which I now realized was the size of a matchbox car. I was impressed at the work someone had gone through to get the headlights to light up. I looked in the windshield and saw that inside the cab of that tiny truck were two human bodies, clearly dead, and decomposing. I was thinking how gruesome it was that someone would model something like that, just as the air that had wafted in my direction upon bringing the truck to my face brought the stench of rotting flesh to my nose. The shock of the smell made me instinctively drop the truck to the ground. The people weren't models. They were real, rotting, tiny people. What happened to all of them in this model valley, I could only guess, but one thing was for sure. Kristi was right. It was very dangerous to be here right now.
I heard another sound coming from the hill. I looked up and realized that the sound hadn't been coming from the hill, but rather from the doorway to the laundry room behind the hill, which was now no more than 6 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter. Something was shuffling around in there and sounded like it was haphazardly coming this direction. I looked back toward Kristi who was going around the hill on the other side of the road. "COME ON!" she whispered urgently. I quickly followed in the nearly pitch black basement. I realized that we were probably dealing with something supernatural considering all the strange things that happened in the last minute.
As I came around the hill where Kristi was I saw her brushing all the junk off my bean bag chair. "So what are we supposed to do? How can we get away from that thing?" I asked. She laid down on the bean bag chair in the fetal position, taking up half the chair and leaving the side toward me empty. "We just have to go... under the sea." she replied, staring straight ahead with wide eyes as though she was concentrating on something very hard or chanting in her head. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do. She clearly purposely left one side of the chair open. Was I supposed to sit down or stand there? Was I supposed to lay down in the fetal position with her? If so, was I supposed to face her, or put my head by her shins, making a yin-yang shape? There was clearly some sort of logic to what she was trying to do, whether ethereal or scientific. I was still contemplating what I was supposed to do when Misty came in the room, waking me up with the noise of the door.