Sat/Sunday

I was having a birthday party. It started at a restaurant, or a bar, and a good group showed up. We moved on to an ice cream parlor, which was also a nice bar. While standing in line to order ice cream sundaes and drinks, two people -- a couple I used to babysit for about four years ago -- bumped into us in line. The woman was looking good, but the man had lost a lot of weight and most of his hair. They had been invited to my birthday celebration and were in town for the weekend, but had declined. It was by chance that we'd run into each other here, and they were apologetic for not attending my party, but chose to join our group then.

After ordering, we found a large table in the back of the place. It was in a large dark alcove, with dim, warm lighting from some modern, minimalist hanging lamps. Our table was a large, hollow square, allowing the twenty or so of us to all sit around and see each other, and talk easily. It was a high table and we sat on tall bar stools, or stood. We made a pile of our coats along the wall and in the corner, behind where I was sitting. I had some great friends there, though I couldn't place all of them quite correctly. There was a good looking man with shoulder length dark brown hair and dense, short stubble all over his face, who I thought I knew from U Chicago, but another good friend, D, a professor at UO congratulated him on having just gotten tenure at a university in Texas. I realized that I had seen the announcement about that, and knew his name from that, Eric [not a waking-life person], but was still pretty sure I had known him in Chicago, but that the timing seemed too quick for him to have gotten tenure. We were all happy for him nonetheless. The other good professor friend, D, then walked over and told me about how he'd written a pivotal recommendation letter for the guy, which had helped him gain tenure. This made it seem more like Eric had been hired, than gotten tenure, but I went with what people were congratulating him for.

We all had large ice cream sundaes and a number of fancy cocktails. A number of people said good night and went home, while others lay down on the floor to sleep it off. I wandered around, noticing that many people had left their coats in the pile. I recognized a few including C's and my own. I paced about thinking about what to do with the coats - to take them home with me so they didn't get lost, or to leave them there.

[I woke up briefly]

A number of things happened in my next dream that I don't recall, but I ended up in the household of a single Chinese woman and her seven year old son. Except for a few written things in the apartment, none of this dream was in English, though I wouldn't claim it was really in Mandarin either.

They were being haunted by their deceased three year old son/brother. It was time for the seven year old to be asleep, and he was sleeping on a mat in the little room I was sitting in with his mother, but then he got up, gathered his mat and blankets in his arms, almost sleepwalking, and trudged past us to a ladder that went up into a sleeping loft. Carrying his things, and not saying a world, despite his mother asking him what he was doing, he climbed the ladder-stairs to the loft and went off to his end on the right to lay down again. Neither he nor his mother went up there much, as the left side was the old room of the three year old boy, was mostly untouched, becoming a shrine, and had a haunted air about it. His mother called after him again, and he didn't reply, but we could see him moving about, trying to get to sleep.

His mother was in a bit of a state of despair, and picked up a strange dark red carved head, which was similar to a fat-Buddha statue, except that it was just the head. She asked it, wailing, what to do about both of her sons, and what was going on with the haunting. She laid it down on the clothed table, where its shrine was, and it started moving on its own. The mouth open, and a long red tongue licked out. It started speaking, and its speech blended into the movie on the small tv next to it on the table. We watched the movie, which was, of course, not in English, but I could follow along pretty well. [Though I don't remember the plot now.] After a bit, the mother asked another question of the Buddha head, about how her son had died.

I was transported into a viewer state, watching a room, in which the boy and his father were watching tv. The boy had something wrong with his hips, and had to wear braces on his legs, and wasn't allowed to move around much. The father was enforcing this, having the boy sit with him while he watched tv and drank too much beer. The boy had to go to the bathroom, so the father paused the program, and told him to go. The boy walked over to the tiny bathroom, and closed the door. He looked into the toilet, and realized that instead of a toilet, there was a large (bigger than the toilet) hole, like you might see in a submarine, with a ladder to climb down. He didn't want to pee down into this submarine below, and he was curious, so he climbed down to explore. Of course, this hole led into a parallel world, so he had disappeared after this moment.