Islands, with a short cut bridge fail

My car had broken down and I didn't want to wait to repair it. My friend J came along in an old volvo and picked up my boy cat and me. I convinced J to drive a shortcut back to the island I was trying to get back to via a tiny, makeshift bridge-road, rather than the big bridge that would go far out of the way and add an hour to the drive. And so she drove down the tiny bridge and almost drove off of it, but stopped in time to catch the car, backed up, and then drove a bit farther and did drive off of it. The car disappeared as it fell and the three of us plunged into the water, feet first, straight down, about 12 feet to near the bottom.

Boy-cat was near my head, floating down with me, looking annoyed at the situation. So as soon as I had less downward momentum, I pushed him upwards towards the surface, and then we all swam up, and I put him on my shoulders and we started swimming across the water, towards the far off island still. (Boy-cat appreciated the push and being on my shoulders. The water was a comfortable temperature, cats just don't like swimming...)

The drop through the water looked sort of like this... but underwater...

Excerpt

In the middle of a much longer, fairly involved dream, I ended up in a public bathroom... possibly at a college or high school. I was in a large stall that was three toilet-stalls big... which was awkward, but not really. None of us were actively using the toilets. I was on the left (with my back to the toilet, front to the stall door) and directly to my right, a man was sitting in a wheelchair, and to his right, there were two women chatting in the third "stall" area. I had to go over to where the two women were, so I did that and grabbed something (maybe a roll of tp) and then went back to my space.  I said something to the fellow in the middle to excuse climbing over him, and he said something back. He was strapped into a sleek, but basic wheelchair, was dressed in a fairly goth style, and some goth music, maybe Sisters of Mercy or similar, radiated out from him. I felt strongly attracted to him, and needed to talk to him more.

House Adventures

Dream 1
We've moved into a new place. It's a house that was well known in college for being a party house, and for being very run down. But it's been fixed up quite a bit, so there are no major problems and there's fresh paint over even the weird patchy walls. The dominant colors are a dark grey and a dark brown, but there's a nice morning light coming through windows so that the place isn't dark or cold. The house is huge and the spaces in it are big and open with high ceilings. We're just renting a couple rooms in this shared house and it is super cheap - about $135 per month. My two cats look around, and spend a long time looking out the windows. They are not pleased with the space because it doesn't have the yard and wild lands that our old [waking life] place has for them to roam. There's a lot of traffic on the street outside the house so I don't want them to go out, but they find a way out and find a small patch of grass to roll around in. They are not happy with the house though, and I don't like them being outside with all the traffic. But the rent is very cheap so I'm conflicted.


Dream 2
I'm headed to work along my usual bike commute route, though I'm walking/hovering/not really paying attention to how I'm moving. At a spot which in waking life always has a bunch of older teens who smoke and drag babies around with them and seem to be heading to an alternative high school environment, all of that is going on. I try to detour around them, and turn right up a block I don't usually go up, and then I turn right again at the next block. This has become a very suburban street with cute diverse older-style pacific northwest houses lining it.

I go up the block and at the intersection the house across the street on the right side seems to be where the teens are headed for the day. Still trying to detour around them, I walk towards the house a bit, and find that the road curves steeply upwards towards the curb by the house. I can't climb all the way up it, and when I turn around I see how steep it was and don't want to go back down. So I walk along the side, neither climbing nor descending, and up the street farther. I climb a slight hill as I get to the end of this block (which turns the corner to the right, but deadends shortly after) and look up, to see the house at the end of the block looming over the rest of the neighborhood.

The house is tall grey concrete with a nondescript garage door in the center of it. About 2 stories up, a bulbous tree trunk and roots bulge/bubble out over the edge of the concrete structure. I go up the hill of the street to the right just till I'm to the right of this house, and find a way onto the house. This part that I've entered is at the base of the bulging tree trunk, and is made of brittle, but thick dark grey branches that encircle the trunk, all growing out in rings at about the same height, so that there's a ring of branches at my feet, and another ring at about my shoulder height. The lower ring goes out about 9 feet before curving upwards, while the upper ring curves upwards quickly, so that I can walk on the lower ring, while holding the upper ring of branches for support.

I don't trust these branches to support me, so I walk catlike testing each step, and having a good grip on two upper branches at all times. Walking clockwise around the base of the tree, I spiral upwards two levels. For a while, the lower branches are filled in with what appears to be a single layer-brick wall that is lying on its side, built with the branches for support, but they're crumbling and only one layer thick, so I stick to the branches as much as possible.

At the top of this climb, I enter a circular room, which is warmly lit as if by fire/candles and filled with deep reds and browns. The center of the room is dominated by a large circular wood table. There are fireplaces on both sides of the room, the left one framed in dark wood and the right one made of light grey stone, but there's no fire burning in either. There's a big pot of lamp oil in a corner, dark red rugs and dark wooden chests about the room, cozy clutter on surfaces, and overall the feel is that the room belongs to a wizard. There are no candles or other lights to be seen, except for one single battery powered mock-candle on a small table which is not responsible for the light in the room.

I'm struck with the idea that I should make a fire, so I start gathering flammable objects on and under the big circular table in the middle of the room. I put a sheet over the table am fiddling with a box of large matches and am thinking about pouring the lamp oil over everything, when someone else joins me in the room and tosses a bunch of quilts on to the table, wads up a sheet, dunks it in the lamp oil and tries to toss the damp sheet wadded up on top of the table too. I protest that they're messing up my fire and they respond with some annoyed comment and leave me to continue. I shift the other person's quilts around, put the wadded up oiled sheet under the table with my other kindling and salvage what I can of the lamp oil left in the pot, drizzling it over the table. I go back to fiddling with the box of large matches and wake up before I actually light one.

Wind

A bus full of people with whom I was traveling was leaving without me. I ran outside to tell them to stop, but saw that if I ran, they would easily be gone before I could catch them. So I decided to fly over. I leapt and took off, flying low above the ground towards the bus, which was just starting to pull through the driveway. The bus turned down the driveway, somewhat towards me, so I adjusted my direction, and thought to myself that I should just ask the driver where their next stop would be, and then plan to fly and catch up with them after I was done here. But then, as I was correcting my course to fly towards them, a giant wind picked up and held me back. It was a strong wind across my face and body, and it blew me back to being awake.

This is the only time in a dream that I can recall that there has been real wind.

Dress from two nights ago

In the middle of a long, elaborate dream, I was trying to stall some people from taking me away somewhere that I didn't want to go. So I insisted on getting properly dressed and went up some stairs to a room where I could change.

I put on a plain, dark, button up blouse, and then a very full, dark grey wool skirt, that billowed out over my hips in thick warm folds that continued down to my feet. I had been given a gift from the people who were taking me away, and so I put it on over this - a coat made of the most luxurious, soft, long, pig fur. It was brown and well combed. It was quite fitted, and was tight to button over my blouse. At the top of my skirt, it spread out over the back of my skirts, but wouldn't close over the front. I determined that this was how it was meant to fit, leaving the front of my skirts viewable.

I awoke before I could go anywhere in this magnificent outfit.

Others

[Most of the following is an approximation/rebuilding of a dream, rather than specific details.]

I was going about my dream doing dream things, having just chosen a new laptop I was going to purchase when I noticed them following me, talking about me, thinking I couldn't hear. They weren't saying anything too notable, just commenting on the things I was doing, like, "look at how she's walking towards the counter," and "she's probably the one," types of comments. One circled around the room quickly and so was walking towards me the next moment. I stooped down to adjust how I was carrying my laptop box, and the man walking towards me noted to himself, or to the other fellow, that I seemed to be acknowledging that I knew who he was, at least to some extent.

He passed me, and I made a little turn towards the checkout counter of this computer store. When the clerk was about to ring me up, the two men approached and paid for my laptop. I was thrilled, though I also knew I was now tied to them. The man who had circled around was a prince of another world, and I was also of there, though raised here away from that. We had been betrothed for a long time, and were now properly meeting. He was quite charming, and I was not upset to have this all revealed. I had already mostly been aware of this anyhow, though I wasn't exactly supposed to be aware, having been raised in this reality.

We wandered off to a place where he and his people were staying. It was some hotel. I was around a number of people for some time, and with him for a while, and things were talked about. Then, a woman, who was associated with these people, but who had separate motives, took me for a walk. We walked outside of the hotel, through a courtyard along side part of the hotel. The walls of the hotel were about 3 or 4 stories high, each level being rather tall, and were a salmon-pink stucco. The sky was bright and blue, the grass was green, there was a deep blue, calm river to our right, and we walked on a tan sidewalk. On the grass, all around us, and under a sheltered patio of the hotel, were beautiful women, who were stretching and practicing for a pagaent.

As we walked, I commented to the woman that this seemed like a weird mix of the fake indoor Venice in Vegas, and some other sort of hotel. She made some remark, or chuckled, and we walked past these women, between the hotel and another building of the same salmon pink. We sat down at a little cafe table that appeared, and she talked to me as if she were trying to get me to reveal what I knew and what I didn't know. I looked down at my knees and agreed with some of the things she said. When I looked up, she was gone, and I looked around and noticed that the walls had transformed into a dusty-stone look, and I was on what appeared to be a mildly populated Rennaisance Italy street. I looked across from my cafe table, and on a grassy hill, I noticed women lolling about in the sun, in fancy dresses, with long lizard tails that matched their dress colors.

Before I had a chance to do anything, a grey, stone-like doorway opened in a wall a little up the slight hill of grass and my betrothed appeared. He seemed relieved to have found me, and concerned that the woman I had walked off with had purposefully tried to leave me in a strange land. I was happy that he'd found me, because I probably would have had some trouble in this place if I had stuck around by myself for longer, but I was less convinced that that woman's motives had been so malicious overall.

Ripe Fruit

I picked a bowl of apples off of my apple tree, to see if they were any good. And then I let them sit overnight, and they developed a lot of red color and were delicious and one was pumpkin sized and had bits of blue cheese marbled through it (but otherwise still tasted like a fresh, crisp, juicy apple. And then I noticed a papaya tree growing in my living room, and went over and picked a bunch to determine if they were any good (since obviously I'd neglected out of lack of noticing it). Some were a bit overripe, but some seemed good (didn't taste any.)

Then I asked someone (R?) to cut off a slice of the apples to try, but he found one that was weird and green-orange and seedy like a pumpkin inside and I saw that it was dark green on the outside, and I exclaimed along the lines of, "not that bad one, try a good one!"

So many dreams so little memory

For some time I've been having multiple highly vivid dreams each night. However, my cat tends to distract me from remembering them properly when I wake up. From Aug. 2-Aug. 8 I was away from my cat and had many dreams each night (waking between many of them throughout the entire night), and having time to think about them and remember them somewhat after waking. However, I didn't have a chance to write any down. And now, I'm back to my cat's distractions... This morning I did manage to remember bits of two though:

1. I was prospecting and found a big crack in a rock. I used the back side of a hammer to pry the crack open. Part of the rock broke off, exposing a handful of gold in a variety of sizes, from large stone, to small pebbles.

2. My sister-in-law gave birth early.

Upon waking I found a number of emails and texts sharing the news that my sister-in-law gave birth to her son a month early.

Scenes

My cat was toying with a little grey rat who had a lame front right paw.

I was holding a thin, curved sword in my right hand, and the corner of a sheet of newsprint in my left hand. I shook the newsprint up and down trying to turn it into a sword as that would prove that Satan doesn't exist.

Sea Cucumber

In the middle of a much longer dream, I looked down into a bowl of water at knee height and saw three blobs that were mostly brown, with blue and red parts. They were sort of potato-like, brown with spots, but they had little wavy bits like a sea creature that were blue, at one end of each of them, and some areas around their spots that were highlighted in reds and blues. I thought to myself, "those look healthy," but then was a bit upset when the little blue tentacles of one of them started to go towards me and almost started climbing my leg. I moved away carefully.

---
They were much like sea cucumbers:
Like this but more brown, and the tiny tentacles on the left were blue:

And while the one that tried to climb my leg was about the shape of the first image, the other two were shaped more like this one (and the spots are like the blue spot on this one:

And, the tentacle bits were a little more like this... but lots of them, like in the first image above:

And no, I hadn't been thinking about sea cucumbers at all... though I have been thinking about potatoes a lot lately.