Ed's Books

I had this dream on the same night as the previous dream post.

I was sitting in my bed room at a house on W High St. that I have dreamed about before. The room I'm in has a hidden door to a secret room. You have to take a few steps down into the room, but it is bigger than my bed room. The room is full of shelves and boxes, and has two old metal desks in it that used to belong to police detectives. I have a lot of storage in the room, mostly mine, but also my parent's art collection.

While I'm poking around in there Ed Gatewood comes in. He's looking for his copy of Catcher in the Rye and some other book of the English-class variety. He has to do perform a play later based on the two books, and he'd left them in the secret room. We start searching for them, and as we do more and more searchers start showing up until the room is full of people looking for Ed's books.

Eventually Kirk turns on a light I didn't know about. It not only helps the search but illuminates the shelves of African statues nicely. At this point I remember seeing the books in a rectangular container with a bunch of other books. So we start searching all of the boxes and drawers. My girlfriend comes in and gets mad at me, because I'd told her the door to the secret room just lead to a closet.

Eventually, we find Ed's books. But when we leave we realize that the door to the secret room is broken. There are two sliding panels, but we can't figure out how to slide them so that they blend into the wall, and the two steps going down into the secret room are getting in the way. Finally Virginia helps us fix it.

Afterwards we are all sitting around in my bed room talking about it. Someone says to me that now all my wishes can come true. I emphatically state that I wish I was out of "this goddamn town." Jane laughs and says "Now that's a wish!"

Crawl Space

We made a late night run in my pickup truck to the outdoor Consumer Product Safety Commission fax machine in downtown Charlottesville (near the old CSX station). We needed to get copies of death certifications for a potential emerging hazard. I keyed in the numbers for the death certificates, typing a 2, then a 6, then running my finger down the 1 through 5 buttons to get a batch of five at once. We had backed up to the fax machine, and the death certificates came in the little back window of the cab, and kept hitting me in the back of the head. Only three of the five came through, so I thought I would have to key in each death certificate number separately.

However, that's when we heard the sirens coming from all directions. Obviously, the CPSC thought we were working for an NGO and were trying to discredit them by finding coding errors in the data. We saw the police coming from all directions (I vividly remember one cop car that was an old station wagon), but someone got away and back to my condo, which was built like one of the old dorms at UVa. We snuck in through the crawlspace that ran around the outer edge of the building. Lots of people were using the crawlspace for their kitty litter pans, and one lady had decorated the crawlspace near her unit with lots of colorful tie-dyes.

[All through out this I've been talking about "we" did this or that. There was someone with me through the entire dream, but I never got a clear image of who they were. The best I got was that they were sort of female: either a tom boy on an effeminate guy. I'm guessing the former, since I watched Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome the night before, and I've always been attracted to the Savanah Nix character in that move.]