Dream: Between The Magic Shop and the Prisoner's Craft Fair

This morning I had a highly  visual dream.

The cat woke me up, and after I threw him outside, I went back to sleep.

The first part of the dream was muddled and involved giant magical snow creatures.  They glowed with purple light. Some of them had gotten boulder-sized holes blown through them by an errant snowball.  This was more surprising in a Warner Brothers cartoon sort of way than it was painful for them.  

Each snow creature was a different story that followed people home.  In one case, a couple got pulled into a ghost dimension.  I think they were named Rachel and Bill. 

I was in their apartment for some reason (I was staying with them?).  They were there as ghosts (they may have been ghosted by the snow creature that followed them home), but I couldn't see them.  They were a little confused about what was going on.  There was an old wooden cabinet radio on, and when I poked a counter top with a silver arrow,  Rachel said, "ouch" over the radio as if I were poking her.   I switched to feathers, trying to figure out where they were, but feathers weren't that much more pleasant for them because they tickled too much.  

I had a sense of simultaneously being in the dream and controlling it, and I didn't want it to turn into a dark poke-fest where I was harming Rachel unwittingly.

There was a break; I tried to demonstrated the effect for A.B. and the dream turned into a talking dream about high drama people who fake drama.  

There was another break and I was driving my old Chevy Impala station wagon along Corvallis.  I was trying to get to work (at my current job in Eugene), and navigating heavy traffic on 4th Street.  (Waking I realize the traffic was from West Amazon and 35th, and the subsequent wrong turn I made was like the too early turn I made off of the Pacific Express Way onto North Park instead of Park).)  I turned right, realized I'd turned too early, and turned up a kind of wooden ramp.  There was a moment of not being able to make the break work, and worrying that I would crash into the cars ahead, but I managed to get the car out of control.

The car ramp went up about fifteen feet and I was looking over the square walls of a penitentiary.  The wooden road went around the prison, and I could see the wide, flat roof surrounding a large square courtyard.  (It feels very "Four of Pentacles" to me in waking life.)

Then I was in an administrative office of the penitentiary above the enclosed square courtyard below.  An inmate was firing something (marshmallow bullets? or maybe real bullets) at us -- "us" being me and two officers.  (I guess this was a prison riot of one?)  The inmate somehow climbed up the wall and tackled one of the officers.  I managed to hold down a stray arm and after a struggle, we handcuffed him and the crisis was over. 

Then I was walking with my parents and their friends in a park or outdoor mall.  I think there were fountains, and everything was green in the bright sunlight.  I was in my grey and green cloak.  We came up to a kind of Norwegian stave church, or pyramid, or hill.  (In waking life it was like the Enchanted Forrest meets a Viking Gift Shop meets the old Geological Museum at Oregon State University's Gill Coliseum.   The building was an odd mixture of old oak, concrete, and ski chalet.   The steeply sloped roof met at a sharp peak, and there were dormers opening up the very top floor.

We wanted to visit,.  There were two women inside, an older one with longish grey hair and a middle-aged one.  They were sort of unkempt, with lose brown robes and fly-away hair.    "Come in, come in," they crooned.  

It wasn't clear how to enter.  I climbed up some stairs; it seemed to enter you had to climb over the base of the building and half-way up the side.  The two women were in an upper loft, and I made it to a funny kind of dutch door with  a glass window set into it.  

"How do I get in?" I asked,

"Just push the door open," they said.  "Yes that's right, push, just push."

There wasn't a knob that I remember, but I pushed the door forward and it slid forward on a kind of track. I walked into the building along a narrow wooden walkway.  It was like walking though book shelves.  They walked backwards until we were all in a kind of wooden loft with me on one side of the door and they on the other.  They started talking about the history of the building and its contents.

I realized that I was standing on a kind of a plank, and that I was suspended in air somehow.  As long as I held onto the door, I didn't have to worry about falling off.  The plank moved around the shadowy interior of the shop while the lecture continued.  I was sort of flying around the inside.

At some point the middle-aged woman noticed my cloak, and commented on how soft it was.

I think the theme of tour was "Myths and Gemstones of the Norse" or something.  I hovered over a gift display of small gemstones, still standing on the plank and holding onto the edge of the door.  One of the women gave me a very small magnifying lens to look at them, but the platform lifted away on the tour before I was through. 

I was swinging around the shop, over the heads of the other customers.  

The final stop was day-glow rocks under a black light.  One of the displays was a kind of glowing crystal geode which was a haunted light-house diorama that had a toy car (with working headlights!) come out of a tunnel, and the car skidded out of control and drove off the cliff.  I couldn't exactly see the metal rod moving the car, but it zoomed behind the glowing crystal outcropping and came out of the tunnel again.  The whole set-up had a "spooky 1950's" vibe to it.

There was a break, and I was walking in a kind of park.  I may have been trying to get back to Rachel and Bill's apartment.  A kind of shabby Saturday market was in my way, and I tried to go around it.  It seemed like it was the prisoners' craft fair, with various craftsmen in dusty, shabby, over-sized grey coveralls.  (Now that I think about it, they looked like a Maurice Sendak drawing)   And the outdoor booths set up felt extra sketchy.  More and more booths seemed to be in my way, and I became more and more hemmed in as I continued. 

I walked past some young people playing a version of street baseball.  Something brushed against my cloak (which may have turned into my black and purple cloak), and I kept walking.  

Shouts of "Hey! He stole our ball!" sounded behind me, but I kept walking.  Then there was a gaunt, dark, dirty 20-something confronting me.  He had sort of dread-locked hair, was clean-shaven, and he was wearing baggy clothes; for a cloak he had tied a long, dusty grey blanket around his neck.  He might have had a stick or rod.  

I said that I didn't have his ball, but I shook out my cloak on the off-chance the ball had gotten caught up in the folds.  I was worried that the ball had been planted on me, and that I was being set up for a mugging or something.  

The ball player said something vaguely threatening, and followed me as I walked.  The way became more labyrinthine, with doors opening up on hallways of doors and difficulties opening one door blocking another.  Somehow I got away from the man and ended up in the Norwegian Magic Rock Shop.

The middle-aged woman, out of her frumpy witch outfit and in a kind of knee-length sheath dress with some sort of piping or plaiting on the front, came out from another door and we started talking about imagination and magic.  A large flat-screen (which I don't recall from the earlier scene) lit up and she started singing a song about how the early Disney movies and the fairy tales first sparked her imagination.  The screen became like Fantasia, and the woman sang about watching a country western, and sure enough there'd be the spirits of the people and land in the mesa.  On the screen the rocks and cacti became whirlwind spirits of horses and cowboys and cowgirls and danced a hoe-down.  There was more cartoon pantheist imagery of objects and spirits turning into each other.   Her song felt like one of those 1970's After School Specials; she didn't have the best voice and the tune was kind of hokey.

And then I woke up with one of my arms asleep.

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Commentary:

Last night Mark and I had a discussion about houses, finances, and writing spaces -- which I think may be driving the dream.

Dreaming about prisons is something unusual.  There was a lot of square imagery which makes me think it was a dream symbol about being constrained by boundaries.

The dusty, dark, shadowy ball player seems like a shadow self or guardian figure.  The more I look at Maurice Sendak pictures, the more the ball player seems like a more thuggy Max from "Where the Wild Things Are"

I wonder if "prisoner craft fair" is a symbol for the writing and marketing process.  You can Google them... and coincidentally, the Spring Street Fair started on campus today (I had no idea...)

The Labyrinth of Doors seems a fairly straight-forward, "If you want to do something, you've got to do something else first" message.

I have no idea what the two witch figures in the Norwegian Magic Rock Shop were doing, unless they were the opposite end of "Prisoner Craft Fair."  No, I have not been listening to Varttina lately.