Dream:
In an earlier dream, I was in Corvallis driving some author friends around, S.D. and C.O. (who is not an author in real life, but a high school friend) or maybe E.P. (who is also not an author in real life, but a friend from St. Olaf College. We may have been driving from Portland, and I seem to recall highway navigation. In any case, I was driving, and I realized that I needed to get S.D. to her house in North Corvallis, which meant I needed to take the Hwy 99 exit to Walnut street--which meant going over a small hill (which in real life was probably the back road to Samaritain Hospital.
Suddenly, S.D. was sitting on my lap, and the car stalled, and I couldn't get my feet on the break or gas petals properly because S's feet were there, too. The car rolled backward, and before we knew it, I was driving the car backward on the highway.
There was something more about being apartment-mates and a meal.
I think the main dream starts here... I was in a house that was my Grandmother Agnes's (only it wasn't). Everything was dark wood, and chrome grates and enamel tubs and vaguely 1950's decor. Some cats and kittens (possibly Cicero) were there, and there was a pile of stuff (like a kitty basket) over an air vent near a cast-iron stove to keep the kittens from getting into it. The room became more cabin-in-the-woods as the dream progressed.
The stuff was cleared away, which revealed a trap door (more like a five-by-five-foot section of the floor flipped up) opening on a kind of vanity counter and bathtub. The room was darker than above, and there was a sense that it was part of the air circulation system. I think we were trying to turn on lights, and after fiddling with an old-style breaker-box, we opened up another part of the room, which was dark and musty like a concrete floored garage or tool shed.
There was still a sense that this space was underneath the wood cabin. This room had a bunch of my Great Great Uncle Olaf's stuff (like a lawnmower) in it. In the dream we called him Uncle Olaf, but it was really my Great Uncle Conrad. There were other rooms beyond, and we found ourselves (by this time my writer friends had turned into non-descriptive, generic family members) in a labyrinthine set of museum wings filled with Fertile Crescent Antiquities that Uncle Olaf had excavated and curated by himself (and everyone was surprised, since he was a potato farmer from Astoria in the early half of the 20th century).
I think the cats followed us around. Room after room was filled with tiles, and carvings, and figurines. There was a room of finials which had a special, crescents-and-feather finial in it... it was some kind of rune, I think.
In a side room, we found a glass-chip vase filled with random rocks and agates. We decided that it would be OK to take a stone each. As we were exiting the museum, I passed through the tool shed garage and noticed a figure standing/sitting in a wheel-chair (he was propped up, he was standing, but there was also a wheelchair). It was Olaf/Conrad; his visage was dark and shadowy (which was kind of odd, since he always had a shock of silver-white hair on the top of his head and I always remember him being pale). Since Olaf/Conrad died in the 1980's, I stepped closer, for a better look and became aware of his dead staring eye blazing blue in the dark. He didn't move; he didn't speak; I don't know if he'd opened his eyes or if they'd already been that way, but his blue eye had a flame in it.
I rushed upstairs. The cabin was still a cabin, but now it was in a city setting. My relatives, a married couple, were standing on a concrete overpass.
"Uh," I said, "I think it wasn't a good idea to take those rocks. We should put them back."
The husband agreed, and gave me his rock.
The wife wanted to keep hers. "They're good luck. Why should we give them back? All those years, Olaf [did something bad/selfish], so I don't see why I shouldn't take some of that luck now."
I walked up to her, "You're using Olaf's bad decisions in the past to justify _your_ bad choice now. Stop it."
There was some frustrated rock-throwing, and I picked up one dark rock from the edge of the overpass before waking up.
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