Visions in the Dark

I am in a city I do not recognize. I live there and I am going to high school still, but I do not have a family and I live in a communal bording house for kids and young adults with no place else to go. I am at school and the teacher gives us a big assignment to do were we have to submit a thesis on something (but I cannot remember what now) but a lot of the young teens in my class are lazy and uninterested and do not bother to do the work. One of the stipulations of the assignment is that it must be hand written on lined paper, and not printed out from a computer.

It takes me only one night to get my assignment done but as the due date approatches I notice that my only friends in my school has barely done hers at all and I offer to help her with it. The little bit she has done is on the computer and I start ccopying what she has written on lined paper until I get to were her assignment ends and I give it back to her. I tell her I cannot finish writing it out until she finishes her assignment. My friend becomes angry and bullies me to finish the assignment for her and eventually I cave in and agree because she is my only friend and I do not want to lose her, because then I would be truly alone.

I am walking outside the next day. It is saturday and there is no school. I am feeling angry and resentful about always doing my work on time and the teacher's not caring since they don't care that the other students barely ever do their work. I pass a resturant that is in a large shopping plaza and on the inside are all my fellow classmates and my teachers and they are all eating great food. There is slices of roast beef covered in melted cheese; racks of juicy ribs; all kinds of potato side dishes, like mashed, boiled and spiced, and scalloped; and all sorts of vegetables and desserts.

I assume this is a school thing that I didn't know about but when I go into the resturant I am told that they are really sorry but there is no food left because they didn't know they would need an extra place for me. I went over to my teacher and asked why I wasn't told about this and why there was no food for me, and my teacher responded that they had asked my one friend to tell me and it wasn't their fault if she had neglected to do so. I do not create a scene even though on the inside I feel like exploding. I quietly and calmly walk back to the bording house, take my friends assignment that I was doing for her, and rip it up and throw the peices all over her room.

I look in the fridge and there is nothing I can make a meal with, just a carton of milk and some apples. I head back to he shopping center to my food for myself because I have a little bit of money. People I pass on the street say that some dinosaurs have escaped from the zoo and are headed our way, but even though I know dinosaurs are real in my dream world, I don't care because I am too miserable.

In the grocery store my goal is to buy ground beef for tacos, because tacos are my favourite food and I think it will cheer me up a little, but I am tempted to buy many other things that I can just barely afford, including cartons of cigarettes, which are laying in a basket near the check out line and are on sale. I am so tempted my some things that I start contemplating trying to steal things, but I know it is wrong and before my thoughts become actions I can hear people screaming outside. When I look out the window I can see a huge Tyrannasaurus Rex stomping around the parking lot and attacking cars and eating people. I leave the grocery store and head into the shopping mall without buying anything at all because people are panicking and running into the grocery store to get away from the dinosaur and it is complete chaos.

People in the mall are also panicking, which others are calmly walking around. I am not scared for some reason, though I feel very tired and slightly annoyed. Vendors in stores start putting up hand written sale signs on a lot of their goods, hoping people will buy items on sale in their panic. I think this is stupid and keep walking through the mall.

I find a little girl crying in the center of the plaza and she says she can't find her mother. I ask where she last saw her mother and the little girl responds that her mother went to get some lunch and told her daughter to stay put. I ask the little girl if she knows what food stall in the food court her mother went to and the little girl says she does know which one and what it looks like, but does not know how to get there. I offer to take her and we push past panicking people who are flooding into the mall trying to escape the rampaging T-Rex but I do not tell the little girl what is going on outside. She is more interested in finding her mother anyway.

We pass many interesting stores, including a shoe store with high heel boots made in Africa, an all natural scented candle store, and an interactive information booth on nature and geography around the world. The little girl and I find the food court and she points out the fast food place her mother went to. It is an Italian food place but the sign says Siesta Teisto, or something like that, which sounds Spanish to me. The little girl thanks me and runs into the store and when I go inside to see if she has found her mother, absolutely no one is there, not even the cooks or cashiers.

I head back to towards the main plaza in the mall but can get there because there are so many people who have come from outside seeking shelter. I climb some stairs up to the second floor that leads to a fancy resturant or gym just as the T-Rex smashes through a ground floor window and starts rampaging through the mall. Lots of people are either crushed to death in the stampeed or are eaten, though I cannot remember much more from this dream.

I was in a department/grocery store of some sort. There was a glass display near the center of the store and I was looking at men's style wrist watches. I was kind of bored but I was determined to find a watch I liked and buy it. Most of them were bulky and coloured black. Someone (a unidentificable woman) told me to hurry up but instead of buying a wrist watch I went to the checkout and purchased a bottle of red wine, even though I don't drink alcohol. This angered the person who I was with for some reason, but I don't know why.

This is the first of two dreams that I had on April 29th, 2010.


It starts off with me in the dream as I appear in real life trying to renovate a section of a strip mall into a grocery store. It's like the future or something because resources are scarce and everyone lives in abject poverty. I want to say it almost like a post-apocalyptic world just with extreme poverty rather than world wide devastation. In this world there are no major services available and trying to open a grocery store is considered ludicris because of the scarcity of resources.

The building I want to work in is old and because of the abstract layout of the building, the floorplan of my grocery store is triangular in shape, with the front doors being at one of the triangle's tips (making it very narrow). I am ordered by the building's landlord to complete my renovations without removing or altering a set of public bathrooms right at the entrance. I am told that no one will want to shop at my grocery store because of the akward narrow entrance in which customers will have to pass public bathroom on the way in.

After renovations are finally complete I then have trouble trying to stock the store with foodstuffs because food is scarce. Yet somehow I am not only able to fill my shelves with food, I even have a refrigerated section where I can stock thinks like milk and butter - which the populace hasn't had available to them since the major catastrophy that led to the world resource shortage. I am also able to install a coffee kiosk to help attract customers and offer a free cup of to any customer making a purchase. There is a small part here about a conflict with an emplyee who keeps leaving stock carts full of foodstuff in the middle of the store without putting them on the shelves.

Despite many criticms of my project the opening of the grocery store is a success and my next problem is keeping foodstuffs in stock for customers since so many people keep coming everyday to buy food. I am quickly becoming rich and I am able to hire other people to do all the work for me while I revel in the success of my business. I now spend my time greeting and socializing with customers rather than working the till or stocking. I am soon wealthy enough to expand the store so that it includes a section selling clothing and housewares and stuff.

I am standing in one of the new aisles inspecting its setup. The shelf is full of pencils and notpads and other stationary. An employee nearby is stocking tall and narrow opalescent coloured vases and fake plants. I go over to inspect his work when he is done and find myself attracted to one of the vases. They are stacked inside one another and when I pull the top one out, its outer lip expands and becomes wider by itself - reminisent of a flower suddenly blooming - like the plastic it is made of automatically collapses when stacked so as to save storage space. I was unaware that such technology existed and I am entralled with stacking and unstacking the vases, content to watch them bloom and collapse in size for hours on end.

1) This dream took place in the front yard of my parent's house. The entire yard was covered by a thinck layer of snow and slithering through the snow was a giant python that could hear me running around on the surface. The giant snake kept lashing out at where it could hear me moving around and trying to pull me under. There was some relation of the giant snake to one of my brothers but I cannot remember what now.


2) Second dream took place in a wintery scene as well, but not one that I recognize. I was following a soldier armed with an AK47. He was escorting me through the area because I was looking for something and was determined not to leave until I found it. I cannot remember why I nneded an army escort. We came across a lake and along the shore I found my cat Zrinyi half frozen to death on the water's edge. I picked her up and put her inside my jacket to keep her warm and told the army dude that I was ready to go now. We started walking away back the way we came. I cannot remember any more of this dream.

3) Third dream starts of in a small grocery store or something. I am wandering around, not really interested in buying anything. I walk towards the check out and notice an opening to a much larger grocery store to the left. I go in it and everything is labelled "Food Basics." I eventually wander out of the big grocery and outside, where a long wooded boardwalk follows a beach/ocean shoreline to a bunch of buildings in the distance. The sun is beginning to set and it is starting to grow cold. I start towards the buildings and I pass a group of young pre-teen boys on the boardwalk, who start throwing rocks, debris and insults at me. I try to ignore them and keep walking. There are other people on the boardwalk but I cannot see any details and everyone is cast in shadow.

The bunch of buildings are three storeys and are college campus apartments. It is never revealed in the dream for what I am attending college though I think that it is summer holidays or something. I share one with four people and we are constantly fighting over space. I do not remember any details of my roommates but there was two young men and two young women. All three of us young women shared the second floor while one of the boys lived in the spacious third floor and the other slept on the couch on the first floor. All the the amenities of our apartment was on the first floor. I cannot remember why exactly but the young man living in the third floor offered to switch rooms so I could have his room. I accepted but this made the other women extremely jealous and they completely turned against me and did everything they could to turn the guys against me.

At some point I leave the apartment to go to the grocery store and as I am walking I come across the group of boys who threw things at me earlier. They threaten to throw large rocks and what looks like hunks of concrete at me but instead I challenge them to see who can throw the farthest and they agree. I suddenly have a vision of one of the boys (in a hat) accidently throwing a hunk of concrete and severely hurting one of his friends (in a blue shirt) by hitting him in the face. Just as the hat boy is about to throw his projectile I grab his blue shirt friend by the collar and pull him out of the way. Sure enough hat boy lets go of the hunk of concrete too early and it lands where blue shirt boy was just standing. There is a bit more to this dream but I cannot remember any of it.

The dream starts off in a large grocery store. I am in the frozen food section looking for something and there are several people throughout the store who appear to be shoppers. I look over my should at one point and see a former friend of mine, Cathy, standing in the doorway to the supply room. I am not happy to see her and I am even more annoyed by the smug look she has on her face. Everyone who I thought at first were random shoppers, myself included, turn out to be prisoners who have to "work off their debt" to be free. Cathy is the one who has imprisoned us and forces us to work in the grocery store, and as of yet no one has ever worked off their debt or escaped.

I am stocking in the soup isle and I find a newborn, sleeping baby, wrapped in a white blanket, laying in a sale bin. I sense that she is related to me somehow and I so pick her up. Slave master, psycho control freak (as she is in real life) Cathy comes over to give me trouble because I am not working and I tell her that I have to call my sister-in-law to come and pick up the baby. Cathy tries to take the baby but I become confrontational and Cathy wisely backs down. For the first time in the dream she doesn't have that annoying smirk on her face because she realizes that I am not afraid of her and will do serious damage if she tries to mess with me. Cathy tells me that she can't have children at her store and I have thirty minutes to get rid of the baby. As the slave keeper walks away I yell "or what? You'll fire me?" but she does not know how to respond and disappears into her office. Several of the other prisoners seem happy to see someone stand up to the boss for once, though they meekly continue with their slave labor.

I leave the grocery store and enter into the large shopping center to which it is attached and beeline for a public phone to call my sister-in-law. She says that she and my brother will be there shortly and I tell them to meet me at the mall entrance. I have no intention of returning to the grocery store and plan on using my brother and sister-in-law as my escape route. When they finally arrive, my sister-in-law takes the baby and says that she is happy to have her daughter back and thanks me for taking care of her. I jump into their mini-van and tell my brother to floor it, but he just stares at me blankly and asks me if I have to get back to work. (*facepalm*) I call him an idiot and tell him to drive and when he protests my sister-in-law also gets on his case until finally he drives away from the mall.

I am both excited and apprehensive. I wonder how long it is before Cathy figures out I got away and hope to get as far away as I can before then. My brother drives along a road that follows the ocean. The sky is overcast and grey it is slightly foggy. We drive in silence for a long time before my sister-in-law asks how work was and I tell her about the perpetual slavery that the workers are forced to endure. My brother asks me something, but I forget what now, before suddenly swerving his mini-van off the road and into the ocean. The vehicle goes deep enough to fill halfway with water and get stuck in the sand, but not deep enough to sink and submerge the entire mini-van. My sister-in-law just gazes out the front window, cradling the baby, like nothing has happened. I feel extremely mortified that my brother is a complete moron, but cannot get a reason out of him when I demand to know why he has sabatoged my plan for escape. I know that now the mini-van has been disabled, I will eventually be found and sent back to work at the grocery store prison, and that makes me very frustrated and angry.