JoannaB

I remember this was a long dream. I remember there were several rounds of it, and it was kind of repetitive but not exact repetition. It was all about me loosing my sons over and over again. It was always either entirely or at least partially my fault, and sometimes also someone else's.

I don't remember all rounds, but in the last iteration the boys were playing somewhere in a grassy area of a city street, and my car was parked nearby with the motor running and key in ignition. A woman who in my dream was the mother of some friends of my kids, but in reality is an unknown, she started chatting with me, and she then went behind the wheel of my car and I got in the passenger seat, and she suggested that we go for a short ride while we chat, and leave the kids here, but come back to them, and I agreed. After we had been driving for a while, she realized she could not easily drive back - I think it was because of one way streets that prevented us from driving back the way we came, and the streets were not in a straight grid like many streets around where I actually live, but they were more curved and complex, more like the streets of old European cities. So in my dream the woman abandoned me or just disappeared. I abandoned my car, and started walking back to find my sons. It took a long time. Eventually I found them. They looked worse for wear, a bit dirty and dischevled, like they had been living on the street for a while. They were delighted to see me, and I them. And just when I found them, my husband found all of us to. I had no idea how he found us because I had not contacted him, and he had no way of knowing that the boys had been missing nor where we were. I had the sense that my husband was reproachful about my loosing our kids, and he had every right to be, because it was my fault.

This dream is reminiscent of a few previous dreams of mine, in which I am also lost, also with a car, and my husband in at least one of them also finds me, and I don't know how. And I also have feelings of guilt in at least one of them.

In my dream my mother and stepfather came to visit me at the university campus (in reality I graduated from college more than a decade and a half ago).

I was parking the car in the parking garage of the hotel on the college campus (there really is a hotel there). I did a very poor parking job.

I spoke with the parking attendant or security guy about threat to life of a professor of mine. The professor dismissed it, but I believed there had been two assassination attempt on him already. The guy I was talking to said he would look into it.

My grandmother could not come for health reasons (in reality she is no longer alive), Christmas was coming - I wondered whether I could instead make a brief visit to here (in Poland) but I was worried because I have a cold and might pass it on to her.

My mom had brought a puzzle that required one to find a clue in a library on other side of campus (the layout of campus was completely different from my university's campus, and so was the library). It was like a scavanger hunt. We walked through the cold campus (it was winter in the dream.)

The puzzle / scavanger hunt led one to constructing a paper or cardboard box with art design. I was disappointed, and I let my mother know that this kind of thing did not interest me, that we could have skipped the step of actually going on this scavanger hunt and could have just read about it. My mom was disappointed that I was disappointed.

In reality it is true that my mother and stepfather are coming to visit soon. I am no longer in college, not since over a decade and a half ago. My grandmother is dead. There are no assassination attempts of course. It is not winter / Christmas. I do however usually do a poor job parking my car.

Notice my dream signs: car, my mother, college.

So this was supposedly in my dream a work related experiment:

You know the starting point of a car. Give the driver some beans. Require him to travel at a certain speed. Measure when/where the flatulance kicks in.

Note: Car continues to be a dream sign of mine.

Earlier in the night I remembered a fragment:
An exercise machine where you can change the height of where your feet are without changing it?

In this dream I had all the parts to build a car from scratch only it was not really a car, it stood for something else, and I think I knew that on some level even in the dream. I rember that I was not in a hurry to put it together, and in the end it was mostly parts still, but I had a better understanding of these parts. I wish I remembered more, I know there was more to it. Oh, I also recall that some people approach the problem backward, but that is also a valid approach.