The Lab Notebook

My parents have just bought a house up on a high hill overlooking the ocean. There is a whole community of similar houses up on that hill; ours is the last one at the end of the street, on the ocean-facing side of the hill. Beyond our house, the hill becomes more of a cliff, and the ocean is below it. My family has just recently moved to the community.

My parents, my sister, and I are coming back from being out and about, and we see all our neighbors standing or sitting around in the open area at the highest point on the hill, which we have to pass through to get to our house. When we talk to them, we learn that they are out there watching the neighborhood slowly fall apart. I see an open patch of mud on the ground in a corner where two pieces of concrete come together, with air bubbles coming up through it. I see a corner of someone's concrete patio sticking up at an odd angle, no longer flush with the ground. All over the hilltop, the is starting to liquefy like this.

We get to our house (which is a long, straight, single-story house built perpendicular to the cliff), go inside, and see that the floor is now tilting at a 20-degree angle or more. It's clear that it's ultimately going to slide off the top of the cliff and fall into the ocean, but we can't feel it moving right now. Our mom tells us to collect any of our things that we want to save before that happens.

My sister and I go to the far end of the living room, which is the narrow edge of the house and the wall furthest from the edge of the cliff. There is a fireplace there, with lots of dark wooden shelves built into the walls on either side of it. We start taking the things we want to save off the shelves. Two of the first things I grab are shiny, silver-colored, stainless-steel thimbles. My sister also grabs a similar thimble of her own. I look closely at both of the thimbles I have and see that they each have a small number 10 etched into them. Good - they're both mine, and my sister hasn't accidentally touched one of mine.

The shelves are mostly filled with CDs and DVDs in cases, but there are lots of other things there, too. We grab a few other small items, but the number of things we decide to save is tiny compared to the total number of things on the shelves. It doesn't take long until we look at what's left on the shelves and think, "There really isn't anything else here that's particularly important to me."

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Side notes:
When I realized what I'd seen and done in this dream, I laughed out loud. Those thimbles are what I've been using as a dream totem for more than four years now. They're supposed to be a reality-check tool. I saw it and handled it, and it never once occurred to me that I might be dreaming, nor that I should use it to see if I might be dreaming. How silly of me!