More Strange Dreams

Maybe it’s the result of having restless nights due to being sick, but last night was one of the most active dream nights I’ve had in a long time. I had about 9 different dreams packed into the night and each of them seemed to last an hour long. But by now they’re all starting to blur together and melt away in my memory. I’ll do the best I can.

Reality: I went to bed wondering if the apartment across the way was a one-bedroom apartment and if I could just move in there instead of moving away because I’m pretty happy with the location.
Dream:
I moved into that apartment and as soon as I did there was a father and teenage son who seemed to have been living in my old apartment for years. I was with someone and we had been watching them because we suspected they were working on some top secret project. Then we finally met the kid one night when his dad was out and he offered us some ice cream from their huge freezer and there were like 10 different kinds to choose from and we agreed on super fudge chunk. Then he agreed to let us in on his top secret project. Then my mom appeared and gave me a laptop which looked like a Casio electric keyboard in a zippered cover. At that point the room looked like the computer room from 6th grade summer school.

Another dream:
I was poor and moved into a poverty-stricken part of some old town I didn’t know (it almost felt like it was more like the 1930s or 40s - it was in black and white) and I was looking for a place to live. I had some friends who were also poor and near-homelessness and the group of us girls had to beg this slumlord to let us all live in this big abandoned building.
It was dark and cold and there were cots all over the big room with some bunks stacked 3 high. It was all women and it felt like we were all there as a last resort and at the mercy of the slumlord, but thankful for a place to live. There was one bathroom for maybe 50 people and not much lighting but we all seemed to form a kind of sisterhood, helping each other find jobs and comforting each other. I sort of buddied up with two other girls, who are friends of friends in real life, and we were looking for a real apartment to move into together because one of them had a daughter who she didn’t want to raise in that old building. We found a place somewhere that looked like the Penrith neighborhood and we were amazed by how beautiful and clean it was. At some point one of us got a job working in a clothing factory and we all celebrated.

And another:
I was in a subway station, very clean and bright and shiny. There were very few people there. I was supposed to be traveling somewhere with a friend from college (in reality he is traveling all over India right now) and he got through the ticket turnstile fine, but the security officer stopped me to look at my ticket. It was an old receipt, like from Kroger, and down at the very bottom was a series of numbers that worked as a subway ticket. The security officer couldn’t really read it because the ink was smudged and we kept arguing about what the numbers were. My friend kept urging me to just jump the turnstile because we had to run to catch the train, and I kept trying to suppress my giggles because the guard was clueless about how the ticketing system worked. Finally he let me through and my friend and I linked arms and sprinted for the train, passing places that resembled my middle school halls and then the Portland airport curb and then on to our adventure.