Outside my house (my Kemper court house), two of my cars are waiting with people inside. We’re trying to leave and I can’t find the right car key. Eventually I realize we actually have a key sitting on the car’s floor; it looks identical but its untried. And of course, that finally works! Josh insists on driving my convertible Beetle since I made them wait so long. By now everyone’s eager to leave quickly, so both cars are driving in reverse at speed out of the court — I hesitate to ask to slow down since I made them wait. Half-heartedly, I ask if he’ll attempt a fast 180-turn, which I watch the other car do. Unexpectedly, he pulls it off and we merge into busy school-hours traffic — a familiar scene since the court is across from an elementary school.
My friend (S. of P&S) has died unexpectedly young… 32 years old? After realizing what it actually means, I feel the gap of his loss deeply. It’s only later that I also realize he has a kid, which makes it even worse.
A sprawling hostel, where an older lady has stayed so long that her shared dorm room is entirely colonized by bookshelves and stacks of books. The hostel itself is a long building with many stacked rooms in rows overlooking the downslope of a hill — a place that feels familiar from previous dreams.
The setting: a human planet that’s been administratively taken over by harpy-like bird aliens. I’m part of a team robbing a store and things go sideways (though apparently not too badly). Our escape route traverses security-activated bean geysers — most of which erupt chaotically around us during the escape. During the getaway, with authorities obviously observing us, one of the team (who reminds me of Cypher from The Matrix) says into our radio, “Can we blame this on anyone innocent?”
After other dreamss, the setting returns to the planet run by bird-people, where I’m flying in a cathedral-like room with columns and buttresses. It’s filled with redwoods, creating a humid atmosphere reminiscent of a cool redwood forest. There are elegant Asian-style stacked wooden shelves with narrow beams for plants. I fly outside through the large opening in the wall. Beyond, everything seems larger than normal (or I’m smaller than usual). As I fly towards a row of cypress trees (evoking a feeling of Northern Californian natural places), I land on an unoccupied bird-people nest I find. I don’t mess with their eggs for whatever reason. Perhaps I realize I don’t feel the need to indulge, even though I could crush them if I wanted to. I continue flying and swoop over a BBQ picnic, where I impulsively steal the big cooked fish just being brought out for everyone.
For a while now, I’ve had a disorganized stack of papers that I use as study material, flipping over the pages as I go to track of what I’ve read. It’s actually a fictional document but a worthy background reference (perhaps on our avian overlords). I realize suddenly upon flipping a page that I’ve read through the whole thing: it seemed like I was in the middle, but no, the last page I flipped is indeed the final page. I rememeber that, oh yes, I started in the middle, once upon a time.