Unfinished Dream

I'm walking along, apparently in Switzerland and/or France, lots of modern buildings around. I enter a doork, at my old college, UM-Duluth - actually, I walk up to the door, the one on the end of Griggs Hall. There is a cute blond girl sitting on a retaining wall by the door. She follows me in. She's kind of a Euro-biker chick, medium tall, kind of tough looking. We end up in a dingy, dirty former bathroom with all the fixtures removed. "Something good" is about to happen, but other people come in and we leave. We're not scared, we just leave.

Wanting to get back to this scene permeates the rest of the dream.

Then I'm walking down a residential street; I go into this picnic shelter (big square tent-type thing in somebody's yard) where my brother and sisters are preparing to spend the night. There are a lot of people coming and going, siblings, cousins, my wife and kids. Whenever I look at somebody they've been replaced by somebody else. This is also a constant theme throughout the dream.

The tent has obviously been there a while, the floor is dirt, and there are sleeping pallets around the edges, the front is folded up and the side farthest from the street is apparently open, people keep coming and going that way. There's a sort of room in the back where there are bunks. A small opening in the back wall leads in there. As younger kids we visited some cousins who had a club house like that. I hesitate to say it, but I think it was a converted pig shed or chicken coop. It didn't stink at all.

There was a square box in the middle with juice and something to eat on it. There are a bunch of those bugs that you see when you pick up a board that's been on the ground too long, clustered on the lower left corner of the box I see sitting down to eat on the entrance side. And, of course, there are more as I peel up the loose ply to look at this. They seem to be contending for something sticky on the middle of that side with a mass of ants who are swarming up from the bottom.

At first I want to just let them kill each other, but then I decide to speed up the process by squishing them with the loose ply, except that doesn't get them all and I use a napkin and my bare fingers to squish the rest. The ants are easy to kill but the other bugs are bigger and harder shelled.

When I quit, I know they'll be back...or, rather, there'll be more to take their place.

I get up to go wash my hands, walking behind the tent into somebody else's somewhat unkempt yard, with lots of trees and bushes, where I'm attacked by a vine with a leafy end. The vine is a parasite growing out of a tall cedar, like the ones that grew around our yard at the "old house," from the crotch of the first branch which rises out to the left from eye level down to the ground and out about six feet. The vine acts a lot like any one of the Schnauzers we went to see Sunday afternoon, though I interpreted their actions as playful and affectionate, whereas the vine was protecting itself and its territory; whenever you came near it, it would "attack," though, other than startling the hell out of me the first time, and unnervingly jumping right up into my face a couple of times, it had no way to harm anyone.

By the way, the word "crotch" is just used as a descriptor here. There was nothing about the tree that suggested sexuality in any way. Although...

Someone was standing in my way as I tried to get out of reach of the thing - I would have had to do something rude to get past him (or her - it seemed to alternate between my wife, my older stepson and my cousin Tim, all of whom are well-known [by me] to do such things). S/he wanted to converse a bit about this oddity, but then I picked up a stick and started destroying it. I wished (non-verbally) that I had a better too for the job, and the stick turned into this steel bar I have in my garage. I've toyed with the notion of pounding that par into a sword, and, for a moment or two, when this challenge was resembling a battle, the bar was a sword.

I felt a bit concerned about how the heck I was supposed to snuff out this thing's consciousness or whatever. Was it at the end cluster of leaves or what? Anyway, striking it there seemed to quiet it enough that I could hold it and shred it with the bar. When I had shredded the vine back to about two feet up the trunk and I was thinking about putting the bar away, I think it turned back into a stick and I just dropped it and went on. I was a bit worried that the vine would grow back leaving that much, but I wasn't prepared to get that picky about somebody else's problem.

More later.
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Sorry about that. I forgot I had to take the older girl to dance class.

Anyway...

I walked up to the stoop of a long, one-story house with light gray asphalt siding - very run down. You see a lot of houses like it in Oklahoma, where I've spent a lot of time. The stoop has a gable over it with pillars, but it's just a stoop. I go into a living room with polished, brown, stone tiles and sort of a sidewalk running from the door to the kitchen. After the fact, it reminds me of my aunt's place that she rented after divorcing my uncle. Her son, my cousin Tim, invited me to stay there for a couple days when he got out of the army and I was coming back from a summer of working in the oil fields of West Texas between my Junior and Senior years in college.

There was a little blond kid, about 2 or 3 playing on the couch there. I thought somebody should be watching him, so I kind of stood there until he went to sleep on the floor. I was tired, so I lay down on the sidewalk-y part of the floor with my head next to his feet. I guess it was night. Oh, yeah! It got dark while I was killing the weed. People, of course, were wandering in and out all night - relatives and their friends. They were quiet, but...

The kid got up and left in the morning. I looked where his feet had been. There were a bunch of eighth-inch long, squiggly, brown worms there. I got up and checked to see if I had any on me. Of course. So I brushed off the ones on my clothes, my arms and my face... I could feel them in my hair and inside my clothes... I don't think I had a beard. I was picking them out of the hairs on my arms and squishing them with my fingers as I walked down toward the river (river?) to see if Mom or somebody knew what to do about this. (Mom's a nurse.) My sister met me and was leading me there when the alarm went off.

So,...basically a bunch of shit happened to me and I either wasn't able to complete anything I started or complete it to my own satisfaction. Lotta bugs, lotta relatives, lotta walking. Any guesses what it all means?

Later thought: The path Lisa was leading me down was very light and sandy, well-traveled - like the path to the Johnny T. bluff in Tenkiller State Park. It went through the woods just like that.

Every time clue I see in the dream points to things I did in my 20s. I also don't remember actually walking through a door or even looking at a door. The street in the residential neighborhood was curvy, not straight. I could never see very far ahead.

I take all this to mean that I am what and where I am due to a complete lack of long-range planning. It has all led to a frustrating existence. I do work that plunks itself down right in front of me, but otherwise, it ain't my problem.

My unconscious mind is telling me exactly the same thing my conscious mind is. Thanks for the freakin' help, pal.

Ooh, that's - that frustration - is a bug that needs squishing. Well, let's see. Are there any signs of something I'm passionate about here? Cute blond biker chicks, of course. Any way to make a living out of that passion? I mean, legally?