Dream #63

Sinkholes and Psychopaths  
   
recorded January 16, 2004

Last night I dreamed that I was just starting college somewhere.  I was living off-campus with several other students in a huge, ancient villa or mansion.  Daddy was at the house with me, and we were just leaving to go to my freshman orientation.  We were at the car, together with (real-life friends from OC) Dave and Caryn and their daughter.  I realized that I hadn’t locked up my cat, Ripley, so I went back into the house to look for her.

When I got inside the house, I looked back outside and saw that Dave and Caryn’s babysitter had arrived.  She was very tall and had her hair done up in a very fancy hairstyle.  She was also one of my housemates.

I couldn’t catch Ripley, so Daddy came back inside to help me.  First we couldn’t catch her, because she kept running away from us; then, we couldn’t even find her.  Finally, I caught a glimpse of her outside in the wheat field that stood next to the house.

I stepped outside through some folding glass doors and walked into the wheat field.  Someone had set a trap to catch snow leopard kittens, and I found one of them caught in the trap.  It was pleading with me to set it free, but then a man in a clown costume drove up in a rickety old car that looked like something a dogcatcher would drive.  The clown threw the snow leopard kitten into the back of his car and drove away.

I kept walking through the field until I’d circled around toward the front of the house.  Several people were moving down a wooden walkway that lead from the house out into the field.  I joined them on the walkway.  I knew that sections of it were prone to disappearing, and if a section disappeared while we were on it, we would fall into a deep pit.  Together with several others, I left the walkway and stepped back into the field.  There was a tiny path leading through the wheat, and we followed it for awhile.  We had to be careful where we stepped, because there were sinkholes that would suddenly appear beneath us.  Most of the sinkholes were shallow, only several feet deep.  But at one point, I turned around just in time to see the lady behind me fall into a hole that was twenty or thirty feet deep.

Several of my companions gathered around the hole and looked in, but I stayed away because I knew something terrible was about to happen.  The woman who’d fallen in was shouting up at us that she was okay.  But then we started hearing sounds like a huge animal growling and shrieking down inside the hole.  I think the woman screamed once, and then there was silence, and I knew that something had eaten her.  I got back up onto the wooden walkway and started helping several people who were trying to build another walkway on top of the other one.  This new walkway would hold us up if a section of the old walkway just disappeared. 
 
I began to realize that these people and the clown from earlier were all completely crazy, and they were trying to drag me down into their insane reality.  It seemed like the dream tried to shift backward into the scene when I was looking for Ripley, but everything was too hazy for me to see what was really happening.  Then the dream ended.