dream of crimescene photos, studio recordings

I dreamed my job was to examine crime scene photographs and determine whether they were fake or not. I was in a house where a recording studio had been built and there were several people I had to interview involving many photographs. In several of the photographs, there was evidence of large amounts of cocaine and dead people. I came to the conclusion that the officer on these cases had staged many of the photos, and that some of the photos weren’t crime scenes at all but instead captured the man having sex with prostitutes and other coerced informants and defendants. I wasn’t sure how to proceed, so instead I wandered into the recording studio and had the engineer/producer play some tracks on which he was working. The sound of the recordings was 1990s indie – Archers of Loaf, et al – but the people were very proud of them and felt they were cutting-edge. I listened and fooled around with all of the rack gear, which was of the same vintage as the sound of the recording.

dream of trip to borrow amplifier

I dreamed I was going with some people to visit J., an old acquaintance from musical days. When we arrived in the vicinity, J. and I started talking about an old bandmate of his who had settled down and started working for Nortel. I asked how he was doing and J. replied that he was ’starting to get tired of it’. I didn’t know if he meant his wife or his job. I wanted to know more, but I started looking around J.’s space instead. There were piles of amps and I decided I would borrow one. I found a sixty-five-watt model that I decided to take, but I had to record myself giving a justification first. I did so and started to move out with the amp. The bandmate showed up, though, and congratulated me on my videotaped justification, saying that it was a great impersonation – but he didn’t say who. I was standing on the tarmac where some buses were waiting, and I wondered if I’d ever come back or just keep the amp.

dream of long journey toward home

I was in charge of collecting large piles and trailer-size containers of debris from some sort of work site. At the end of our task, everyone drove away. One of the vehicles accidentally hooked one of the smaller trailers and dragged it across the road and down into a deep narrow gully. I ran across the street and looked down into the gully. There were several good-sized logs standing vertically and a small gas lantern – still burning – on its side down at the bottom of the pile. It looked like a drop of about thirty feet. I tossed a small log next to the standing logs and jumped down on top of it without injury. I extinguished the lamp and used the small log to boost myself up out of the gully. I decided to try and get home, although I was quite unsure exactly where I was. I started running on a small divided highway that ran along the west side of a river. There was little traffic, but lots of people were going very slowly. After awhile, the surroundings changed as we went through the city, with row houses and strip malls. We reached the main drag of the city – which now was obviously some alternate-universe version of Manchester circa 1990 – and I knew that if I could run another fifteen miles, I could take the back road out of the north end of town toward my old home. I hadn’t run that far in a while, but was excited to try.

dream of airport terminal and the melting guitar

I was in the terminal of an airport sitting in a small group of people. I had a nylon-string guitar and was playing it. Some of the people said they had been to where I was keeping my other guitars and wanted to hear some of my electrics. I went to the outside storage space where my gear was and looked for a Stratocaster to bring down, but the neck and pickguard were off. As I picked them up, I noticed that they seemed wet in places. I saw that all my stuff was sitting on a boulder, and that for some reason all of the glue on the guitar had turned into a clear jelly-like substance and was flowing upwards on its own. I picked up a handful of the clear stuff, but it wasn’t sticky and didn’t smell either. I decided not to come back inside the terminal.

dream of ruined shell of town, going to the beach

I was with a group of people that had discovered an abandoned town. This group was on a mission to glean information from old documents that were found at the town. There was an unnamed sense of urgency about the work everyone was doing, but at the same time we were all acutely aware of the beautiful white-sand beach that was right down the road from where we were working. I was on the fence about going to the beach, but there was some woman I was supposed to meet there from the group.

dream of mall competition and search for transport home

There were several ‘competitors’ – I’m not sure exactly what our task was. We were at a large shopping mall and were just wandering around. I remember at one point I had found the people I was looking for and wanted to go home. For some reason, I decided to urinate in front of the EMS store instead of going to the restroom and people called the police. The policemen were not upset, but instead were saying that the amount of urine was quite impressive and I should be proud of myself. It became evident that one of the competitors was an impostor and it seemed very important to find out which person was there under false pretenses. We kept walking around on the different levels of the mall, but we would never walk inside any of the stores. I suddenly had a strong feeling that I wanted to leave. For some reason I couldn’t talk to the people in my group.

dream of jumbled journey

It was really mixed up, but there were many different scenes. I was part of a choreographed adventure where there was some sort of manufactured conflict for the benefit of unseen observers. It was outside in some sort of wooded valley, I think. We had to keep going forward and avoided some sort of enemy.  For some reason, fake guns had something to do with it, but I don’t think we used them. The people  I was with seemed familiar to me. Later on, one of the people I was with accompanied me to a store. It was an exultant moment when I knew that no one was watching or making everything up any longer. I wish I could remember a little more of it.

dream fragment of office building

Most of it flew away, but I dreamed I was working or otherwise occupied inside a converted brownstone-type building. We were being supervised or otherwise monitored, but the work we were doing was unspecified – it felt like some sort of ESP or other paranormal activity that made everyone tired and depressed after doing it for hours.

dream of stolen memory card and giant satellite map

I dreamed I was working at a small business located in a town with narrow street and old buildings – it looked like northern Italy or Austria. There were huge mountains in the background. For some reason, our internet stopped working because a memory card had been stolen from the router. I found the spare and put it in the appropriate slot, but I felt worried about the theft. My old boss came by with some old men and showed us a huge three-dimensional drawing on the ceiling detailing the huge dataflows that are routed between satellites. He pointed to a tiny thread of a line in the middle of one of these connections and pointed out we were an invisible speck in this tiny line. I understood that this was an exercise in perspective, but I was distracted and wanted to send someone to buy more memory cards to replace the ones that were stolen. As I was giving orders for the cards to be bought, it started snowing a little bit, but the sun was out. It was beautiful, and at the same time I knew there was something not ordinary about the town. It was not a negative feeling – I was excited to find out what was really going on here.

dream of party, addicted friend, and airport shirt check

I went to a party with my friend X. and a couple of other people. It was a fun time, but I noticed that X. didn’t seem to be having a good time. After awhile we left and I found out that X. was addicted to heroin and was having a very hard time of breaking the hold it had over him. The next morning we met at the airport and he described the jobs he was holding down to finance his habit. As he described it he worked cleaning out trucks of trash, debris, and leftover body parts(!) of gang members and other criminals. He said he was trying hard and was happy in his sobriety, but was having trouble sleeping. As we got ready to take the shuttle, we had to stand in a large tiered parking lot and find a shirt we had hung up prior to our trip. I remembered where I had hung up my shirt, but couldn’t find it. One of the people I was with admitted to hiding it, and I found it just in time before the shuttle left. I had written my name on the shirt, and I noticed there was someone else on the plane with the same last name as me. After I arrived, I was in a house with people I knew and was putting doors back on jambs where they had been removed for some reason. The last one I was doing was some woman’s office. I got most of the screws back in normally, but the last one didn’t fit correctly and made a big vibrating noise. For some reason, we all thought that was very funny and laughed a long time.