Buried Treasures, Portal to Another Time or World

            Still having a problem with my sleep cycle. Dreams are sort of choppy and more random than usual. This morning I had one five or six minute stretch that hung together in a single story:

            I dreamed I was in my old office at MCHS. The AV room was being dismantled for the coming renovations and I was helping move stuff out of cabinets. We pulled everything out and moved it to another room. When we got to the desk, and cabinets next to the desk, there were papers behind them that had been trapped against the wall, some since the school opened. Some of them had my writing on them, others had my dad's writing, and some were from the first AV tech. One of them was a game map from my very first squad level game test (RPG club helped with that play test in about 1996.)

            My dream then stopped being rational. I found a keychain from a Nevada city, several quarters, and a set of blueprints that showed a basement. The basement access was under the cabinets. We pulled the cabinets all the way out from the wall, and sure enough, there was a trap door in the floor.

            Dropping down into the basement was like dropping into another world. The light was different, the temperature was almost refrigerator cold. There were stacks of books and filmstrip kits of all sorts. I started to wander around and discovered several old projectors, still in their shipping cases, never opened. There was an electric cart, several tackling dummies still in plastic. The basement went back under the MDF and into the area below the textbook room. There was a door, my master key unlocked it. A hallway ran all the way to the center of campus and then branched off in three other directions. One path went under the theater, where there were literally hundreds of spare lamps and lenses and hardware for hanging lighting instruments.

            Another path went out to the science building where there were cages for small animals along both sides of the hallway. All of them were empty.

            The last path curved back to the admin building. There were hundreds of cases of paper, the ones on the bottom of the pallets looked like the boxes had been nibbled by critters. Other boxes looked almost new except for the layer of dust on the top boxes. There was a file cabinet with photos of all the first year's students, and empty folders for future years, as though it had been started, then forgotten about. We found an access way to a stair well and climbed out into a giant cave where the office should have been.

            The sun shone into the cave and we headed out into the daylight. We were on the side of a hill overlooking a forested valley.

            "Now I know why they sealed it off."

            I looked at VM and raised an eyebrow. "You'd think this would have been a big deal, portal to another world and all."

            "School wouldn't have opened on time, if at all. Can you imagine what a ruckus this would cause? We shouldn't tell anyone either." V turned and took the others with him into the cave.

            I just couldn't go back so climbed a nearby pile of rocks to see around better. I could make out the ocean in the distance. There were some large birds in the air, about twice the size of our California Buzzards. In the distance I could see a golden plain with several large animals moving through it and lifting the stalks of grain into their mouths with their trunks. For some reason the wooly mammoths didn't surprise me, but the silvery disks whipping through the air at supersonic speed did. I waved at the second flight I'd spotted, but they continued over the hills into the distance.

            I thought about hiking it down to the beach, but got worried about saber tooth tigers or wolves. I seemed to recall that large mammoths also meant large predators. I turned to go back into the cave, but it wasn't there.

            I then found myself spiraling up into the air, and then into the belly of a flying saucer. Inside were all globs of intelligent color and binging noises. I was then shot through a series of tubes and spun around a couple of dozen times. I could see out the porthole on the bottom of the saucer as we shot out over the ocean and then under it. The saucer raced past several large sea mammals with hand-like fins and flukes. The underwater beasts were obviously whales, and they had woven kelp into baskets which were hanging off their sides like saddlebags or purses. Tools of indefinable purpose were loosely held in their nearly useless hand/flippers. I'd seen a couple of kelp mats that had almost looked like this; I'd thought they'd been natural. (This was a Dream Memory, not a real memory.)

            There was a game of connect four involved at this point.

            Who knew that flying saucers would leak when underwater? I found myself free of the spinning and lights, but standing ankle deep in seawater that was warmer than I ever remember the Pacific Ocean off our shores. I began to wonder where/when I really was.

            More tubes and intelligent colors, more binging noises. There was a loud rumble and I tumbled out of, something, the saucer? I couldn't tell, I was too busy falling into the sand dunes and piles of laundry just off of the beach. There were several skeletons in with the laundry. I picked up a few garments that looked like they might still be serviceable, and found a construction hard hat that would fit. There was a broken thermos, a cracked leather tool belt with some electrician's tools in it, and a couple of pairs of boots that looked like they might fit. I made myself a little bundle of artifacts and headed for the beach.

            The beach was populated by attractive women in short leather tunics that laced at the side. All of them had dark hair and eyes, and they were all surprised at my presence. None of them spoke English. Latin and Spanish seemed to be out also. One of them offered me something to eat, a tuber of some sort. I traded her a few M&Ms; they were all the food I had on me. She squealed with obvious delight and called the others over to share them. I was sad I didn't have more.

             The tide was creeping in this whole time, and finally it rolled up around our calves. One of the women was too slow to grab her basket and it was swept out into the ocean. She wailed after it. I handed one of the women the tool belt and swam out to get the basket. The women were shouting unintelligibly behind me. It only took me a couple of minutes to reach it and bring it back to shore. Everyone was crowded around watching me, now up on the dunes. As I came out of the water, they started pointing and shouting. I turned around and saw dolphin fins scatter as a killer whale surfaced in their midst. That was why no one went after the basket. I began to get that "we're not in Kansas anymore" feeling.

            One of the women had dumped the tool belt onto a woven mat and was trying to figure out what the tools were for. Another had taken the flathead screwdriver and used to force open a clam. Soon the men returned from their hunting expedition. They were not as friendly as the women, until the tale of my swimming after the basket was told.  Near as I could figure, it was the swimming part that was impressive.

            I woke up along a stream under a willow tree. I heard a ringing; there was a phone in the bottom of the tool belt. I answered the phone, and then there was more spinning and tubes and colors. I was back at MCHS, but the hills were covered with Oak Trees and there was a stream running past the edge of the campus. I looked out towards the ocean.

The maze of housing developments was missing. In its place was a large forest with scattered houses and fields. I called home. “The number you have reached is not in service.”

I called my parents, they answered. I asked them for my home number. It was not anything I recognized. I called home. Someone other than N answered. She recognized me, and was wondering why I was calling so early in the day. I asked her for my work number. She was confused, more so than I, but gave it to me. I called it. I answered it.

“Wow, this is a funky dream.” We both spoke at the same time. I (at work) agreed to come over to MCHS and pick myself up.

Dream blew itself apart into Dr Seuss looking cars and more lights and tubes and spinning. Oh, and an ear ache. (The ear ache didn’t go away when I awoke.)

           

Ad astra per technica,

FF