Goat Car and Another 'Semireal Unfortunate Scenario' Dream

My brother is taking me out to Burien to get lunch with one of his friends. To get there we take a route down Ambaum, and when we get to the Baskin & Robins, which is a shady taco joint in the dream, we must take the most direct route through it before the owners get back. We walk briskly through the seating area and into the dirty back room, which is tiny and triangular, but with high ceilings. The only way out is through the small drive-thru window, which is very high up on the wall. Nick's friend goes first, then Nick, and finally I crawl through, contemplating Rikyu and the humbleness-inducing crawl-through entrances to his tea houses.

When I emerge, Nick and friend are nowhere in sight, but I am almost bowled over when a booming "EH-EH-EH-EH!" echoes through the neighborhood, and a giant old station wagon decorated as a goat barrels down the hill sans driver. It drives past me and turns to go up the next hill, periodically making goat noises. As I look around an obese black man steps out from behind some bushes on Kathryn's old street with a jolly chuckle. He clutches a crudely made remote control with a joystick, and tells me, "It gets 'em every time, and the fun never wears off!" My shock wears off and I laugh with pleasure at the man's joke. Nick and friend emerge from around the corner the goat wagon just passed, exclaiming at the genius of the social experiment.

The man directs the goat wagon over to us and parks it, and we all drink glasses of milk from the roof of the car. The man says he can't stand that watery milk, he needs something of more substance, and pulls out a carton of heavy cream. I jump up and pour it into a cup for him, but then he pulls out a stick of butter from his pocket to mix in. I stir the milk, now more than a little revolted, and wonder about the moral implications of serving pure fat to an obese man.


I am on vacation with Kris and his entire family, including the cousin I haven't met. His sister wants to go for a bike ride, but no one else is ready to leave yet. I don't plan on going, so while she is waiting she asks me questions about school, and then Julie says something that implies Mali was an art history major. Then she pulls out an envelope that supposedly includes her final grades, but the name on the envelope is not Mali, but an alternative spelling of the name Rebecca. I say, "Wow, I'm really embarrassed now, but I honestly thought your name was Mali and you majored in something like archeology or classics."

Then suddenly Kris comes up and says, "I want to get back together" and starts kissing me before I can get a word in. I find myself kissing him back, and realizing how wrong that is I halfheartedly try to get him to stop, mumbling his name. After about a minute of this I start to wonder why he hasn't stopped kissing me, so I say louder, "Stop! ...Beth!" Woah, wait, have I been saying everyone else's name but Kris' this whole time? "Why.. did I ...just say ...Beth's name?" I ask. "I mean... Stop! Kris!" Finally he pauses and I struggle to find words. I say something stupid like, "There's absolutely no reason I should allow this" and then trail off, wondering what I'm trying to say.
Kris is very persistent, not by saying much (other than "I want to get back together..."), but we still end up on the ground. While I know Kris doesn't actually want to start a relationship again (and neither do I) I don't have the energy to call him out on it, or the will to make him stop kissing me and END ALL INTERACTIONS IMMEDIATELY type of thing, so I decide to go along with it for the moment. I tell Kris that's fine, and get up to get breakfast, while he goes off to take a shower.

In the kitchen, I contemplate the English muffins, more than a little pissed. In the bag there is one half of a muffin, on top of the last whole muffin. I decide I want a whole muffin, so I take it out and cut it in half. This is when I notice that there is also half a muffin sitting at the bottom of the bag and I could have taken that and not cut up the last whole muffin.
That pushes me over the edge. As I stand there staring at the muffins with a knife in my hand, getting angrier, I decide Kris needs a taste of his own medicine, and if he's going to pretend he wants to be in a relationship with me, he's going to have to live up to the responsibilities. I am disturbed from my thoughts when his mother comes up and asks me if I've seen him recently, and I say I think he's in the shower. She asks if I will go tell him she wants to talk to him, and I say yes, quickly forming a plan in my head.
It goes something like this: If Kris wants to get intimate under the false pretense of wanting a relationship, things are going to get real intimate- and real inconvenient too, as goes with the responsibility of a relationship, right?

So I march down to the basement, planning on barging in on his shower time and demanding intimacy, but when I get down there, I can't barge in because the door to the bathroom, and the shower for that matter, are wide open. I am caught off guard, so when I get to the bathroom door, I stop and say, "Hey Kris."
And he says normally, "Hey. What's up?"
I'm feeling comfortable and say, "Not much."
"Really?" he says, kneeling down in the shower, as if posing for a gesture drawing. I am about to respond when I see he has some serious bruises on his legs.
"Yeah, hey- what are those bruises on your legs?" He looks down and examines them. "-If you don't mind my asking-" He looks at me and opens his mouth, and I can tell he could answer me if he wanted to, but instead he's about to tell me something completely different, and be open and honest for once. I know that as soon as he says this thing I am going to be able to talk to him about knowing he doesn't really want a relationship but being ok with that as long as he's honest; and we will be able to talk about what we really want without saying anything wrong.
But just then his mom comes up behind me. I didn't realize she had followed me down there, and so I quickly say, "Oh yeah, and I just wanted to tell you your mom wants to talk to you," and leave.

Another Barefoot in Public Bathroom Dream

The rules state that I must shower first, so I wander through the complex maze of the locker room until I find a relatively uncrowded shower. I set all my things down and turn around to shower, but when I turn back they have all been taken. I am not concerned about my clothes (if they are missing), but rather about the top-secret diagrams. I ask my mother to help me look recover them, but she is missing too. I walk back out of the locker room, now all too aware of the grimy wet floor, until I find the lifeguard. He reminds me of an older Mr. Wallis, or other vice principal-like figure, and I tell him of the theft. He makes me lead him back to the scene of the crime, where he discovers nothing and makes insincere promises and mutters about paperwork.
Obviously, my only hope for recovering the plans is Roderick. I take a walk around the block with him, and by the time we get back to the starting point, we almost kiss. o_O

I am in a fancy new building with glass walls and doors, along with about seven other people, including my brother. Finally, we convince the security guard that we really want to be locked in for the night, and he leaves. We all shiver in anticipation of the event that is about to happen after months of waiting. Our research has come down to these final few minutes, indicated my a large digital timer with red numbers on the wall in front of us. We take our places: I stand in an alcove in the glass wall, leaning as far forward as I can against a glass door, looking to the left. Two other people crowd in an alcove to my right, but I have a better view. One woman is actually in the room my door leads to, and she presses her nose against the glass wall on the left side of that room, peering intently into the room the actual event will take place in.
One minute is left, and I can see motion at the far end of that room, but the woman is blocking my view. Some apparatus with wheels is slowly rolling backwards with a great effort against some resisting force. I shuffle forward a few inches, wishing I could get into the next room. Then I try the handle of the door. It turns. I push it and step forward, and an alarm goes off! All of the lights shut off!

My Houses

My parents are on vacation, and the babysitter has plotted to let some burglars into our house, who will kidnap me and my twin brother. I hear her talking to the men as she lets them into the house, so I run upstairs to hide while my brother runs to the basement. I think they capture him, but I climb out of the upstairs window and run though my neighbor's backward in my pink nightgown. I ring their doorbell frantically, but the men pull up in the driveway. I sprint across the street to my other neighbor's house, yelling, hoping someone in the neighborhood will hear me. As I run up to the door a man opens it and I run inside. With a chill, I realize the man is not my neighbor, but a cohort of the crooks.

I crouch in the my neighbor's kitchen, which is now much older with a wood stove and dirty pink linoleum floors. I know it is useless hiding here.

My parents hug me and as we walk back to (not) our house. They press the garage door opener and the walls roll up, revealing a gigantic well-stocked beverage refrigerator, like the kind in the grocery store where the shelves are tilted so the bottles slide forward. My sister lounges on top of the bottles on the top shelf, a little cramped under the roof of the machine. She welcomes me back and casually asks if I am going to stay away for a while this time. I hadn't thought of that, but now I remember that sometimes after an Ordeal, children will stay away from home for a while, having earned a vacation. This sounds like an excellent idea to me, so I climb up into the refrigerator, the heels of my striped Fluevogs slipping on the plastic bottle caps, wedge myself underneath a ceiling beam and into the other side of the refrigerator, and slide down and out for the house.

Kathryn and I drive along a freeway towards Canada. We approach a bridge spanning a ravine, and somehow get in the wrong lane so that we hurtle at a rapid speed down a small river in the center of the bridge, and down into a tunnel in the face of the cliff.

Somehow we survive, and pull up in the line to cross the border. The wait is going to be a long time, so we decide to get out the car and use the bathroom and a Chuck E. Cheese/cruise ship we can see on the a nearby forested hill, but I think it might be in Canada, and I worry that we won't be allowed back to the car without our birth certificates. Kathryn isn't concerned, so we continue on.
There are more people with us now, like Anna, Kellen, and Lindy, and as I wait for them outside of the bathroom, I critique the wall in front of me that I see as somehow more generic than any other wall I have seen. It is coated in plastic, and has perforated outlines where one might punch out an extra doorway of needed. I scoff at the Chuck E. Cheese/cruise line for only having used one of the five possible doorways.

We go back to the car, which is now a school bus that we live in. Somehow it is turned around facing the other direction, but everyone else is convinced that Canada is that way anyway.