Today's dream is one messed up doozy.

[felicula]

At the outset I was in my parent's place in Snyder, NY with my son. There wasn't anyone else in the house. Night was falling, and I was filled with the same kind of unease that I used to feel in that house when I was home alone at night. Aidan was in one of his mischievous phases, running from downstairs to up and back again.

Somehow, we went down a level. Instead of a basement was a gigantic room that merged the feel of a cathedral, a warehouse, and a gigantic cavern. Inset in the floor was a pattern of circles and lines within three larger interlaced circles that were about fifteen feet in diameter. The walls were a blend of stone, cement, stalactites, stalagmites. On one end of the room were columns and a dimmer subsection of the room. On the end that I entered from was a balcony, a door to my parent's house, and a wide, turning staircase down into the room. Off to the right from entering were small caves leading who knows where. There were people bustling throughout the room and in and out of some of the small connecting caves.

I got a sense that they were trying to set something in motion, that the pattern in the floor was more than just design. Next thing I knew, Aidan had run to the center of the inlay and pried up a small circle, about a foot in diameter. He giggled and grinned, running close to me when the three main circles recessed about 5 inches and slid back to reveal more of the mechanism. Some of what was there was wooden, about the shape of picnic table benches, one in each circle. Two heftily built men went to one of them. It took both of the men to lift one end of the giant lever. As soon as they had, it slid vertically into the circle, and the entire circle slowly decended about 5 feet. Another duo did the same thing to the circle clockwise next to the first. As each circle reached the bottom, they turned a quarter of a turn and clicked into place.

Watching all this, I was filled with a sense of foreboding. Then, the scene switched to Aidan moving what used to be my parents' kitchen chairs to their upstairs. Somehow this was contributing to what was going on with the mechanism. I got upset at him, but he innocently insisted that he was only trying to help. I gave him a hug and asked him to put the chairs back.

Back down in the mechanism room, the pattern was activated. I needed to take shelter in one of the caves to the side. The cave was barely more than a crawlspace except for an abrupt drop of on two sides. I was joined in the cave by a man who looked like a medieval Japanese archer. He was crying. I asked him what was wrong. His response was that his love was dead. There was a moment when he was explaining what happened when I could see it as if I was living it. What it boiled down to was that she had been killed by his own hand.

At that point, I wanted to leave, and fast! I found myself out in the mechanism room, but I can feel that what has been set in motion would only bring fear and pain. I run away.

Again, the scene shifts. This time mechanchaos and I are looking into apartments. The place we're looking at is in a large brown, brick building. In part, it reminds me of 72 Days Park in Buffalo, only the building was larger. The apartment is small and dingy. The interior is an apartment I've seen in my dreams before, but isn't one like any I've been in in real life. I only really see two rooms of it: a dirty, yellow dining room with two smallish windows that face the rear of the building, and a dirty, white kitchen with a small window facing the same direction. The shape of the rooms forms an upside down L.

In a moment the state of being slides from us looking at the place, to us having lived there for a while. The location of the building is similar to the place we lived in on North St. in Buffalo. It faces north, but on the southeastern corner of a small side street. The parking is in the small back lot or on the street.

It was afternoon/evening again, and I'd decided to take a walk in the neighborhood. I walked south, down the side street, then took a right onto the busier road at the end of it. I walked something like four blocks down. What turned me around was noticing a predatory-looking man down the side street I'd just crossed. He was in his thirties, beer belly, pudgy all over, scraggly, greasy, mouse-brown, longish hair, and this smirk when he saw me that whispered that he was up to no good. I turned around to head home. I didn't think he was really following though. I ducked down the next side street to check. He wasn't following.

As I calmed down a little, I noticed what looked like an abandoned storefront facing the sidestreet, but still near the corner. It had the darker outline in the reddish brick where a sign used to be. There was a light on, though, and movement. It was human-like movement, but the silhouette wasn't the right shape. It was more slender, and had mechanical-looking portions. In a moment, I realized that it was a six-foot-tall android. Its design was closer to some of the "older model" androids in AI, with no anthropomorphic skin. It was moving around, a little jerkily, but in an otherwise very human way. I found myself staring at it, fascinated, but when it turned and fixed its sensors on me with equal curiousity, I was scared.

For the first time in the dream, I ran. I ran all the way back to what was home in the dream. I wasn't being chased, I wasn't being followed, I was just scared that the robot was looking at me with the same curious intensity that I was looking at it. For that, I ran much more than I would be capable of in real life.

In the back of the apartment building, there were lines of garbage cans in the south and east sides of the back yard. These were set behind locked fences. As I was catching my breath, a neighbor from across the street caught my attention. She approached me, then started complaining about all the garbage cans. It wasn't even that there was a mess. They were all neatly lined up and as clean as garbage cans get. It wasn't even anything I had any control over. She just went on and on. I tried to tell her that it wasn't my responsibility, but she wouldn't listen. Finally mechanchaos came out and started talking to me. Either I was able to tune her out, or she just went away.

Though it was both warm and snowy, mechanchaos and I stayed outside and talked. Somehow the topic came up about family counselling when he was younger. He was obviously shaken even to talk about it. I asked what he feared so much about it. In sad tones, he said that the counsellor liked to have one of them finish off the session on a positive note.

To illustrate his point and clarify his sarcasm, he showed me a photograph. It was an old polaroid. The setting was outdoor, between a pair of stone/cement walls that turned toward the right at the point where the people in the picture were situated. His father wasn't in the picture. The far wall had a stone seat built in. On that was the counsellor, leaned into the corner, looking tired but satisfied. In front of him on the ground, with her back to the wall on the left side, was the woman who was supposedly mechanchaos's mom. (In real life, his mom is on the short side, and is heavyset) She was slender, with blonde hair. Her pose suggested exhaustion and a feeling of defeat. Her face, shirt, and hands were spattered with blood, and her eyes were closed. A young version of mechanchaos's brother was sprawled face-down as if he'd been hit and knocked out.

I couldn't find mechanchaos in the photo. Concerned, I asked him about it. He pointed. I followed his finger to see an ankle, severely cut and bleeding. The rest of the body couldn't be seen because of the wall on the right. Most of him was behind the corner. Crying, I asked him if that was why his foot was all scarred. (In real life he has no such scars.) Gravely, he said yes.

At this point I woke up, seemingly without prompting from the outside world. I was shaken enough to share it with mechanchaos as soon as possible after I'd jotted it down.