Dream #24

Summary:
I was with Katie, she had, the night before, invited people to a party where here house was switched with other people's houses. Literally, the house was moved off its foundations and other people's houses were put on top of it and this was some cool hipster party. I was invited but I didn't go because I was hanging out with Melissa and Jordan, I think? Instead she sent me picture texts through the night of different houses being put where hers were and people partying inside and outside the house. It was some kind of cool party that I probably didn't get because I didn't live in Durham. Next thing I know, I'm asking her how she made it happen and and she takes me to a sound stage where the just pull out backdrops and fake houses to create the illusion of it. The stage is raised about 8 feet off the floor of the totally empty rest of the audience room. Melissa and Jordan were there, next scene I remember I am standing outside but its still kind of a soundstage. There are grassy, rocky "riversides" and in the middle is a fake river that Katie can make repeat a regular wave pattern - like a long wave pool. there are ladders every so often on the sides that allow you climb up. Katie is swimming with me in it. When we finally emerge from Katie's fake river wave pool (which I navigated out of well),  Melissa and Jordan made a recommendation that we go to some restaurant, but earlier Mom and Dad had made a recommendation for a different restaurant that was more conservative and probably affordable. Since I'd have to be paying, I went with the latter. Katie couldn't come, or something, so I ended up going with my dad and some other person, a man. We ordered our food ahead and for some reason the restaurant had a Caswell radio that they used to ask me about my order. I thought about joking with them over the radio, but since I was now in Wilmington(?) I was too afraid that Mr. Holbrook could pick up that I was joking over the radio. The food came sporadically, in courses - with one course including a burger bigger and piled with more toppings than any burger I've ever seen in real life. I devoured it and the people I was with were astonished at how quickly. I made the comment that the food was really good but the service had just been spotty and my dad scolded me quietly, I look up to see that the waitress is standing behind him giving him the check (it was the same waitress from Outback last week when I ate there with Mom and Dad. I try to play it off by not flinching and asking her if she'd prefer that we not place our order that way, she said no, it was fine, and immediately walked back to process our checks. I commented that that was rude to not answer my question more thoroughly, Dad agreed in his "I'm just agreeing with you to show that I support you" kind of way. NEXT scene, and no idea how it got here unless it was from driving home from the restaurant, I'm watching, as if a TV show, Bob Saget drive around the ruined remains of San Francisco. It's completely abandoned and overrun with trash and debris in the streets. He goes down the famous "stair stepped street" and there's like furniture and crap everywhere. He drives over a long old bridge and remarked that the little flea market on the side of the bridge (lots of small, brightly colored huts) are abandoned now. I get the sense that he's reminiscing on how much better things were in the 90's before the economy tanked and apparently created an economic catastrophe in San Francisco. So where was he driving? To the country on the other side of the bridge, like, rural California wine valley. There was a priest, in cassock I believe, with a bald head talking about how he sees the economic downturn in his area as a sign of the coming apocalypse. Says something like "I can only see what's going on in my district and from here, it's looking like it will be coming soon." I follow the priest back to his place and it's a very tiny ranch style house, or like the parsonage at FBC Four Oaks. Apparently this whole time, I've been following the instructions of whoever I was supposed to be on the date with in the first place and this was an ideal that that person had to help me see what the afterlife would be like or communicate with someone who was dead, not clear on which. The priest explains that he has developed a new method for going beyond our world and directs me to lay on a towel he's put on the floor. FUN FACT, there are two headstones in his living room, as if his house was built over them in a graveyard. He instructs me to lay on my back with my feet bottoms at one of the tomb stones. He gives me a little book, (like a tract) and tells me to read it and relax and then he's just gone. I'm really really aware of how alone I am in this mans house, he had turned on some colored lights on either end of the room but mostly it was very dimly lit. I noticed his hanging religious portrait (Jesus? Mary?) in another room that I could see through an open door. Laying there I began reading the booklet. There was not much on each page, usually picture or biblical quote. As I went along I started remembering his instructions, that I should relax and that he had discovered that through meditation on the things in the book and the mixture of colors in the room he created an environment where you would trance out into the afterlife. Lots of people had done it before me, it was a new popular thing. I was informed that I would feel I was being hit with a heat wave and that I should just let the feelings take over as they made me jerk, sit up involuntarily, and generally freak out. When they took full control I'd be in the beyond, or whatever. I had already felt a heat wave so I was nervous about continuing. I can't emphasize enough how incredibly quiet it was in this man's house. I kept reading but as I went there were seemingly demonic things mixed in the book with the biblical quotes. Demonic images like goats heads and devil goat head's I specifically remember seeing as I turned pages. I started shaking and sat up wildly out of my own control but fought to keep control. I decided that it might be inviting demon possession if I kept reading it and that the mixture of good stuff and bad stuff in it was weird. So I sat up and looked around for the priest. I was really twitchy, nervous, etc. When the priest did emerge from a back bedroom it was because I had called for him frantically. I was seated in a wooden chair with the towel over my shoulders looking and feeling crazy - I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sight of him and screamed. He said here, have a beer man, and passed a half drank small bottle of PBR to me as he opened the front door to invite the girl who signed me up for this into the house. The pries had taken he cassock off and he was wearing a wife heather exposing all his arm tats and somehow he now had dreads and a darker complexion. The priest was totally different now. The girl who came in was not who I was supposed to be on the date with but she explained that she thought I'd enjoy the situation. Then she made the comment that there are videos of people doing it online and it's hilarious to watch them when they get spastic. I asked her if she'd ever done it and she said no. Then I was like "well don't make me do this crazy crap that you won't even do!" She got quiet and looked upset to be scolded. I woke up not long after that, still freaked out and trying to keep the "spirit waves" of heat from flashing through me.

Influences:
There are a lot of little ones from all different times. Katie is a Durham hipster and I feel like she's always having some kind of cool thing that she's involved with that I just don't understand or am not cool enough to come to. I've spent a lot of time recently with Melissa and Jordan visiting Cary/Apex, so I'm used to hearing them talk about the places they like to go. The overarching "date" theme is likely because I've been thinking a lot about dating recently. The missing date is an interesting one, no idea on that, maybe because I don't know who my date/wife is yet? Eating the meal at the burger place seems to be a reflection of having gone to outback with my parents not long ago. The sound stage before that is from reading a wikipedia article about Mary Tyler Moore and how she guest appeared on a TV show that was shot on the same sound stage that her show was shot on. Driving around abandoned San Francisco with Bob Saget, other than being a life dream, was influenced by the episode of Top Gear that I watched the night before last where they drove around abandoned things in Spain to show how dire the economic situation was there. The priest could be due to Catholic Youth weekend being last weekend and seeing a good number of them. No idea where the scary possession tract experience in the priest parsonage came from.

Overall Mood:
WHAT THE FREAK THIS IS TERRIFYING (at the end). Otherwise, pretty meh.