craaaaaazy dream

i was at a home depot type place, and this started out as the type of dream where i was there but sort of a noninteractive observer to the action, like i was floating invisibly alongside everyone else but just watching what went on. anyway, i was “observing” this mentally challenged employee, that the managers were mistreating and overworking. they told him that for his next task he needed to go upstairs and get a pair of boots and a hard hat. at this home depot, you weren’t allowed to own your own hat and boots; you got a rental fee taken out of your paycheck every time you needed to use them. he had to go upstairs to this room that had rows and rows of boots and hats kind of like how a bowling alley has rows and rows of shoes. he started up this really narrow dark wooden staircase that would take him all the way to the 4th floor without any landings. we were having trouble balancing on the narrow rickety stairs, and then partway up, the handrailing came off at the top and was just attached at the bottom of the stairs. we were still holding onto it and it was swinging around wildly. next thing i knew, we were at the top of the stairs, and the dream changed.

there was a hollow football made of silver beads on wires, with little colored gems stuck in every so often, and a “collar” on one end made of much more flexible wires and beads, and it was called a “chalice”. lori used a rope catapult to toss this thing from the ground up onto the 4th floor balcony of our house, wrapped in a green khaki backpack. it was a our house but very different from our actual house, gigantic and older, with very large rooms. the balcony was on the 4th floor and had wood floors and only a 1′ railing, and everything was painted a smoky blue.

i heard the chalice “thump” on the balcony, went out to retrieve it, and realized it must be a gift for doc. but from whom?? i suspected it was from lori because in the public art gallery on our 4th floor, i thought some of the new paintings were lori’s. doc didn’t think so, but i did because a lot of them used metallic puff paint which was something that i knew lori used in her work.

then i was in another room of this house, also on the 4th floor, and i was trying to rearrange its furniture. trying to put 2 sofas, a chair, a tv, my desk, and my art studio in this room. i wanted to try putting the desk in the wide shallow closet, just removing the sliding doors, but realized that there were reams and reams of paper on the shelves in this closet and we’d have nowhere else to store our paper if i took it out. when i finally got the tv/sofa area arranged, the room suddenly appeared about three times bigger than before. the floor was covered in beige berber carpet and slightly sloped, and as i investigated how sloped it was, it grew more and more pronounced until the center of the room was a plateau about 2 feet higher than the edges of the room.