Caving, and a darned cellphone

Last night’s dream (well, Wednesday morning’s, actually) combined a few rather common elements, but did so in an unusual way.

There were clearly two distinct parts to this dream, the second part following events of first, and related to them, though involving a different set of concerns.

In my dream…

… I was 1.) living in Bloomington, Indiana, 2.) working as a UPS driver, and 3.) enjoying a favorite sport: exploring the wild caves in that part of the state. All three of these are things I actually did when younger and are things that often appear in my dreams.

There was one wild cave of which I was particularly fond, which had an entrance located only a few miles out in the county from where I was living. Of its many interesting features was a horrendously long, tight crawlway through which one had to pass in order to reach the larger rooms and more complicated passageways deeper in the cave. I came to love that cave and its long crawl, and often visited it alone. (I don’t endorse solo-caving, by the way. It’s an extremely dangerous activity.)

At any rate, in my dream I’d adopted the habit of driving to the cave and doing its long crawl as an early morning exercise: showering afterwards and then reporting for work. And in this dream a couple of my fellow UPS drivers wanted to do the “early morning crawl” with me. I had extra gear (helmets and carbide lamps) and decided to let them tag along.

This was the first part of my dream, and it didn’t go too well. The guys were able to follow me through the crawl all the way to where it opened up into the first big room. Of course, I moved at a slower pace than was my norm. After resting for a few minutes I told them we’d have to move faster on the way out if we wanted to make it to work on time. Now, being late is an unforgivable sin for a UPS man, so these guys said, “Okay, lead the way.”

And I moved quite a bit faster, falling quickly into my familiar rhythm. When I arrived at the front end of the crawl I was alone. I’d expected the other two to be well behind me, so I waited for them to come out. They never did.

Not wanting to be late, I ascended the rope and climbed out of the small pit that formed this particular entrance to the cave system. And still there was no sign of my two buddies. So I waited some more.

The second part of this dream found me still waiting above ground near our parked cars when start time at UPS got near and I had to call the Center to let them know I was going to be late. Only… I’d forgotten how to work my damned cellphone. I was holding it in my hand, but I did not know how to make the phone call.

And I stared at the phone in confusion for the longest time, not having the slightest clue what to do. Then it started ringing. And I knew it was a UPS driver supervisor trying to reach me, but I didn’t know how to answer the damned phone.

And still there was no sign of the two guys I’d taken into the cave. And there I was with a ringing cellphone I didn’t know how to work, late for work, not knowing whether or not my two friends had had an accident back in that crawlway, and…

… I woke up.

Whew! I was SO glad to see by my bedside clock that I’d had a good, long sleep. It was safe for me to start waking up. I did NOT want to return to that dream!

I was an “Occult Investigator”?

Yep, that’s what I was in last night’s dream(s).

My sleeps last night were segmented, and so might have been my dreams. I slept a dream-filled four hours from 04:00 to 08:00, then was awake for two hours, then slept for another three, from 10:00 to 13:00 hours. All my dreaming was done in the first sleep segment. When I woke from that I couldn’t tell if I’d had three dreams with common elements or one dream that was divided into three distinct parts.

In this dreaming I was an independent investigator of occult events. And so was Mr. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. He and I weren’t partners, but we weren’t adverseries either. And we were both working the same bizarre case. We were investigating a strange cult in Bloomington, IN, that centered around a naked witch who lived in a small cave directly beneath a huge tree that was growing in Dunn Meadow on the IU Campus.

The three parts of the cave involved 1.) my investigation, 2.) Bill’s investigation, and 3.) our interviews. It wasn’t clear in the third part whether I was interviewing him, or he was interviewing me, or if we were both being interviewed by a third party. But the first two parts were vividly clear, and involved visual, auditory, and tactile senses.

No, I wouldn’t call this a nightmare: at no time did I consider myself in danger. But it was one of the strangest dream experiences I’ve had recently.