Less nice was that a very large vehicle was following very close, so large and so close that I had no idea what kind of vehicle it was. All I could see in the rearview mirrors was a patch of sheetmetal painted silver grey, somewhere below the windshield. Its impatience to pass was clear, and I would gladly have given it room, but I had no room to give: I was as close to the vehicle ahead of me as I was going to get, the shoulder was too narrow to pull off and the lane to the left of us -- this was a very nice four-lane avenue with trees and manicured grass in the middle -- was as stacked-up as we were.
Finally I pulled into the parking lot of a discount-warehouse type store, and an enormous silver-grey bus zoomed past on the road from behind me with its bus-horn blaring. Jerk!
2nd Movement: The Menace Increases But So Does the Beauty and Tenderness Inside the wholesale discount store, which had many low-ceilinged stories and walls of concrete blocks buttressed by rude timbers, and which reminded me of a place where poultry or rabbits were inhumanely raised, I was soon being pursued by a crime organization. I didn't know what I had done to offend them. My only guess was that maybe the maniac who'd been driving that silver-grey bus was one of them. Many of the people inside the store, which seemed to belong to the gang, were members of the gang, but they weren't being obvious: rather, they did their best to blend in with the customers and sneak up on me. A young man pushed me into a corner. He was smiling in a very strange way, which might have been meant to be threatening. He was saying equally-enigmatic things which might have been threats. I really wasn't certain whether this young man was a gangster or just very odd. But since he was not letting me pass peacefully out of the corner, I felt I had to punch him in the face. This left him groggy, and I was able to get away. I felt bad about punching him, but I felt that my life was in danger and that I had to do some desperate things to stay alive.
At this point I was joined by my girlfriend. I was upset with myself for getting her into this situation, and determined to keep her from all harm. She was not any specifically identifiable person from real life. She was very pretty, bearing a slight resemblance to the actress Lauren Ambrose -- slight enough that it was unlikely someone would mistake one of them for the other. Her hair was cut into a very short pageboy, and she was wearing a simple dress with a denim jacket over it and sneakers. I felt a very great tender affection for her.
No matter how many flights of stairs we descended, it seemed, looking out the windows, that we never got much closer to the ground. At this point I seemed semi-aware that I was dreaming, and I got angry with myself because in real life we would have been out of that building long ago by now. I was determined to get out in spite of the unrealistic frustrating aspect of the dream stairs. On the 2nd floor we found a parking garage. We broke into a huge old Cadillac, I hotwired it and we drove right through one of those concrete-block walls, falling to the ground without injuring ourselves, and with the Cadillac right side up and still running, and I drove us to a nearby mall.
3rd Movement: Love Flees We were inside the mall. If the gangsters weren't in the mall already, they would be very soon. We had no money. I told my girlfriend that we would have to steal clothes that looked very different and change into them, and then go to a salon and change the colors of our hair and dash out without paying, in order to save our lives. And so we did exactly that. With our appearances changed, we held each other tight and felt each other's hearts pounding. My girlfriend said that if we could get a hundred miles away in any direction, we probably would be safe. I told her it was unfortunately more like five hundred miles in most directions and a thousand miles in some directions.
Coda: I Tell Mr Smug What's What A white-haired, pink-faced man with a long pointy nose and an unpleasant smug smirk was about to write The Meaning of the Dream into a an enormous book with a quill dipped in ink. In his opinion the dream had meant something about how dogs rule and cats suck. I said, "Hold on there smug guy. There are people like you who love dogs and hate cats, and there are people who love cats and hate dogs, and then there are people like my beautiful girlfriend here and I who love both cats and dogs and post pictures like this
on the Internet."
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