Dream Log: Stuck in the Mall, and Year-Round Major League Baseball

I had a 2-part dream: in the first part I was in a mall and couldn't find an exit except for one which led out into pitch-black unlit night; and in the second part I was on a major league baseball roster, but I wasn't playing baseball, and the major-league baseball season was all year long.

I've frequently had dreams like the first part, where I'm stuck inside a mall or some other large building and can't find my way out.

Last night, as usual in these dreams, I kept going around and around the whole huge building, and somehow kept coming around to the same exit, which in some of these dreams just leads to more buildings, and in this dream, where the exit was in Sears, led outside, but it was too dark outside to see, and I wasn't going to go stumbling around in the dark, hoping to eventually come across some sort of light. So I went off looking for another exit.

I had a sweater on over my shirt, and I was too warm, so I took off the sweater and folded it and put it on a stack of sweaters in a store. And then I kept on marching around and around the huge mall, feeling as if I would never find my way out. In last night's dream, a big crowd of other people was having exactly the same problem. We were getting more and more upset, because no-one who worked at the mall would help us.

But apparently I eventually made it outside, because suddenly my brother and I were outside, walking on a sidewalk on a busy city street, coming over the top of a hill. Below us a bridge crossed the road. I told my brother that we could go to the left, crossing the bridge, and head to an area with lots of art galleries, or --

and before I could say anything else my brother was already turning to the right, heading to the stadium where the San Francisco Giants played major league baseball.

And before I knew it, my brother and I had both been hired and were on the Giants' roster.

In the dream, as in real life, it had been guite a few years since I had payed close attention to major league baseball. I didn't know whether or not the Giants were having a good season. I got ahold of a newspaper and looked at the sports section, and it turned out that the Giants had played 6 games the day before, and had won 5 of them, and that this had been the final day of the season, and the Giants had managed to pull themselves up out of last place. Then I saw that it was February. I had been used to baseball season starting in April and ending in October, but now, it seemed, the baseball season ended in February, and the next one started later on in February. There were about as many games per season as before, though, so the players got about as much time off per year as before, they just didn't get it all at once.

Then came some changes which I didn't understand at all: now, not all of the wins and losses were decided by actually playing baseball. Some of the players on the roster, although they wore the same baseball uniforms as the regular players, did not play baseball, but instead performed some sort of work at computer terminals, and depending on how well or poorly they did, the team would get more wins or losses. We computer "players" could add as many as 30 or more wins or losses to the team's total in a single day. My brother and I had been hired to be two of these computer "players."

However, I had absolutely no idea how this job worked, and no-one would tell me anything about it. I couldn't find my brother to ask him about it, the actual baseball players acted as if they had nothing but disdain for me and my job (which I could actually understand), and the other computer "players" whom I could find seemed to have their own nerdy club of which I was not a member (and which didn't look like a club I'd want to join either).

And then I woke up.