Spying on the castle-mansion, foiled by pitbulls

I was perhaps a spy or something, and had walked up an outdoor walkway in the woods to the outside entrance to the top (third?) story of a castle/mansion of grand proportions (maybe football-field sized).

The door was open, looking into a roomy stone hallway. Before I could really step in, a pair of pretty evil-looking brown pitbull-like dogs came up to me and began to menace.

On and off, they went from baring their teeth and looking ready to pounce, to zoning out and looking nonchalant. I decided, though, that I better not take chances, so I strolled back down into the woods. The dogs followed me for a ways, still switching between evil and docile.

The last stretch out of the woods was a neatly delimited steep slope, covered in fallen leaves, with a railing all the way up the left side. As I climbed the slope, holding onto the railing, I noticed that the entire railing was covered with a very thick layer of whipped cream.

Estate + ferry: shortcut out of DC

I was riding in a car driven by a woman I knew well, who was maybe my mother's age. We were on our way out of the city, which identified with DC in my mind, though a bit different.

There was a huge river running through the middle of the city, for one thing. But I'll get to that. We had figured out that the best route to take was to drive south and enter an impressive, yet compact, estate. We drove our car from the back gate, into a courtyard filled with gardens, green copper statues on stone pedestals, and a circular center with maybe a sundial or fountain in the middle.

We stopped for a moment in the circle, and I turned and took a picture out the window of some small copper statues, perhaps cherubs or children. I looked at the picture on my camera's screen, and for some reason, the focus was messed up. There were three statues, the closest one on the right, the other two behind it and slightly to the left. I had tried to focus on the middle one, but the focus ended up showing up intermittently in different parts of the picture.

We turned right from the circle and continued through a small tunnel towards the front exit from the estate. As we were coming out, some of the estate's actual residents (at least one dark-haired guy) were walking up the covered front steps (kind of like a valet area), and looked at us, as if trying to remember if we were guests staying there or what. We glanced awkwardly at them and continued out.

Basically the only thing accessible from the front exit of the estate was a ferry that crossed the very wide river that ran through the city (though here the shores of the river looked pretty mountainous/woodsy and not built up at all).

Loss of a ghost

I and a girl friend of mine had just walked into a small, messy library that was part of a larger building — a mansion, I think. From the door in front of us, opposite the way we had come in, the ghost of a girl in her twenties walked in and greeted us cheerfully. We'd met her before on several occasions and were friends with her. She came over and talked to us, catching up, and started reading a few magazines with us on the floor.

For some reason, though, my thought process had changed recently and I had reached an unsavory conclusion about the nature of ghosts. I wanted to, yet felt pretty scared to, test my conclusion. But I ended up going through with it...

I asked her to read some of the magazine's text aloud while I was looking away. It came out as gibberish. I asked her to recount a conversation we'd had a few minutes ago, or something we had talked about when we had met previously, but she couldn't think of anything.

I had realized that ghosts didn't have the full human version of sentience/consciousness, but rather they depended heavily on the input of the people they interacted with, and my tests seemed to confirm it.

I became very emotional. I lay down on the floor beside her and put my left arm around her and hugged her as tight as I could. I loved her for all our past interactions, knew that she had been a pleasant influence in my life, and yet I had to cope now with the realization that she wasn't exactly a real person. I had to accept that, whoever I thought she was in real life, there was little to be shown for it in her current form. I didn't want to let go of the lie.

But someone decided to destroy her anyway. She suddenly had a chain attached to her and was being pulled past me and off to the right. I looked and saw a villainous woman there among the bookshelves who seized the ghost and took her out another doorway and around a corner. She stabbed the ghost with some kind of implement, and bright light leaked out from the stab wound until... you know, like, the ethereal plane burst out in a supernatural explosion, and the ghost was gone. As the breeze from the explosion blew past me, I screamed in despair.

Ringo and the big band at the mansion

I was hanging out in a small, cozy living room (I think maybe it had the dark brown shag carpet that we used to have) with a guy and girl I knew, watching TV on an old set (maybe the wood-paneled Zenith TV we used to own). On TV was a rare recording (in black and white) of an early Beatles performance in England. The setting looked like maybe one end of a ballroom or other function hall in a mansion. Ringo was standing with a microphone, singing an uncharacteristically soulful song (also, maybe sort of slow and big-band-like). I didn't actually spot the rest of the Beatles, but I assumed they were behind him somewhere. However, on all sides of Ringo were at least six or seven other backup musicians.

To Ringo's left (right from the viewer's perspective) was a guy playing a full drum set. At one point in the song, he did a fancy drum fill where he started in the seated position, then hopped up and walked off the front-right corner of the stage area and off the screen, hitting three or four cymbals on stands as he walked. Another guy who was playing hand percussion behind Ringo stepped over to the drum set and hit a couple things to finish off the part.

Meanwhile, I was wondering to myself if I could find a download for this on the Internet. I wasn't sure what search terms to use, though. The location had flashed up at the beginning of the performance, but all I could remember was that it had the letters "ea" in it somewhere, which didn't narrow it down much.

Bringing 90210 to Texas to win the girl... I guess...

So, I lived in Beverly Hills (90210, as we refer to it), and I think I go to college there. I was hanging out with my friend, and we were messing around with our hazardous gas evacuation procedure (something probably triggered by watching NCIS when Abby's lab had cyanide gas in it...). He tells me to stay behind the closed door where you can still see through the little window in the door, press myself up against it, and hold out my ID badge. So I did, then when I came out, I was like, "Did it look like Stargate?" At least I thought that's what we were going for.

We went back to do it again, but this time, the door had become the (wrought iron) gate of my friend's mansion, and his fiancee came up, asking if I was somehow implying that their marriage was doomed to failure. I wasn't exactly sure how she reached that conclusion, but it looked like they wanted me to leave. Behind my friend and his fiancee, on the other side of the gate, I briefly saw this girl with long black hair and (face? still working on who she reminded me of), who I must have known at least somewhat. My recollection was that she was sort of a bitch, in the broad sense of the term, but that I liked her for some reason.

Later, I had taken my posse from college and we had all gone to Texas to catch up with that girl. We walked into a local food establishment, and went into a back room where not many people were actually eating, and many people weren't even sitting at tables. Several were simply standing up against the side wall near a back door. It was winter, so everyone was wearing boots. Sure enough, the girl from earlier was there (for convenience, let's call her Monica), except that she had dyed her black hair to a dirty blonde. She was one of the ones leaning against the side wall, hanging out. One of the girls next to her was the sister of another friend of mine (we were trying to recall what his name was later... Dave? Wayne?). His sister lived (or went to school?) in New Zealand but was going to school (or visiting? or studying abroad?) here in Texas. She also lived in eastern Colorado? The details were getting kind of confusing. There was another girl leaning against the wall too, near Monica. I didn't know her name but thought she was exceptionally cute.

So, the posse (of however many people) has all come into the room, some of them standing on the stairs that turn up to the second floor. People ask where we all came from, and someone in the posse says, very deliberately, as if he has to try to remember each number as he's saying it, we're from "9.. 0.. 2.. 1.. 0." Monica asks what we're all doing here. I hesitate, and one of the guys from the posse gives me a look of encouragement. I tell Monica, "I came here..." I hesitate some more, already regretting what I'm going to say next, because Wayne's sister and the other girl both seem like such great opportunities -- I look them over again, and continue: "... for you." Monica looks surprised, but soon turns out to be impressed, and agrees to go out with me. My feelings are muddled. She mumbles something about breaking it off with someone else, but I figure that's a minor detail.

She asks me if I want to go with her to another place, or, on second thought, what about bowling? I agree that bowling would be cool. She heads out into the front room and I go with her, but as we reach another side exit, I realize that I am no longer wearing my boots. I must have taken them off while we were talking. I go back to the back room and find them, and start putting them on. I'm really annoyed by how long it takes to put the first boot on, having to retighten the laces before I can tie them. Plus it's a little cold and the laces are a little wet, so that's tricky for my fingers too. Then I go to put the right boot on. I stick my foot in, and realize that it feels too soft, and then notice that it's totally not my right boot at all. My boots are mostly leather brown, while this boot has some blue nylon cushioning near the ankle. So, I walk around the back area, looking for someone who has the other boot with blue cushioning, figuring they probably have my right boot. I do find someone who has the wrong boot, and they hand me what they think is my boot, but it's a little bigger than mine, and has a different logo on it.

I get more annoyed, and walk back towards the front area, and as I'm passing into the front, I look back down and see that my correct right boot is on my foot now, which is a relief. I chat a little bit with a couple closer friends from the posse. One of them mentions that if we want, we can take some items of Wayne's sister's from Wayne's mansion, because she doesn't want to move all that stuff back to New Zealand. That's about the end of that dream.