I dreamed I was with Mom and Brooke at SeaWorld in Hong Kong. We were looking for someone, but I can't remember who. It was around Christmas time, so only part of the park was open for a special holiday celebration. I said I'd go look at Shamu stadium, but Mom said she thought that was closed. I insisted that the whole park was built to showcase the orcas, so if anything was open, Shamu would be.
It turned out I was right, but I didn't find the person when I looked there. I left the stadium by a back way and found myself in a stairwell where the stairs had no railings and would just stop in mid flight. I had to jump the gaps, and almost fell off of a segment of straight pathway suspended about halfway down. I left the stairwell at that level, and found myself in an office area. I had to get across a row of cubicles where the desks and chairs were all made of foam and floated atop a deep pool of salt water. I stepped gingerly from chair to chair, but lost my balance when I was almost across and plunged into the water. There was a guy sitting at a nearby dry desk cube, but he just looked at me in confusion, and didn't offer any help.
Eventually I hauled myself out onto solid ground, and went to rejoin my family. But then I got a call from work asking me to go to a colleague's home and tell him to call in. I took a boat to a peaceful little man-made lake with luxury houseboats moored all along its shores. I found the one my colleague had retired to, and pointed a little TV remote type thing at his door. This rang the doorbell and left a message at his doorstep. I took the boat back to meet Mom and Brooke.
We ran a few errands around town, which involved taking taxi boats to various hillsides, climbing up to the shops, then hiking back down to the taxis. Eventually we decided to visit the hot springs at the top of the mountain, and check on the old family home along the way. We were surprised at how overgrown the paths were. What had been a busy Walgreens just a year before was now an overgrown ruin. We had planned to stop there for a refreshing soda, but ended up visiting a remote little cantina instead. There we paid 20 pesos for a two liter bottle of Coke.
I agreed to run down ahead and check on the house. I dropped down a side path into a wide field where the old home stood, ringed in a little fence, with cattle guards on the driveway to keep the cows out of the yard. One of my uncles was driving a tractor out in the pasture. I was surprised to see the front and back doors all open, and some large dogs lying on the porch.
I went inside and saw signs of habitation. I crept up the stairs to a wide landing, and saw a man asleep in a sleeping bag. Two big dogs at his side raised their heads and began to bark a little. The man moved and I saw that he was fairly young, but mostly bald, except for one small patch on the left side, that he'd grown out long and wound into a lank, dark braid. He had a sparse dark beard in a scraggly fringe around his jaw.
I crept back downstairs before he woke up enough to see me. The dogs followed me out. One was a tawny gold and looked like a Labrador and mastiff mix. The other was reddish brown and looked to be part German shepherd, part bloodhound. They weren't friendly, but they weren't aggressive, and seemed well trained, which gave me some level of comfort about the man in the house.
I went back and told Mom about the apparent squatter. We all needed to use the bathroom, and it was our house, and there were three of us and my uncle at hand, so we decided to go ask him if we could stop in for a minute. For all we knew, someone in the family was letting him stay. Like the dogs, he was polite but not friendly. We didn't question his right to be there, but resolved to ask around the family for more information.
We continued on our way, discussing ways to politely dislodge him when I woke up.
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