Tiger Shorts, Comic Store Hostages and a Dumpster

MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

First, I remember going to Disney World with Richard, Jessica and Cailey (yes, another Disney World dream). We were standing in a long, winding line waiting for something, perhaps our park passes. During our time in line Cailey became upset about something, but I can't remember what.

My next memory is that we were walking down a strange-looking dream version of Main Street in the Magic Kingdom. We went in some of the shops to look at merchandise. One of the shops sold clothing, and I found a pair of shorts with a tiger face printed on one side of them. Not Tigger. Just the print of a realistic tiger, having nothing specific to do with Disney. For some reason I wanted these shorts, and I bought them.

Shortly after I'd left the store with the purchased tiger shorts I noticed they had small holes in them. I took them aback to the store to make an exchange, but they rack where I'd previously found them was no longer there, and I had to look for what seemed like ages to find it again. Eventually I had to get an employee to help me, and even then it was some time before we found it. Then I exchanged the shorts. Exciting dream stuff, huh?

Sometime after this I went to a huge comic book store where they were about to host a panel with a guest speaker I was interested in (I can't remember who). At this point the dream began to feel more like a comic convention than a Disney trip (not that it had seemed very Disney anyway).

I was milling around the comic store waiting for the panel to begin when suddenly the store was hijacked by some group of robbers, or thugs of some sort. They herded everyone in the store into one of the back rooms and locked us in there. The room was big enough that the 20 or 30 of us had room to mill around a bit. There was some couches and chairs for a few of us to sit on.

I was sitting on one of the couches with a girl who was either Hermione from Harry Potter, or the actress who plays her, Emma Watson. I don't know which incarnation of that person it was meant to be, but we were apparently friends. She was really nervous about what would happen to us and I was trying to encourage her as she held on to me. (I have no idea why, but I genuinely did not feel very scared about our situation).

Eventually the crooks left the place, and Hermione/Emma and I formulated a plan of how to get the door unlocked (apparently just breaking it down wasn't an option). We ultimately escaped unscathed, and then I found myself back on that weird version of Main Street. There was some really odd-looking Disney merchandise on display that I can't even describe. Just bizarre collectibles bearing various Disney character likenesses.

Finally I remember "waking up" at my parents' house, as though I had been visiting there. I went downstairs and no one else was home, so I started preparing a bowl cereal for breakfast.

There was a different dream that involved a large trash dumpster. I can't remember the "story leading up to it, but several people and I had lost an item in the dumpster and wanted to retrieve it. The dumpster was too deep to just reach down into, and it was filled with a dark, wet, mulch-like substance, so we didn't want to actually jump inside it. We decided that maybe we could tip it over to make the contents spill in order to retrieve whatever our lost item was. Of course the wet mulch substance made the dumpster especially heavy, so we were having a hard time tipping it over.

Eventually I discovered a white plastic box, not much bigger than a shoebox. It somehow connected to a level near the top of the dumpster. Once connected, there was some way this gave you access to the inside of the dumpster--it doesn't make any sense to try to describe it now, because it's one of those things that only works in dream logic.

My last memory in the dream is trying to describe this function of the plastic box to one of the ladies in our group.