The neighbourhood is changing

There was a bit of time travel in this dream: two eras of my life sitting site by side on the landscape.

At the beginning of my dream, I am back at mom & dad's, painfully depressed and wondering how I got back here. It's the suburban bungalow where I lived (miserably) from age 10 to 14, in my room in the basement, on a tree-lined street. The house is full of mom and dad's friends, a family reunion or something ... then my sister arrives! I go out and meet her in the driveway, and there's also a kitten or two out there on the lawn, one of them white with flowers on its collar.

My sister is, of course, as uncomfortable at mom and dad's house as I am, so we grab umbrellas and go out for a walk. I offer to show her around town, as I now live in a different city. I suggest we go to my place, where we can visit with the ancient cat we had as kids, but she says no, she doesn't want mom to be able to find her. So instead we just walk around the block. On the corner, we pass the squashed-flat body of the white kitten with flowers in its collar, run over in the gutter.

It turns out that my apartment building is directly behind my childhood home. We get to it by crossing an alley. I decide it would be fun to show sis the weird shop in the basement, a high-end automatic vendor where well-off tenants can buy $50 steaks and gourmet salads and basically anything they want out of an automatic dispenser machine that takes credit cards. So we go in the back door of the building and find ourselves in a concrete passageway that branches off in several directions, as if there were also a subway stop under there. We try to get to the shop, but there is a security guard who wasn't there before and he stops us. I have forgotten my keys, so he doesn't believe I live in the building. He sends us away.

Art Therapy

I dreamed that I went to the house I grew up in (happens every so often) and found the place haunted by the ghosts of a man and a woman. Their bodies are in the house too, all dried out in peaceful attitudes. I asked them what they were doing in my childhood home; they said they are here to tell me I needed to take some things away with me: a black cat, a grey cat, and an apple from the tree in the yard.