He was trying to make his way somewhere, sounth of where he lived. A store, perhaps. It was getting late, and he was prepared to get a hotel to stay nearby until he was done and able to return home. He was lost. The roads were hellish -- not a straight one in the place, nor many that kept their name past the nearest intersection. The roads resembled a spider web, and he was looking for a route number that slipped in his head like popcorn butter. He had his cellphone, true, and his mother knew where he was going, but she wanted to talk, and the reception was poor, so when he called her for a reminder, it was a horrible task to get the route number from her again. He had a county road map, but without the index, just 40-some pages of the twisting, many-named roads. Worse, the road map indicated that this place had an incredible number of dumps, chemical plants, and other industrial buildings for its size -- about one for every 3 pages. He pulled in to a BP super-shopping centre (must be a local thing, he thought -- he never knew BP to sell anything but gas and convenience stuff), went in, wandered through the isles for about 20 seconds before he realized he really should keep trying for his destinantion, went to a line, and slid his card through a card reader. The cashier handed him five dollars, and he asked, in an offhand way, do you know how to get to .. there's a big route, I think it ends in 8, maybe 38? .. from here? She had no idea. He kept talking for a sec, but she really didn't know, and there were other customers (although they seemed not to be irritated in the least). He finally went outside via a side door, and lay in what looked like someone's front yard, using the street light to stare at the map. Time passed, and the sun went down as he tried to find the nearest corner road on the unindexed map. No help.

For being in a tiny little hell, it really wasn't that horrific, just a prolonged, stressful situation. Weird dream. I wonder where the parts came from. I think the BP part is from my needing to fill my car up yesterday, although I have no idea why the BP was more like a Wal-Mart than a real BP. The roads in the dream were a lot worse than Pittsburgh, and so I have no idea where they came from. The deficient map? Occasionally I've dealt with maps that were in that state, but not recently. Perhaps, in my cleaning of my car, I came across one of those old county maps, and it reminded me. They have red covers with black type, black and white insides, with each corner of every page indicating what page to go to (or other county map) to continue along that direction .. ahh, another dream memory -- in this case, there were no page numbers -- each direction pointed me to a named page or area.

Anyhow, that's dreams.