Another night of strange dreams

The other night, I dreamed that I telephoned a charismatic Lakota "spiritual teacher" of my youth - this being a real person, not a dream; he was quite an important figure in my getting my shit together in my late 20's. We had something of a falling out - a "disillusioned disciple confronts his guru" kind of cliche - after which, he walked away; I haven't spoken to him since (about eight years ago). It was odd, then, to talk to him on the phone, even if it was in a dream. Mostly, on the phone, he talked about himself -- it was a bit of a one-way conversation, which I remember thinking was fitting. I woke up in a more serious mindframe, for having spoken to him.

Last night, I dreamed that I had encountered a charismatic crank - an old man with a Slavic accent who lived in a trailer with his wife and was on some sort of nature trip. I don't remember what the specifics of it were, but I do remembering asking him what he cleaned his dishes with, and him answering that he used soap -- along with water and milk. (The milk made it smell better, he explained). I could tell he was an eccentric, but I was considering becoming his student anyhow. At one point -- while waiting outside a grocery store for my new teacher to finish his shopping -- I phoned my friend M., to report this to her. I told her about some other dream I'd had, involving, I thought, a statue of Pope John Paul II (whom she admires); the statue was hollow, but filled with gold, and I had reached up inside it to get some of the gold out. "What does it mean - it's hollow, it's empty means it's false, without merit - but then, it's filled with gold?" (I was unsure if it was exactly a statue of the Pope - maybe it was a popstar, and said so to her - maybe it was Tom Petty, or someone else. In fact, I'm not even sure if this dream-within-a-dream was actually a dream I'd had earlier in the night, or if the memory of it was false from the gitgo). Then I told her that I was considering subordinating myself to an eccentric spiritual teacher again, maybe to compensate for a perceived lack of guidance in my youth; I remember sitting in the parking lot of the grocery store (in Maple Ridge, where I grew up - I'd perversely located the dream in a place where there hasn't been a grocery store in ten years) looking out at the traffic zooming by, feeling that old feeling of confusion and dismay at how completely insane human life is, wondering how anyone could possibly be guided through all this mess...

There was also my old "interrupted masturbation" dream motif, last night. I had a bunch of magazines I was going to jerk off to, but people kept showing up and I couldn't make it. Part of that dream saw me back in the room I grew up in, in Maple Ridge, listening to a very, very old console stereo I had as a child - it used to have a black and white TV in the center, but we scooped that out when it stopped working and kept it for the stereo. At some point, in the dream, that stopped working, too...