A Dream About Mole's (One of Many)

I worked for my old friend Dean Newman at Mole's Record Exchange in Cincinnati, Ohio for 20 years. My employment there ended in 2012, but my love for Dean and those years we spent together at the store will never die. I frequently have dreams about the place. Here is one, a crazy long epic lysergic dream I had in November 2021, shortly after I left Cincy and moved to Bluffton:

When the dream started, I was on my way to work at Mole's 1.0 on Short Vine. The entire store was empty and cleared of fixtures. Giant cardboard signs that were cobbled together out of old boxes covered the entire counter area, hiding all the CD stock behind the counter. I locked the door behind me and went into the back room. There was no one else there. I walked a long hallway that went underground and turned to the left for a distance of about two or three blocks and then opened up on an entrance to the store through this long hidden tunnel that I had not previously been aware of. I opened this previously hidden door and there were people milling about on Vine Street. Some of them began to wander into the store through the secret tunnel and I was concerned that no one was supposed to be in there but me. Somehow this small group of people and myself ended up in a corral on a dusty farm and I knew there was livestock about so I climbed up on a fence. Sure enough there were several bulls running around in the pen and all the other people soon scrambled to safety. Also in the pen I saw a large grey panther. It walked right by me. I also saw my old cat Franny (also grey) curled up and sleeping. The big grey panther tried to play with her but she was not interested. I wandered back into Mole's and found at the end of a long wide hallway reality opened up on what looked like a TV screen. It was like another dimension that lie just on the other side of an invisible border. No glass front like a TV, just a surreal otherness to the environment on the other side. Like something in a science fiction or horror movie. Like Poltergeist. I stuck my hand into this screen just to see if it could be penetrated. It brought no resistance or discomfort so I stepped through into this other world. As soon as I was on the other side I felt that otherness pulling me deeper in and it was very hard to go back to the real world. Like a riptide or reverse magnetism was pulling me into this other world, tugging at me physically like a strong wind causing resistance as I tried to push back to reality. I eventually did and just shook it off. Next, I was walking down the street with Tom Scheidler, my old friend and former co-worker at Mole's. In the middle of the street where we were walking we saw the giant cardboard sign that Dean had put up in Mole's and it had made an appearance earlier in the dream. Tom and I arrived at Mole's and looking through the front window I saw my friend Matt Schlasinger (who I actually worked with many years later at Everybody's Records). He was in the shop doing some carpentry work for Dean at Mole's. Tom and I entered the store and I started talking to Dean. We reminisced about our many years of working together. Dean was sad that I was leaving town. I assured him that we would see each other again. I was helping Dean and Matt move some newly-arrived inventory to the back room. One of the items was a big limited edition Pearl Jam turntable that came with a 45 of "Spin the Black Circle". I asked Matt if he already bought his and he said of course but he had no plans to actually play the record. He wanted to keep it in pristine condition.