The bookstore/halfway house in both California and Mexico. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm in a bookstore that also serves as a sort of house for troubled youths. I'm mainly associated with the nonprofit bookstore side of the building. I help people find materials they would like to read. 

Half of the store is in Mexico, and half of it is in California, although not just anyone can cross anytime they want to. There's some time/space bending involved, and you also can't just go willy-nilly into one country and then the other without authorization. 

I see that a lot of books on a spinning rack in Mexico are gone. Someone mentions that someone took Mexico's "divinities." (The books are called "divinities.") The fact that these books aren't in place means that a lot of rights that are in the full rack in California have been bought and taken away in Mexico. I wonder what the consequences of this are to ordinary people.

I go back inside, and go to the bathroom in California, which is out in the open, around a corner of the bookstore. Kids go in and out showering. I stand next to the toilets, getting sprayed on with fine droplets of mist from the showers. I'm gathering information from the kids. They're talking about what's happening in the bookstore and in society, and I want to know about what's happening too. In my life, I mostly just go back and forth in the store. 

I give a little advice here and there to the kids. They have a lot of difficulties with parents, food, housing, and peers. Then I go back to the main bookstore and I look at a rack of California's divinities and postcards. It's full, and I'm relieved. 

I contemplate how my degree in biology has helped me at this job. Any kind of knowledge is a little helpful, but biology hasn't been particularly helpful. I'm very happy to have the degree anyway though, just because I know things about life now. 

INTERPRETATION

I sometimes wonder just how dangerous Mexico is (how many "God-given rights" they are missing). A lot of kidnappings, murders, and imprisonments of crime lords in or from Mexico have been in the news lately. I just wonder how it is that psychopaths and otherwise bad people so often rise to the very tops of so many human societies. Why doesn't good prevail more often? 

Good's not exactly prevailing in the United States either though, as demonstrated by the troubled kids. Some of society's most vulnerable people are in crisis here. They don't even have a private place to take a shower.

I guess the theme of the dream is being content to learn about how life is, or maybe just being okay with the understanding that that's all you can do for a given time, because mostly all I do is run around gathering information about these problems. And life is certainly not trouble-free when you look at biology either, where I turn my attention when I'm done studying the two social groups.