weirdly detailed

I had the most absurdly detailed dream this morning. First I was at a shopping center here in town that morphed into a more upscale (although strangely empty) enclosed mall. I guess clientele was scarce, because I was begged by desperate shop and salon workers to come in and look at their wares/services. One blond and very-made-up lady in a salon was especially desperate-sounding. I didn't like the begging and found an empty office to wait in. I don't know why I was there to begin with, but I ran into a couple of classmates from way back. I was ambivalent about seeing them, since I inexplicably had a clay mask on my face. I decided to go ahead and try to enjoy the interaction, though, and assume that they would understand and give me time to wash off the mask if they decided to go somewhere else for another activity.

Then it morphed into a workplace, except that it was still in the mall building. I was organizing a cabinet with all kinds of dried tea and spices, and feeling on edge because a somewhat bossy person I actually work with was making suggestions about how it should be arranged.

Then the interesting part started. I can't really explain how I was perceiving this, or in what sense I was "there", but it was like a hyperrealistic film. The image started out as a still image that I was looking at with some other people, including my husband, and gradually elements of the image started to move until finally we were actually *in* the image. It started out as a wild, deserted beach, and the camera panned to include some sea stacks. We were bent on guessing where it was, but not really sure. Then people started moving into the image, a lot of them with wild dreadlocks, and this prompted me to guess that it was Australia.

Maybe as a reward for guessing right*, at that point we were absorbed into the image, although it didn't stay a wild and deserted beach peopled by post-apocalyptic hippies. We moved up the beach toward a city and started sightseeing. There was an absurd quantity of very vivid detail packed into the scenery: a shoreline, a fancy Calatrava-esque bridge and a much smaller Victorian-era footbridge, complete with gazebo-like folly; lots of plants and flowers; a marketplace that was tourist-y but not offensively so; a cemetary with above-ground graves; a school complex that turned out to be the Savannah College of Art and Design (and somehow here we were either thinking about it or had actually moved to Savannah); etc. We were with another couple, random dream people based loosely on past classmates/coworkers, and I commented to the woman how interesting it was that there should be such vivid details in a dream. She completely ignored me and I assumed that was because she didn't want to recognize or be reminded that it was actually a dream.

*I think this is because we watched Part 1 of "Che" last night and at one point I recognized a place we went on vacation last year. Also, I know there was a mini-storyline featuring revolutionaries on the run somewhere in the dream, but I can't really remember that part.