Dream of box, hair, silver, rocks, finger, father, gift, home, wall, tree, form, sea, child, spiritual, light, metal, eyes, bear, old, shells, treasures, well, name, animal, hand, coffee, dirt, want, hands, called, rubber, struggling, hurry, searching, bird, darkness, cousin, morning, back, door, sister, letter, pencil, way, forest, ring, toys, stumps, wire, work, friends, dinosaur, age, may, dark, floor, candy, park, register, hunting, office, egg, paper, hidden, bakery, counter, side, person, insects, bones, white, friend, time, man, chain, open, crystal, fence, children, mail, space

The dream started with me standing at the entrance to a forested park with some friends. When I learned that we were about to partake in a scavenger hunt, I was very excited as I knew this park well and announced that I had done scavenger hunts here before and knew all the good hiding spots. (I use the term "scavenger hunt" because that is what it was called in the dream, even though we didn't have a list to follow and were basically just looking for hidden items, more like an Easter egg hunt.) I started out feeling very confident that I had an advantage and would be able to find everything easily. I looked in all my usual spots but was surprised to find that I wasn't having a lot of luck. I stumbled upon a collection of carefully laid out bones which looked a bit like the remains of a very large bird but the impression in my mind was that they were dinosaur bones. At this point my understanding was that we were hunting for light-coloured rocks so I picked a few out of the bones and put them in a paper bag that I was carrying. Then I noticed another, much smaller, collection of bones nearby which precisely resembled the larger arrangement. Next I got down on my hands and knees to peer inside a hollowed out section of a tree stump and discovered a few more rocks close to the opening to add to my bag. I could see a deeper part of the hollow further back and, mostly unconcerned about insects and cobwebs, I reached my hand into the darkness. Suddenly an animal poked its snout out at me. It took me a minute to realize it was a bear, and then I noticed a small white ceramic bear figurine on a smaller stump nearby. That is when I realized my current strategy of assuming that whoever had done the hiding would have put things in the same spots I would think to look was not going to get me anywhere, and that in fact he had left clues in the form of smaller versions of the things I really needed to look at. The next thing I noticed was a large shrub with two conspicuous cuts on its branches which resembled small tree stumps. Convinced this was another clue, I told everyone in my group that we should look for two tree stumps standing next to one another. At this point I encountered some skeptical resistance to my theory that the hider was leaving small clues for us and it was also starting to get dark so everyone wanted to quit and go home but I eventually convinced them to keep searching. We all looked around for a while until I found two stumps on the backside of a knoll. Again, I got down on my hands and knees and peered through the space between them. I spotted some sparkly things which I retrieved and put in my bag, but I could see that there was much more in the area behind them so I worked on trying to find a way to get there. Around the left hand side of the stumps was a barbed wire fence which I tried to climb over but the barbs proved to be too much of an obstacle so I covered them with a piece of something like paper or cloth. This was still too challenging so I continued further around the enclosure until I found a tiny opening that I could squeeze through. Once inside, the space appeared to be a small corral, fenced or walled in at all sides with a dry, dusty dirt floor and mostly covered with low tree boughs. Here I found many treasures, some out in the open and some located within hidden corridors whose openings were not apparent unless I looked very carefully. There were sea shells, trinket boxes, costume jewellery, carabiners and keychains, crystal and rubber balls, a huge stash of leatherwork that my sister had created, candy, pencil crayons, and long-forgotten toys that I had owned and played with as a child. At one point I discovered a series of three small silver triangles, all linked together in a chain, which were intended to be lined up like a puzzle ring and worn on one's finger. When I found this particular item, somehow I knew that Rob (my soulmate) had left it there as a gift for me. There were so many wonderful things to collect that I ran out of room in my paper bag and was struggling to hold them all in my arms or to decide which things to leave behind. By this point the members of my group had evolved to include several children, plus my sister, who was trying to convince me to hurry up or quit so we could go home before it got too dark. She explained that we needed to divide all the loot up amongst the children and let them choose one by one which items they wanted to keep for themselves, but I argued that it would take too much time because there were so many things that had been found, plus there were nostalgic items from our childhood that she wouldn't want them to take anyway. I said it was better for us to just take everything home with us, sort through and divide it all up as equally as possible and then give each of the children a bag of treasures in the morning. Somehow at this point the dream changed scenes and I was no longer in the forest but standing indoors near a concession stand of some sort. It may have been a coffee counter or a bakery. There were many people lined up for their turn at the register but I didn't want to get to the counter; I was trying to get to the wall of post office boxes behind it. I squeezed my way past the line up and the counter which I had to push out of the way a little, and then opened up the door to my mailbox. Though the opening was small, the space inside was vast, and I could see that there were quite a few letters to collect. Most of them were flyers or envelopes addressed to my workplace but I kept hoping that there would be something fun for me as well, like a hand-written letter from a friend. As I looked around inside the box, I could see that some old letters from years ago had fallen through cracks or lodged themselves in the seams around the edges so I worked on getting those free. I couldn't reach a lot of the envelopes toward the back because the box was so huge, and as I struggled to get them, a person suddenly appeared in the space, presumably having climbed through a large opening at the back. She was about my age, with long dark hair and dark eyes and she began collecting all of the mail that I could not reach and passing it to the front of the compartment for me. She started to talk about her father and how he used to work with me. I said, "Oh, I didn't know I had worked with your dad; I thought your father was the man on TV, the spiritual leader." She explained I was mistaken, but I still couldn't place her actual father in my memory so I asked her for his name. She wasn't sure and said it was one of two names but couldn't remember which. (She said two actual names in the dream but I can't recall now what they were.) I asked, "Well, what is his last name?" and thought she replied, "Mar". I said, "Oh, that's funny, I have a cousin whose middle name is Mar. Is yours spelled the same, or is it M-A-R-R?" She said, "No, not Mar, my name is Guar." "Really, Gwar, like the metal band?", I asked. "No," she said, "G-U-A-R".