Weird nightmare

[AlienGirl]

Last night I had this weird nightmare. In the first part of it, I was working as a telephone information-gatherer (one of the two jobs I have IRL) but instead of calling people's houses to ask them what they think of some local library issue or whether they enjoyed their cruise to Alaska, I had to call animal-research labs to ask what they were currently doing. It was a huge questionairre, at least twenty pages, about what kinds of animals they were using and what they were doing to them. The first person I got to talk to me was a woman who was doing experiments on cats. I don't remember what she was doing, it might have been the thing where they see how long they can keep an animal awake before it dies of exhaustion. Anyway, I was asking her all these questions, and there was this pit of horror in my stomach as she answered. The creepiest thing was that she had an office decorated with cat calendars and artwork of cats wearing clothes. One of my co-workers remarked, "That decoration shows that deep down inside she recognizes cats are like people," and suddenly I had this breakthrough, and I replied, "No...it shows that she wishes she could *do this to* people."

Then suddenly the scene shifted, and I was walking to another job, which was as a waitress at a pho restaurant. I knew if I was late I would be fired because I was already on my manager's bad side. I got hopelessly lost in these suburban streets that all looked the same. I had this backpack thing made of wood that I had to assemble, and I tried to put it together, but it took too long and I knew I'd be fired. So I sat in the road with the book Like Any Other Fugitive (fiction about Vietnam-era people interspersed with literary quotes, one of my favorite books) and waited for a car to run me over since I had no hope left. "There is nothing left for me," was the exact thought I had.

Then I was in my dead grandparents' house and all the rooms were empty and bare and didn't "feel" like my grandparents anymore, and there were a lot of mice, so I wanted to take some mice home with me as pets.

Can anyone give me a lead on any of the syhmbolism in this set of dreams?

Tucker