I was living upstate in an alternate version of New Paltz.  The terrain was still that of Upstate, but everything was built up as though it had be suburbanized, Long Island-style.  There was a fair amount I don’t remember, something about sleeping in a mall and something with a pizza parlor and Tom.  What I do remember is that instead of working in a strip Radioshack, the Radioshack I had worked in New Paltz was a mall store.  I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a Radioshack by name either.  In principle it was exactly the same, but I recall wearing a Best Buy uniform.  It was my last day, and I was quitting to get a better paying, better in general job.  I was very excited and said all my goodbyes to my Radioshack coworkers, then tried to go to my new job.  I can’t recall the specifics, but the better job wasn’t available to me anymore.  I tried to go back to Radioshack, but in the time I had gone and come back something drastic and strange happened to the company.  I believe they were promoting me, but it was on terms that were so horrible I didn’t want to take the position despite the fact that I was unemployed.  Oh, I would like to note that this mall was built into the side of a mountain.  It was very beautiful in a Miyazaki way.

The dream’s intent shifted as I left the mall and wandered into this home improvement store that only exists in my dreams.  It’s like Lowes combined with Michael’s combined with pet store.  I will do my best to take note of the name next time I “visit” there.  At this particular location, the pet area was directly to the right of the further-most right sliding doors.  I immediately went to the pets and started to look for something small to bring home with me to make myself feel better about losing my jobs.  This particular location had a ton of birds and a fair amount of dogs, but not much in the way of felines or the small and fluffy.  But then I found they had a whole bunch of ferrets.  Two of them were adults, and as I went to “meet” them the woman behind the counter informed me that they like to bite.  She didn’t lie.  The adult male just chomped down on my hand, and it was like something out of a cartoon.  I was waving this ferret all over the place trying to get him to let go, but he had super strength.  Finally I get him to let go, and move on to the babies.  The two babies were brother and sister, the brother being milk-white with tan markings and his sister being sable.  The boy was named Samson, and in this dream we had an immediate connection.  I knew I needed to bring Samson home with me.  In the dream I was aware of the fact that I was supposed to be seeing Tally Hall the next day with Steve-o (real life carrying over into the subconscious), and that all of the money I had with me was supposed to be for that.  However in the dream I had less money than I actually did.  I had about $100 total actually, but in this dream I only had $50.  Samson was priced at $80.  This was the first problem.  However, I noticed that the store was using a piece of my Japanese homework as one of their advertisements for some reason.  It was altered for the store, but I recognized my handwriting.  I decided to use that as my bargaining tool, and went to the lady at the counter to haggle for Samson.  She told me the best she could do is let me have him for $50.  I decided that I would get an advance from work the next day before seeing Tally Hall (at some point the dream transitioned to me working at Utopia, and the previous happenings were irrelevant), and was now prepared to handle the next problem : getting Tom to let me bring Samson home.  I called him up and began to argue my case.  Tom of course countered by saying I shouldn’t spend my money on a pet, having a ferret would be expensive, but I didn’t back down.  Eventually Tom said if I thought that I really felt the need to bring Samson home, that it would be alright.

I woke up soon after.