connection connection

a singificant dream that i experienced last night involved my attempting to make a phone call to my mother. i was in a strange town and needed her to come and pick me up. every payphone i tried to use was somehow unusable. all of the phones were foreign contraptions. i had trouble putting the money in, dialing the numbers, trouble with connections. after dialing the number on one phone, i heard myself having a conversation from the past. the dream just went on and on with every phone i tried to use causing some kind of problem for me. it amazes me how varied the problems were. one phone looked like some sort of rusty fire alarm pull-thing and the cord was only about five inches long. there was a phone arcade where all of the phones were also a game of some sort. one phone had a stack of bills sticking out of the coin return slot. other people were all using phones, but somehow they could not help me figure out how to use one.