Dream Journal #18

Been a while, eh?

14 Feb—15 Feb

I had driven myself out to a shopping centre type of building. First I went to dinner at an excessively British restaurant with waiters that would hover over me and even sit at the empty chair across from me. They had some sort of fried cheese curd appetiser that I ordered and, after finding nothing satisfactory on the menu, I ordered fish and chips. I ended up eating the appetiser with the nosy waiter, who vehemently corrected me when I tried to refer to it as anything other than "curds of cheese."

After that, I went next door to a nail salon. The lobby was a wide open space with a large, three-sided counter behind which the receptionists stood. No nail stations were in sight, but there were a few chairs for waiting in the lobby, and two female, Asian employees were talking to me. I was in a bit of a rush so I wouldn't have to drive back in the dark, but whatever we were doing took an extremely long time. At one point, one of the girls held up a very shiny, large, golden key that was attached via a sparkling rope to something that looked like a square pocket. She said it brought up memories and guessed which movie it was in (a movie in which both I and the other worker had starred), but in fact it was from a different movie with us in it.

When I was finally finished, it was 10:00 at night, and I was extremely distressed about this. But when I stepped outside, it was still bright as day. I was extremely confused. Getting in my car, I backed up into another parking spot (I had been in one at the curb).

I came back to the parking lot a bit later to find some adults leading quite a few costumed children through the parking lot. I hurried to a large, black pickup with heavily tinted windows that was apparently my car and got inside. In my haste, I had entered the left backseat, and Emily*, who was in the passenger seat waiting, gave me a look. We watched the children as they made their way across the concrete and laughed at some of the clumsy ones.

At that moment, Kasey** was in the driver's seat, and she rolled down her window to holler at the kids. She joked about running them down and got enough of a response to decide to go through with it. Everyone in the car was laughing as the children continued to run, making it to the edge of the concrete, where grass curved up in a bit of a hill. Worried, I yelled at Kasey to not crest the hill, and, once we had made it almost to the top, she let the pickup start sliding back down the hill.

Then I was driving, and suddenly we were on a dirt road. On either side of us were rows of deep green crops in dark soil. We were utterly lost. I came to the abrupt ending of the dirt road before asking the others if they had any idea what direction we were going. I then looked up at my car's compass, which was indeed that of my real car, to find that it read "Y." Knowing that this somehow meant "west" and we wanted to go east, I turned around and drove for a minute before we were back to the car park, at one of the small street-like exits to the main street.

At this point we were clearly no longer in a car, although we still behaved as if we were. As we came up to the intersection with the larger road, I quickly asked the others in the "car" if we were supposed to turn right or not, and I was told that we were. I stopped just before turning and looked over the main road, which was covered in a layer of slush. Just ahead of us were two very tiny traffic cones and a crumpled water bottle in the near lane. A small white electric car drove on by before it got to the spot just ahead of us, at which point the car promptly flipped onto its left side and skidded to the next-nearest lane, where it stayed. Katya***, one of the two girls with me at that point, told me that this was because the stuff in the road was hazardous. Another car crashed in the same spot in a similar fashion before I checked the oncoming traffic and quickly swung my foot out ahead. I kicked the bottle and a good scoop of slush out onto the grass. After quite a few more cars passed, we finally turned right and headed home.

*My roommate. I drive her to church, so it's not unheard of for her to be in my passenger seat.

**An old friend from church and the neighbourhood.

***One of the girls who went to Japan and China with me last summer.