My favourite team leader from work is making a speech at the zoo about being vegan. Lots of people are standing around and listening even though she is just standing on a path and not even near any cute animals.
The coworker who thinks I am gay is also at the zoo, although she was not listening to the team leader’s speech. We go to look at the baby hippopotamus, which looks like a shiny, hippopotamus-coloured antelope with rabbit teeth. It is running around and jumping up on people like an excited puppy. There is a sign saying that seeing it do tricks when it is less than six months old is extra special, because at six months it will be able to understand what people are asking it to do.
Later there is a behind-the-scenes tour of the zoo and we see a shower with no door or curtain. Someone tries to demonstrate how it works by turning on the tap, but water goes all over the floor.
I am with a group of people I have never met before, and we are going to buy food from Lord of the Fries. For some reason Lord of the Fries is actually at Flinders Street Station, instead of next to it; there is a little inlet at the top of the stairs to Platform 1, and the Lord of the Fries outlet is tucked in there.
The guy behind the counter is frustrated because nobody knows how to order the food. He is relieved when I figure out the protocol and order for everybody.
The burger I get is about eight centimetres in diameter, and the fries are hidden underneath it. I think something is wrong, but then somebody tells me that’s what the food from Lord of the Fries is always like.
It tastes pretty good.
My high school saxophone teacher is doing a strange mechanical dance in the middle of the schoolyard. As he steps and twitches, clicking sounds come from his mouth; he cannot speak except by doing the dance. Nearby, someone is blowing bubbles that turn into balloons.
I get in a lift with my English teacher from year eleven. She is carrying a big pile of yearbooks that she wants people to sign. Someone else in the lift sneers and asks why she doesn’t just use the iPhone app.
I am asking my housemate when her friend (who has been at our house for almost two weeks) is going home, and explaining that being consistently woken at two or three in the morning by their racket and then kept awake for a couple of hours is not something I can cope with on an ongoing basis. My housemate is pouting and calling me a spoilsport.
There are a whole lot of other people in the living room with us, and they all look a bit surprised. The room smells of cigarettes.
There is a child on my train. He belongs to two of my friends, but they are not on the train. I take him with me.
We arrive at a camp where rows of children - the boys dressed like characters from Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, the girls dressed in red and yellow sacks - are performing slow-motion dance moves that are supposed to ward off diseases. I am told that children at this camp die of things like measles and influenza all the time.
Someone at the camp gets a phone call from another friend of mine, who went to Ballarat on the spur of the moment and so will not be coming to meet me. They relay the message, but I do not get to speak to my friend.
Later, I am supposed to take a group of people onto the sports field for practice. The game is like a cross between netball and American football. There is another group of people on the field already, and there is a tense standoff between me and their coach. It is clear that this is the beginning of the longstanding feud between the two teams which will be central to later episodes.
Someone is coughing too much to be allowed onto the field. We put his head in a bowl and leave it off to the side.
I received a Google Wave invite and started learning how to use it.
(This has been the most embarrassing dream to admit to so far.)
I am trying to give away my egg cups, because I don’t eat eggs anymore and it seems silly not to give them to somebody who will use them. I can’t stop calling them “egg cup holders” and so my conversations go nowhere.
In this dream the main character is a guy who looks like Johnny Depp did fifteen years ago. He/I is/am on a cruise ship for work. (It is not at all clear what this work constitutes.) We are being pursued by a girl and also by the girl’s mother. Their intentions are not pure. It is especially awkward when they both make a move at the same time.
A man is marching up and down asking everybody he sees to give him a name. He doesn’t have one, and he only has a single tooth in his mouth. Once he has a name his tooth problem will be solved as well.
Two of my friends throw a huge party to announce that they are going to adopt a child from a third world country. I am worried that they are doing it to make themselves look good, as a public performance to demonstrate that they are The Right Sort of People. When I say something about it they become extremely angry in that way that means I am right and they were hoping nobody would notice.
***
I am talking on the phone with a friend who has gone to Perth to correspond with Che Guevara. He asks if I am avoiding the subject of the house I am supposed to be getting for us both to live in when he comes back, and he is extremely angry when I have no idea what he is talking about.***
I am staying at my father’s house and eating crumpets and English muffins straight out of the cupboard. Some of my friends are supposed to be staying there too, but two of them aren’t engaged anymore and two others have gotten back together and I haven’t seen any of them in quite some time. I go to catch a train, and I have to sprint fifty metres along the platform and then force open the door to get on the train.***
I am supposed to play with a band that lost their saxophone player. There is something wrong with the music they give me; it is actually a rebus that I manage to decode. It says “bullshit”. Suddenly my friend comes along with a ring on his finger and tells me that he and his fiancée are engaged again.***
One of my co-workers can’t go out for lunch with me after all, because she has to hand in her thesis. I am going to ask my very favourite co-worker instead, but instead I wake up.