A dream I had the other night:

I was waiting outside a friend’s apartment for her the to get home, even though I didn’t recognize this particular apartment complex at all. The only reason I knew it was hers is that I tried the handle and it was unlocked, which I thought was weird because she’d had some recent unpleasantries and I didn’t think she’d leave her apartment unlocked like that.

A man I identified as her boyfriend was there, too, waiting outside. At one point I saw he had a gun in his hand so I asked “everything okay?” He said “yeah. I got my gun so people know I mean business.” I said “o-kay” and walked away from him. The “gun” was a block of wood crudely shaped like a gun and covered in mildew.

I went back inside the apartment and now it was full of people, and my mother was there. She was cooking a sheet of tofu on a hibachi. There was a bag of “ready to eat Lasagna noodles” on the counter that wasn’t lasagna at all. I looked at all this and asked her “what are you doing?” She leaned in close and whispered “No one here can cook.” I leaned in and said “That’s not what I meant. I can see what you’re doing; my question is why are you doing THIS, specifically?”

Cut to: I’m walking down a very steep and long hill in the outdoors with a lot of other people. Some of them appear to be hippies. The strange thing about the terrain is that someone had thrown fleece blankets all over the ground so that no pavement or foliage could be seen. At one point a woman says “Babe, we need to talk.” Five guys respond almost immediately with some variation of “Why do you sound upset when you say that?” At that, everyone sits down, except the lady who first spoke and the five men who answered. She points to one of them and says “You know why,” and the other four sit down. The man standing points to a seated girl near him and says “Well your friend said…” and she stands up. She points to me and says “Well, your friend said…” but I am sliding down the hill on the softness of the blankets, farther away from all of them and I can’t find my footing. I finally realized this was an Improv Exercise but I didn’t recall reading about this in the literature prior to the hike and I didn’t fully hear everything exchanged, so I’m sliding away muttering “I promise I’m trying. Oop, there I go. By, y’all! Send canned goods…”

And then I wake up.