Last night I met up with Alv which was a pleasure as always. It seems he doesn't share my curious inability to get into the stock market - for a good 2 drinks he did nothing but talk about stock positions, spreads, exchange rates, gold and oil. I hope I haven't opened the door to a gambling addiction.
Two pints of Black Sheep later, we made our way to Brick Lane for another disappointing curry. Alv's Tikka Boona was incredibly salty, so we complained and the waiter said that it was perfect, natch. He then said that there was no salt in the Boona sauce! Why then was it so salty? Could it be that the chicken had been heavily salted to disguise the fact that it was fucking old and rancid? Certainly the replacement dish we eventually extracted from them was a lot more tender and a lot tastier.
We went to the Lounge Bar where I was disappointed to see them make my Hendricks G&T with pub tonic from the syrup-soda mixer tap. Such a waste. - and it cost 6 quid. From that, a pint and a half of Cobra and the two Black Sheeps from the stock market discussion I managed to get quite drunk. I certianly didn't sleep well and woke up with a headache despite two pints of water before bed. I also woke up into a half-sleep in which I was conscious I wasn't sleeping, yet also not really awake. I didn't look at the clock (I don't have an easily accessible clock since I started using a dawn simulator but it felt like at least an hour or maybe more. During this time I had a very real dream.
I was staying somewhere foreign, but I'm not sure where. It looked a bit like a Japanese suburb, but it felt more like a holiday island in the Mediterranean, like Malta. I was staying in someone's house, in a spare room at the top of the house. It was very basic - no one lived there normally - and had a desk and a double bed, with a white and blue bed cover like a tablecloth. The ceiling was low and sloping. On the desk was a computer, but it wasn't mine - it was either running Windows 95 or a really crufty spyware infested more recent version. It wasn't comfortable surfing on it. There was a long, cheap and narrow wooden staircase that ran up to my room. Sometimes there was a small landing with other doors as well as the one to my room, sometimes not.
There was a sense of dreamy deja-vu - I couldn't say whether I felt I had been there before or had that dream before, but it wasn't a new situation. In the previous encounter I felt I had spent some time with a Japanese girl sitting on the bed browsing my music collection on my Mac. She had later invited me to a club or a bar and drawn me a map. This wasn't possible this time because my Mac's screen is broken.
In my dream, there were two small and pretty short-haired Japanese girls, and I knew them both separately. We came in from a larger group outside and I introduced them in the kitchen of the house. As I did so, I stumbled as I realised they were both called Miho, and they both new our mutual friend Satoko. In the dream it went something like this:
This is Miho, and Miho this is ... same name - Miho. I know Miho through Satoko, and, um, you know Satoko too.
In retrospect, the verbal stumble felt like my brain was only assigning them names at the point at which they were needed, the introduction. In the dream I executed a rather clumsy cover-up in which I blurted something about how funny it was for me to be introducing them when we all already had a mutual friend who should have introduced us. It felt like a kind of distracting gambit.
One went away back to her home - they both lived in this place but I was on holiday - and the other Miho stayed and we chatted. She looked like she was up for it, and was very friendly and physical. We talked about kissing and I moved in but she pulled back, smiling. I lifted her up - she weighed about 10 kg - and held her in various poses while she laughed and talked about her boyfriend, Stefan. I was sure Stefan didn't exist.
The other Miho returned and we arranged to meet at the same club or bar from the previous dream, in 15 minutes, after they'd gone off home to change or something. I wasn't sure where it was (I definitely hadn't been there before, despite feeling certain that I knew of it from a map in a previous dream) so I asked Miho-who-had-gone-away to draw me a map, but this time she wouldn't. She said everyone knew where it was and I should ask. This was a problem because although she'd said the name several times I still wasn't sure what it was called, and I wasn't confident with whatever language was spoken here. Oddly, I could even draw you rough simulacrum of the previous dream's map now. In the dream I tried this but it wasn't useful. Then I noticed that the one who wouldn't draw me a map was much uglier than the other Miho. They both left to go to their homes.
I still didn't know anything more than the vague direction of the bar, apart from that I had worked out its name from the scribbles on the map I had drawn and from an interpretation of the sounds she made when talked about it. It was called, "Mind Kitchen".
Posted by Oxygenik at December 9, 2005 11:37 AM