Last night I had the strangest dream…

I keep having these crazy dreams. For the last two nights I dreamed about Wichita, Kansas. Dreaming about Wichita, in and of itself, is not that weird if you consider that we have family there, but two nights in a row, about a specific city? Hmmm.

Anyway, last night I dreamed that Doc and I were walking around downtown Wichita at night, and we went into a tiny little pub with neon signs in the windows. By “tiny,” I mean that it was maybe six feet by twelve feet in size. Plus, it was sort of a split-level thing, because we walked up about four or five stairs from the street to the door. The ceiling was very low, because I couldn’t stand up straight. To the right of the door, there were a couple more stairs to a tiny raised area where the two booths were. There was just enough room to squeeze between the front windows and the tables. We sat down in the back booth, which had a tiny passageway running behind it to some back part of the place. A warm yellow glow was coming from around that corner, and there was a sheet across the doorway. As soon as we sat down, Hujefa and Surekha (from college) walked in the door and sat down at the table with us. Except as soon as she sat down, I realized that it wasn’t them. It was actually Tulika (who looked like a cross between Surekha and Subha) and Upendar. Upendar went back down the little stairway to get some drinks, and the first thing she said to me was “How was your Christmas?” And I realized that 1) she had a very thick Indian accent, which in real life neither Surekha nor Tulika has, 2) it seemed a little strange that she didn’t say hi, how are you, long time no see, or something like that — just straight into the holiday question, as if we had been keeping up all these years and that was a normal thing to ask; and 3) that Tulika never liked me much anyway, so why would she want to socialize with me now? And I barely knew Upendar. Upendar came back with drinks for the two of them, and water and coke for me and Doc, and I tried to introduce them to Doc but couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

Then later, driving somewhere, we were stuck at railroad tracks where the gate arm was down but no train was coming. Instead of driving around the arm and over the tracks, I wanted to turn around and find another way. There were some scary looking guys surrounding the car and they climbed on top of it and on the hood and started pounding and yelling, and making the car spin around like it was a toy top. Doc told me to just ignore them and pretend they weren’t there, and they would go away.

Night before last, I dreamed that we were again in downtown Wichita after dark, but this time waiting at a bus stop with a bunch of other young people. The girl sitting next to us, who had dark hair and was dressed in a short dark velvet dress, told us that she played lead guitar in a band called Slayer, and that they were really awesome, and that we should come check them out that night. Doc asked them why the musicians in this town all drove vans and not school buses. She said that it was just because they all had vans, no reason. But he kept asking, like it didn’t make sense to him that they would all use vans instead of school buses. She hopped up and went over to a box truck that had parked on the corner and told us to come listen to her show later.