Dream Spores - 15. Sunny Australia

Sunny Australia

So we were in the wild of sorts, a kind of forest, but rather open, more like a tundra with inexplicable trees here and there.

The sky darkened somewhat and the horrified faces of the people with me made me think something like 'Oh shit, superstition. They're going to believe it's gone forever and start sacrificing people or something.' But it wasn't all that rash. When the clouds went, the sun came back, but it was milky and pale, somehow, as was the light-blue and white sky around it. So the unease stayed. And I myself was mystified. Not scared, but extremely curious as to what obscured our view of the sky around the sun, and only there. I moved around a little, observing the phenomenon, and realised that it moved a little when I did, just a tiny bit on the edges. I got the sudden idea that we might be trapped under a giant glass dome now, but that couldn't be quite right. I floated upwards a bit and looked at the phenomenon from a little above tree-height.

"It is a glass dome," I called down to our leader, or what seemed to be the most responsible and reliable of the nervous people, "It's not over us, but over an area over there, and between us and the sun right now." When I looked again while slowly floating down and a little sideways to get another perspective and check from where the sun would be clear for us again, it came into view for me as sitting on a light metallic stand like a pale yellow glowing crystal ball, in the middle of the dome roof - and I saw that the glass dome wasn't a dome anymore, but had a flat top that looked like soil, with silvery mercury-like liquid on it in the middle of which sat the pale sun. It was small, maybe only as large as a skyscraper; roughly judging by the distance and the size of the glass "dome".

The "dome"s shape had also changed drastically, or rather, now I could see more of it and judge it better – though how something could look like a round bowl for so long when it really has 'this' shape beats me, but I only then saw it: Well, flat and soil-and-mercury covered on the top, we settled that, and, looking at it from further above, it had the shape of a walking German-Democratic-Republic traffic light man. I looked extra long and thoroughly and at each limb to make sure. How curious. *

When I floated back down to tell the leader guy he was just finishing up talking to a policeman from somewhere else, who apparently had just asked if everything was alright. He had come throug a squary, plastic looking coloured gate, on which I proceeded to bump my forehead. When they finished their short dialogue, I called down: "Es hat die Form eines gehenden DDR-Ampelmännchens!" Slowly and clearly. (="It has the shape of a walking DDR traffic light man!") And apparently that was that.

Next I found myself sitting in the front of a car, to the right of another passenger who sat between me and the driver. I never saw the driver, only his pants and his lower arms, and he never said anything. Behind us were more people, but I didn't see or hear anything from them either, or only vaguely, because the young brunette next to me was taking up all the attention. Well, but first of all, I got some kind of telepathic rundown of what this whole situation was supposed to be about, I reckon: There were people who took the challenge upon themselves to drive from North- to Southpole, from pole cap to pole cap, starting in ice and ending in ice, taking an entire year for it at a leisurely pace, and I thought: "Ice road truckers?" not really knowing the TV show one bit, but this sounded like somewhat like the title, at least.

So this young flannel shirted woman next to me had one of her legs put comfortably over the other, was almost leaning against the driver with her shoulder and back to face us, me in the third front seat and the people behind us – in order to address us better while talking. She was poking around in a brown glass bottle with a thin straw or a straight stick, and there was some dark brown, sirupy dredging in it. I enquired after that stuff and asked if she was eating some sort of sirup, and she said it was Australian beer, which she liked a lot. She talked about being in this area and a lot of blah – as I looked out of the window.

We were in some... landscape. Sort of a mix between prairie and forest. She announced with a moan-sigh that she hoped we would be there in (town whose name escapes me now) soon, because it had been a while since she had taken part in a (forgot the name) tournament/festival. She said something about the last or first time and that it didn't go so very well, and my dream provided a flashback:

There she was, lifting up a slender, round log almost twice her size, and running with it towards a heap of loose hay, piled up at the side of the dusty road. She ran into it and tried to jump, but failed miserably, dropped the log and landed on her knees in the grass beyond the hay pile. I was worried she had seriously injured her knees, but her face only bore an expression of childish offendedness at not managing this – whatever it was supposed to be. I snapped out of this little excursion into the past, thinking "The Scots do it better..."

As soon as we arrived somewhere I was standing in some kind of snack cart with little squeeze bottles of different mayonnaises, mustard and other stuff in a row before me. I was given some information that I did pay attention to, but have forgotten now that I'm writing this down. It's not even important. Now, as flashes of images of flyers for log-throwing festivals and some Scots in them were taking turns at appearing, I had squeezed some mustard into my left hand and some ground meat into my right and was kneading and forming them into thick sausages of sorts. Don't ask me how that worked with the mustard, but it did, it was all very elastic, so my dream-mustard recipe probably included some kautchuk (gummi arabicum) or something of the sort.

Next, I was in a big, big supermarket-like shop, more like a Walmart or Real, you know, a shop that's really ginormous and they have way more than groceries? Well, this particular store hat a red theme, so it was neither Walmart nor Real, by the way. It was sitting bang in the middle of... landscape.

My underling colleagues and I came there together and started working there together. My job sometimes included preparing food, as in cutting and slicing meat, fruit and vegetables, because I'm a cook, so I was wearing my white chef jacket under the red apron. But most of the time we did supermarket-underling jobs, getting stuff into and out of storage, putting it into the shelves and all that. The atmospherein the shop was nice, actually. It was sunny and warm and the rooms and equipment felt somehow livable. It was all wooden, white and red.

A thing that slightly worried me occuried. Because I was wearing that red apron, I didn't need to put an entire set of black buttons into my chef jacket. (It is much faster putting your jacket on the fewer buttons you stick in, so it saves a tiny bit of time to leave some out.) Apparently, I carried the leftover buttons from the set of twelve around with me while working, and the worry-thing is this: I ate them. Once in a while I would pop one of the black plastic buttons in my mouth and eat it. They were crunchy and sweet, and this worried me not because I was eating plastic, but only because I was eating them away, meaning that obviously I had less and less and would at some point have not enough left to button up my jacket properly.

Anyway, something else took my attention. We workers had to change into local clothing, for a specific occasion that I forgot – not that we were told any details anyway. We had to pick something in the shop to wear so we all gathered around, and some of us were sitting at a shop computer and laughing at the 'christian rock' music that was apparently locally popular. They were playing it over the shop's loudspeakers and mimicking some of the verses – it was all in German, which was weird, because I had been under the impression that we were abroad, possibly still in Australia. Anyway, the ones actually trying to pick out clothes were disgusted with the horrible choices we were given (I won't describe them in detail... suffice it to say: rainbow colours throughout, knitting, short, short, shorter, shortest.). I managed to find regular blue jeans, though, and was just looking through the stacks to find something in my size and with a shape that looked as if it might just find a human body, when the hilarity over the Jesus-Rock grabbed my attention again. One of the guys showed me a soda bottle with a Jesusloving label that he had altered for shits and giggles. Instead of "Hoffnungsstern" (=star of hope) or something like that it now said "Offnungskern". (=core of opening)

That was pretty much it.