I had a dream last night that involved going to a sushi restaurant/tavern that (in the dream) was near M’s apartment. M was friendly with a bartender there, and the bartender was the pimp for a bunch of neighborhood hookers. I think the dream starts in the restaurant, and the bartender keeps leaving his post at the bar to come hang out with us at our table and give us drinks.

Then later, I’m in an apartment, only separated from the apartment next door by a curtain. The girls who live there always pull back the curtain to talk to me. They have a bunch of rocks with random words scrawled on them with a sharpie pen, and the rocks are scattered everywhere and spill over into my apartment. They also have a large dog that never seems to move, which is fine with me. I don’t like large dogs.

I’m having problems with my cell phone. My voicemail messages are going to some government agency. I did get one message from my mother in Alabama telling me that Liam M. was trying to get it touch with me. I thought it was odd that Liam would call my parents in another state to try to reach me instead of just emailing me. Also, I couldn’t figure out why Liam would call me in the first place, since we’ve hardly ever even spoken to each other. I figure he needs a banjo player or something for a show he’s doing.

I go to this subway station, and it’s got tracks in it that cross over each other. Trains frequently collide, but they don’t crash. They just go right through each other, like ghosts. Everybody in the station is standing on piles of dirt or sitting on the ledge next to the tracks. It kind of looks like the inside of a coal mine, this subway station.

I don’t get on a train, and I decide to take a bus instead. But the bus is going the wrong direction, and the bus driver offers me a beer. As it turns out, I’m sitting in a seat right next to the driver as if it were a regular car, and there is a cooler full of beer at my feet. I finally get off the bus, and I’m trying to find my way back to the restaurant. I ask some random people on the street if they know a bartender who hangs out with a bunch of hookers, and they point me in the right direction.

So I finally get to the restaurant/bar and M is involved in a sushi tasting event, so I go to the back of the bar and get a beer. Then we’re back in the apartment with the curtain and the girls next door. I go over to my computer and I see that M and Janice have been playing some sort of internet role-playing game together, and I sit down to read the narrative. Then I woke up.

This is a typical sort of dream for me – with me doing relatively mundane things, but extraordinary things are happening around me. The settings, circumstances and incidental characters are always different. Frequently old girlfriends replace each other at random. Sometimes I’m still friendly with people that I haven’t been friendly with in years.