I'm pretty sure I was in Seattle. It *looked* an awful lot like New Orleans, but I was SURE it was Seattle, and there was a tour guide training seminar in town. It took the form of a sort of scavenger hunt, scouring the city for historic landmarks and all the coolest places to visit, and some of my tour guide friends were there, along with Captain Malcolm Reynolds, to lead groups of trainees and random interested and paying customers like myself. We may also have been supposed to save Seattle from alien invaders, but I didn't really catch all the details on that part of our mission, and I never saw any aliens.
I know I went out with a group, but suddenly I was wandering alone. I finally decided, as I hesitated in the doorway of the Pere Antoine Restaurant and Bar on Royal Street (because of course I was in New Orleans, silly), that it was time for lunch, and I'd never eaten here, for some reason. So I went in and sat down. I ordered a Diet Coke and contentedly sipped my soda, enjoying the warm yellow ocher walls, the dark wood and gleaming mirrors and chandelier prisms, the white linen and shiny flatware on my table. And I started reviewing the pictures I'd taken with my phone. There was definitely one of St. Louis Cathedral, it's pale walls and dark slate steeples strikingly monochrome against a deep, clear blue sky, above bright green trees, where it perched on sea cliffs looking out over the Atlantic... And somehow I'd manage to take a photo that was completely recognizable and conveyed every aspect of that, even though the primary point of focus was a single dark window in the white wall, near the entrance, in a study that looked more like a collection of abstract rectangles than a building. There was also a photo taken through an arched window showing a barn-like building painted in coral and tan, with deep sepia beams visible, separating planes of painted plaster. The angles of the roof came down to overhanging eaves that, with the archway, framed a statue in the distance. Or they would have perfectly framed the statue if I'd held my phone just a little lower, and paid better attention to the angle, because the eaves actually obscured the very top part of the statue. I was very frustrated that I'd missed such an amazingly composed shot by so little, and that I couldn't take it again.
Also visible in the photo, somehow, were myself and an old-fashioned baby buggy, in which I was pushing around a baby that was somehow my responsibility. But somehow had not made it to the restaurant with me. I put my phone away to look for the baby, but was distracted by the little pig-tailed girl sitting in the desk next to me. There I was, drinking my soda and observing a class in an elementary school Uptown. The room was bright and airy, with a wall of open windows looking onto a concrete courtyard. There were at least thirty desks arranged in rows around the room, all facing the teacher's desk in the center of the window wall. None of the children paid any attention to me, but instead were listening to the teacher, except the girl beside me. She asked me politely to pass her the strange object she'd been sending sliding around the classroom floor, that was now lodged on the other side of my chair.
This object was shaped like a three-dimensional bell curve, and was wobbly like a jellyfish. The edges were colorless and translucent like frosted glass, rising up into a bulbous, crystal clear center, in which floated dark green blobs like the floating globules in a lava lamp. I somehow knew that this was a very strange variety of jello shot, that the clear center was filled with vodka and a green, sugary syrup that refused to mix. The whole strange conglomeration was melting in the heat of the room, making it very slippery, and one component of the frosted edges and bottom was encapsulated dry ice, that was sublimating and lifting the jiggling mass up off the floor, allowing it to slide around the classroom like an air hockey puck. The teacher had asked the class to keep it moving around the room and observe it as it bounced off of objects while she continued to teach the math lesson.
I passed this thing over to the little girl by nudging it with my toe, and joined the class in keeping it moving, whizzing across the tiled floor, ricocheting off of chair legs and walls with sloshy, gurgly noises that made us all giggle, until it got stuck under my seat again. The teacher finally called an end to the game, and the kids began to file out to recess. I picked the strange, slippery thing up to hand to the little girl to put in a container she had, but it slipped out of my hands and hit the edge of the container and burst, the vodka and syrup streaming onto the floor, and all the fizzy dry ice buoyancy somehow evaporated in a moment. I'd broken it! And then I woke up.
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