New Orleans Is So Much Stranger in My Head ~ 2/15/2014

I can't remember where it started, but my recollection of my dream picks up with a former colleague having an argument with our team leader.  I was on my cell phone listening to my colleague's account, which included his pride about how he turned the team leader's comments back on him with a heavy dose of sass, showing the team leader how his side of the argument was illogical, and getting him in a fair amount of trouble.

I had just hung up the cell phone when something made me look over my left shoulder and up into the sky.  Two hundred feet up in the air was a sort of stop light intersection in the sky.  I could see the team leader carrying a brief case and walking up in the air, as though on an invisible sidewalk.  He stopped at the intersection, as though waiting for invisible traffic to cross, then the walk sign came on, and he continued walking in the sky, crossing the intersection up in the air.  Of course, there were a lot of these intersections in New Orleans, and people crossed them all the time, so why not?  I continued walking down the ground level street.

I turned and started walking down Carondelet. A couple of blocks off of Canal, my eye was caught by a new pub.  I looked through the window and saw that the interior was a cathedral made out of beer bottles.  It was apparently modeled off of a similar, if grander, tavern in Belgium. I had to go in and check it out. I wandered all the way back to the beer bottle apse back behind the bar, where the altar would be. There were side chapels and columns and a central choir.

I headed back up to the entrance, weaving my way around the pools and ponds of a cypress swamp. Spanish moss hung from the trees, and it was dark amid the trees and vines.  I stepped into a canoe and began to paddle down a small, dark stream, flowing silently over fallen trees, moving smoothly through the swamp.

Only the canoe apparently belonged to a colony of cannibals who lived up in the trees. And they didn't liked that I borrowed it.  They hauled me and my canoe up into the canopy where their village was, and I hopped out and began to jump from limb to canoe to vine to limb, using a hooked walking staff to haul the canoes they suspended towards me so I could jump into them.  It felt kind of like a strange video game, and suddenly I was looking at it from outside, like it WAS a video game, with colorful if unsophisticated graphics.

Finally I got back down to water level, ran to the end of a doc, jumped into another canoe, and started paddling down the river again, and finally reached the entrance of the bar. I stepped back out onto Carondelet and woke up.