Apartment life in post-apocalyptia

In post-apocalyptia, I and a few friends (one male and one female, I think), had just returned to our apartment. We were arguing about what to do with our paper money (probably because it wasn't currently worth anything). The guy was trying to show how we could use the paper money to make our rides more aerodynamic.

(Our rides were little battery-powered boxes on wheels, perhaps two feet cubed, barely big enough for our butts to rest on. He unlatched the top of his, and was folding the edge of a multi-dollar bill and slipping it in and over the battery to demonstrate what he meant.)

We then did some mental exercise, imagining what to do in case of a zombie attack. In our imagination, a woman was walking down a sidewalk while fending off a not-so-clever male zombie who had been bitten in the arm.

Our apartment building was surprisingly well-maintained, and well lit by daylight, though completely empty of furniture. It looked like a building that had just barely finished being constructed before the apocalypse.

I was sitting in the hallway outside our apartment, with a young girl (maybe 10 years old) sitting next to me. Our neighbors, a young Spanish-speaking couple (and possibly a child), walked by us in the hallway on their way out somewhere.

The wife chatted a little with us in pseudo-Spanish about the zombie; I was mentioning how the zombie had been bitten in the arm but I couldn't quite work out the phrasing. She said something like "ha estado [verb]ado en el armada". The world "voller" was in there somewhere too.

The girl next to me was looking up words on a handheld digital dictionary device, but wasn't sure if she was spelling them right. I was a little suspicious of "armada" meaning "arm". We couldn't work out what "voller" was.

At some point, the girl changed (imperceptibly) into Joan D (adult), and we were eating oreos. She was mentioning how it was interesting that the words "dedo" in Spanish and "doigt" in French (both meaning "finger") looked so similar. So I said, oh, yeah, well, "digitus" -- pointing out that another word for "finger" in English was "digit", and all three words came from Latin.

Joan looked astonished, and told me what a rush she felt when she figured out stuff like that. :D And then we ate more oreos.

(But I wanted to save a few oreos for Ray, who apparently had furnished them for us.)

Café Tacvba's highway gas stop

I was driving back from somewhere in southern Virginia on the highway, and I needed to stop for gas. The rest stop that I pulled off at was rather strange. On one edge of the parking lot was a small curbed-off field where several people were lounging and relaxing. There were a few signs there, facing towards the parking lot...

Well, first off, I somehow knew that this facility belonged to the band Café Tacvba, and throughout the dream I had a couple songs by them playing in the background. So something inside me expected to see Spanish writing on all the signs. But as I stared at the signs, I realized they were actually written in some kind of informal Esperanto. Many words that I would have expected to end in -o (i.e. nouns) ended instead with an accented syllable ending in a consonant. But the clincher was that one sign on the right end of the field actually simply had the word "Esperanto" on it. (This sign was in the middle of a few vertically stacked signs — the others may have been gasoline prices.) I think there must have been at least one sign asking for donations to whatever cause Café Tacvba was sponsoring here.

I went inside a restroom. I noticed that inside the restroom there were a couple small gas pumps, but I couldn't imagine how someone would fit a car in here. A sign near the pumps mentioned that you could only buy up to 2 gallons of gas there. I guessed that maybe people could drag their motorbikes in here...

Anyway, I found the normal gas pumps outside and across the parking lot to the right.

Singing in the "humour" room

At somewhat of a resort/retreat. It seems like basically a normal house but has many sections to it. Late in the dream, we go outside and around the corner to a section labeled "humour" (the lettering is peeling off the wall). Once inside again, we are in a little room with carpet and a table at the "head" of the room. At the table were a few people, including someone who seemed like Patrick B. He was singing along with music into a microphone, and others were supposed to be singing along as well. Everyone else knelt/sat on the carpet.

Sitting near me were Lia M, possibly Meghan M, Karen Q, and others. Lia was writing a greeting card (maybe to Meghan or another close friend. It looked like she was working out particular years when her friend's birthday fell on a Saturday, and writing out what event they would go to on each one. (At least one or a few were Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts.) After one or two lines, she skipped ahead to 2100 or so, and then again on to well into the 2200's, implying not only that she thought they would both live that long, but that their friendship would endure that long. (I had a side dream where I was consulting a calendar app, trying to figure out really how often a given day of the year would fall on a Saturday. Obviously a space of 100 years is wrong. I scroll through years and watch for patterns, but I keep getting screwed up by leap years.)

A new song came on. It was "Esa Noche" by Café Tacvba. I realized what it was right away, saying "Hey, it's Esta Noche!" And then when I heard the words I corrected myself (esta->esa). Meanwhile, I had noticed a little (well, a little bigger than a softball) depression in the carpet. After some poking, it revealed a storage area under the floor, about two or three feet down, with the same carpet as the room above. Still, the hole was only the same diameter that the depression had been. I showed Karen as well, and had her try to figure out what items were down there.

As "Esa Noche" was ending, I realized it was a live version. The music was finishing, and one of the band members starting shouting something to the audience in perfect English.

Jack the epidemiolinguist

Jack M had written up the name of some obscure disease on the blackboard, except he had parsed it out into several words in a column. He asked what language the words were from and I said they looked Spanish... No, wait. Portuguese. Then he noted that when Casey Anthony (currently on trial for murder) was asked to read those individual words aloud, she tried to pronounce them as if they were English, indicating that she is a monoglot.

Andrew sings Café Tacvba

Andrew was trying to sell tickets to something and I didn't feel interested. But for a second he sang something in Spanish that sounded like El Baile y El Salón by Café Tacvba, and after a minute I suddenly remembered him doing that and was like, "Wait a minute, sell me a ticket." So to pay him $6, I gave him two fives. He kept inspecting one of them, for some reason unsure of its authenticity, and talking about how fives were becoming more popular lately.

Dorm guitar party, sunset hill tablet reading, neighborhood road trip

I'm near my dorm room (having come from the stairs?) and someone tells me to take my guitar, cause we're heading to the attic of another dorm/building (not, as one girl suggested, the secondary or alternate dorm.) I bring my amp, too.

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Sunset: Dry grassy hill descending from a dorm to the road; not straight smooth hill but had "snake lines" running through it causing slight mounds and height variations. Written on a flat vertical edge at the end of the hill near the road are tablet-like readings which I am looking at. At one point I am changing locations to read more tablets; I sit so that my feet dangle over the edge, facing the road. To my right I see standing on the hill (with another person) Queca from high school Spanish class.

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Road trip? Don't want to be racist - something about a white spare tire. We drive in the van and remotely control the 4Runner to drive in front of us. Due to swerving a cop lectures alongside us on "Valleywood Drive". Finally leaves. We speed up as we approach "Cavalier Drive" -- now clearly a sandy/dirt path w/ large conifers on either side. We head (to the right) to some building. We speed up because the song is changing. We get out of the van and begin singing "I Get Around". I stop at the left to fix a sandal while beginning to sing. Many girls are there, in summer clothes. I catch up w/ the other singers, continuing to sing. Something about chestnuts....