Blew their minds with a song about bears

There was a battle-of-the-bands type contest going on between a rock band of Metallica-grade self-importance, and us (me and Kevin S and maybe Ray).

The Metallickesque band had just made an earnest, rocky song, and it was our turn to create a song to challenge it. We ended up copping the song structure from their song and changing it into an inane lounge song.

Kevin S wrote the words, and as we played the song for the other band, in like a backstage hangout room, written lyrics magically unfurled on one side of my field of vision, as though it were on TV.

The other band was dumbfounded as we played. I worked out some kind of chord/bass progression on the left (chordy) side of an accordion (though the sound coming out sounded like a perc/rotary organ).

It was in B flat. The words were kind of like:
1 Prose. x . . . . . . . 3b 3b 3b 2 1 Rock music history, Who-knows. x . . . . . . . It's such a mystery. Bears. [Something about bears..] Bears. [etc.]

Of course I probably did some random post-awakening edits while trying to piece it back together, but it was to that effect.

Aliens kindly request split-screen TV

Aliens had just recently made first contact with Earth. An ambassador of theirs (who looks like a human guy to me) meets me in a little downtown, which (in hindsight) seemed oddly isolated from any nearby urban area, like a single curving street of modern two- or three-story brick storefronts surrounded by grass and hills and highway.

He walks me towards a store window, mentioning that now that we'd made contact, we would definitely have to change our TV broadcasts to be split screen (one above the other), with subtitles in both languages.

He simulated such a split screen broadcast on a TV in the store window, using whatever had been playing before (a balding Italian-looking sophisticate sitting in a red velvety room, talking towards someone off camera). The subtitles on top were English, and the ones on bottom certainly appeared to be Italian, not Alienese.

He then ushered me into his sensible sedan, and we drove back the way we came, then around to the right onto a downhill entrance ramp to the highway. (I also noticed a high bridge nearby crossing over the highway.)

However, traffic was backed up, so he cut off the road onto the grass and snuck down towards the highway. I keenly noticed that the ride wasn't bumpy whatsoever. Amazing suspension on this car. Alien technology, I suppose. We somehow drove up over a guard rail and onto the highway.

(Another example of how I rarely seem to experience tactile "bumping" sensations in dreams; though, as it turns out, I do sometimes feel textures, so tactile sense isn't completely missing.)

Weird pole vaulting on TV

I came downstairs to a room resembling the back room at my Grandma M's house. Three or four people, including maybe Greg and Dad, were sitting around, watching a weird athletic competition on TV.

Two guys were competing on a pole vault-like event. There were multiple rounds, and right now the scores were pretty close. The guy getting ready to go (muscular with light brown skin) had a slight edge, and if he pulled off this jump, he would almost certainly win.

The pole itself was weird looking. It was chrome instead of white, and a foot or two from the ends of it, U-shaped bars jutted out, two or three feet long, extending toward the ground when held horizontally.

As he approached the jump, he made some kind of misstep, and ended up having to jump below the bar (the one you're supposed to jump over in pole vaulting). However, the rules of this event were such that, if you jumped under the beam (presumably without knocking it down), you could run down the track after that, and earn points based on speed.

But making the jump always gives more points than taking off running. So it looked like we still weren't sure who was going to win.

Eating "stears" in the Philippines

I went to the Philippines, by boat. (Several other people did too.) I was looking at a map, trying to figure out where I would actually make landfall. I picked the central west coast of an island (which was shaped kind of like a mirror image of Japan's Honshu island), after passing by the northwestern tip of the island where many of the other travelers were going. I arrived, swimming the last short leg of the journey to the dock. I was then in the house of a host family, sitting at their medium-sized round wooden kitchen table.

There were at least two people there. There was a "motherly" type, and a "brotherly" type. I was eating some food -- particularly, fruits that looked kind of like eggplants, or elongated mangoes without a pit. I used a large knife whose sharp edge curved towards the front end, and rather than ending in a point, the front end was broad, sharp, and slightly angled. To cut the fruit open, I stabbed the broad end of the knife straight into the middle of the fruit (lengthwise) and sliced it in half.

The brother asked me if I wanted any pizza, and I said "yes". I wasn't exactly sure when the pizza would be served (either in a few minutes, or tomorrow morning). In any case, another woman had appeared, and she was another traveler like me, possibly my leader/commander. She said I should really be eating the "stears" (pronounced "stares"/"stairs") for nutrition. The "stears" were like the other fruits, but bigger/longer with orange skin. Actually, the other fruits may have been another variety of "stears".

I think the reason I know how to spell "stears" is that I saw a flash of a news show on the small TV in the corner of the kitchen where they were talking about them, with a picture and caption.

A British gathering of bands

There was some kind of British talent-show TV special, in a large, dark auditorium with lots of theater-style seating and a big stage. The host was calling up random people from the audience and asking for their five favorite bands. One audience member rattled off five, and was surprised to see that a couple bands who were sitting near the front row of the audience (as the camera panned onto them) started getting up to go on stage as the audience applauded.

Apparently the host anticipated most of the audience's preferred band choices and invited them to the show beforehand. At least one of the bands the audience member named, however, was not present, and the host told his assistant to make sure "N19" (or something like that — the band's name) got here quickly.

Then, on a big projection screen up on stage, the host started narrating a presentation. It looked kind of poorly done. There were a number of large thumbnail images on a white background (in an interface that looked like Windows) representing bands that had been selected to play. They cycled through each of the thumbnails, playing a clip from a popular song of theirs.

Two or three of the bands' voices sounded distinctly like Beatles vocals, which surprised me. (I'm annoyed that, with all that music, I can't remember how any of it went.) The last band looked like it was actually a side project of George Harrison's, and the song clip they played was sort of a chill electronica remix of "Let It Down"; the thumbnail looked like an outside view of a cave entrance.

Ringo and the big band at the mansion

I was hanging out in a small, cozy living room (I think maybe it had the dark brown shag carpet that we used to have) with a guy and girl I knew, watching TV on an old set (maybe the wood-paneled Zenith TV we used to own). On TV was a rare recording (in black and white) of an early Beatles performance in England. The setting looked like maybe one end of a ballroom or other function hall in a mansion. Ringo was standing with a microphone, singing an uncharacteristically soulful song (also, maybe sort of slow and big-band-like). I didn't actually spot the rest of the Beatles, but I assumed they were behind him somewhere. However, on all sides of Ringo were at least six or seven other backup musicians.

To Ringo's left (right from the viewer's perspective) was a guy playing a full drum set. At one point in the song, he did a fancy drum fill where he started in the seated position, then hopped up and walked off the front-right corner of the stage area and off the screen, hitting three or four cymbals on stands as he walked. Another guy who was playing hand percussion behind Ringo stepped over to the drum set and hit a couple things to finish off the part.

Meanwhile, I was wondering to myself if I could find a download for this on the Internet. I wasn't sure what search terms to use, though. The location had flashed up at the beginning of the performance, but all I could remember was that it had the letters "ea" in it somewhere, which didn't narrow it down much.

Deep Edwardophobia

"In the 6th millenium: deep Edwardophobia."

- Cheesy newscast on TV with brass jingle