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.

The Greenland compound

I had entered some kind of compound (on the coast of, say, Greenland?), with mostly drab, gray, concrete architecture, and was walking indoors, from building to building. Nobody was around. I looked out a big window at one point and saw that the coast was quite nearby, but several stories below. It occurred to me that there should be penguins out there somewhere (okay, so maybe this wasn't Greenland), and I continued walking through different parts of the compound, staying mostly along the edge nearest the coast, trying to figure out how to get down and outside.

A few times I came across "dead ends", where the level I was on had nowhere else to go, but there was a railing and a wide open overlook to see the lower level below; there were signs indicating that I could go down, but the only way down was literally to go over the railing and figure out how to slide down the smooth concrete wall without dying. The last one of these "dead ends" I got to, I seriously considered going down, since there was a spot where I could wedge myself between two walls that were closer together than my armspan. But I think I ended up walking back some other way.

After a quick stop at a nearby restroom (in which, surprisingly, there was actually another guy in one of the stalls -- first person I'd noticed so far), I cut back around to an area where I'd been before. Now it reminded me of the entrance to a public building or school; the first thing as I entered the room was a series of steps and landings, which stretched from wall to wall (maybe 10-15 yards wide) and had three or four railings separating it into sections; it only went up maybe 6-8 feet, and then there were more hallways and rooms.

I started searching around some more, and then as I was getting ready to leave this part of the compound, a bunch of people started coming in and up the first set of stairs. I tried to push my way through them, and got most of the way to the bottom, but then I changed my mind and started going back up in the crowd. As I got to the top again and was headed towards the main hallway, someone behind me started asking "Kevin" a question. At first, I figured they weren't talking to me, since I didn't immediately recognize the voice, and I didn't really expect to meet anyone here that I knew. But I figured I'd turn around and check anyway. It turned out to be Kelly P, who was walking with Caitie R and another girl. Kelly's hair was very slightly braided on the sides, which looked nice. She was asking me if I remembered what Tywanda C or "Derrick Arins" (or was it Darin whom I met at LSA 2011?) looked like. I told her I would probably recognize Tywanda if I saw her, but I didn't know who Derrick was.

I continued walking. Kelly and the other girl went off to some class they were taking, and Caitie had somehow ended up in front of me, at the end of the hallway, at the gift shop that was there. Lots of merchandise was sitting out on a long table outside the gift shop's entrance. I walked by Caitie, but we didn't really interact (I don't suppose we have anything to talk about). I looked at some of the trinkets on the table. One really caught my eye. It was like a medium-sized glass bead, heart-shaped, with a solid white bottom, and a black dot right in the middle of the bottom layer. It reminded me of Hello Kitty when I looked at it. But the really interesting thing was that the glass was somehow structured to refract the light in a weird way. When I moved my head one way, the dot in the middle seemed to move slightly in the opposite direction. I swirled my head around, looking at it as the dot swirled around the other way.

Then I went inside the gift shop, but I didn't really see anything that impressive inside. I cut out the side door. I ended up going to a huge room, again with gray concrete walls, ceiling, floor. The ceiling here was probably 3 or 4 stories high. I went and lay down in a bed in the back corner of the room and the lights went off. There were tons of other people in the room as well, all lying in beds, going to sleep for the night. Since I had been here before, I thought I would show off a little trick. I reached my right tennis shoe (my shoes were black) and pushed a little button that was part of the rubber sole, and the bottom of my shoe became like a flashlight. I directed the beam onto the ceiling, where there was tons of graffiti, except it was more like bathroom stall graffiti, all black and legible in plain text. Some of it had quite elegant handwriting, actually. The impressive part was that most of the writing was large enough to read from the ground, so a capital letter might be as tall as I was (or taller). I don't recall what any of it said.

The bathroom aquarium access terminal

So I'm in this bathroom, which is more or less the same layout as the upstairs hallway bathroom at the Cantilever house, but slightly roomier. But the bathroom is linked to an aquarium-like facility a few floors below (I'm picturing a big, tall, open first floor of a skyscraper, with fancy shale floors and an artificial river flowing through the middle).

The bathroom mirror has sort of a computer interface to it, where I can select a species of fish and then I can examine it. So, after selecting a species, I flush the toilet, and up it comes, into the toilet bowl. It's a medium sized gray fish, maybe half the length of my forearm. I go back to the mirror and select another species, then flush the toilet again. The original fish goes away (presumably back to the aquarium). Nothing new takes its place, though.

But when I flush the toilet again, two slightly smaller gray fish appear in the toilet bowl. These ones like to jump, and one of them ends up on the floor, so I decide to transfer them to the bathtub. I have to use a towel to grab them since they're slippery. Even after I get them in the tub, one of them jumps out on the floor again. I put it back in and close the shower door.

They're still trying to get out, and when I look closely at one of them, resting on the lip of the tub up against the door, I notice that its fins are at the ends of really short proto-arms and legs, with just barely noticeable knees/elbows. I go back to the mirror interface, intending to look up coelacanths so I could compare their structure, but I guess I woke up.