Bike ride through a crowd to the park

I went for a bike ride up towards the park near our house. There's usually not many people on the tar bike path that runs alongside the main road, but on this ride, traffic on the road was completely stopped, and a lot of people (college age and adults) were just sitting around on the path, some with bikes on the ground near them. Most were facing towards me as I came up the path, and though it looked like some important (planned or unplanned) event was going on, and some people looked eager to inform me about it, I just kept biking through and past them.

Later, I was coming out of the park, this time in my car. I was coming out of a parking lot towards a traffic signal to my left, and preparing to make a left turn. The traffic signal was a wire with two side-by-side single lights.

As I left the parking lot, the lights turned yellow, but I decided to dash out. Just before I crossed under the lights, the one on the left turned red. I was a little worried there might be oncoming traffic. Needless to say, I was a little startled when my alarm went off at that exact instant.

Friendly biker and snakes of unusual size

I was walking/jogging along the median side of a two-lane road (reminded me of Old Bridge Rd near Smoketown Rd in Lake Ridge), when a woman, perhaps in her sixties or seventies, came up behind me on a bicycle. Instead of cutting around and passing me, or at the very least signaling her presence, she instead crept up next to me, between me and the median, until we were side by side, and she kept pace with me.

I was annoyed, and I asked her why she hadn't just gone by on the other side. She seemed a little annoyed too, but she was really trying to engage in conversation with me while riding along -- probably just trying to be social, whereas I don't go out walking or jogging or biking expecting to end up in a social encounter with a stranger.

We had turned left into a sparsely built, hilly housing area with plenty of trees around. We ended up chit-chatting a little bit, as we went down the sidewalk alongside the winding street/hill. I had already had one or two songs (sung by John Flansburgh) running through my head before we met, and then something she said made me think of yet another Flansburgh song, and I had to force myself not to break into song (figuring it would be kind of antisocial to do so).

We came to a bend in the street (the sidewalk had now ended, and the street was unpainted asphalt), where the street hooked almost 90° to the left, passed alongside the front yard of a single family home, then hooked around 180° and continued down the hill.

Standing at the end of the driveway to the house was a young, vaguely punky woman in her twenties, with brown hair. We both seemed to recognize each other, though neither of us seemed really sure where we could have known each other from. So we said "hi" to each other and looked at each other for a moment before I continued on. Besides the initial confusion, she seemed to have a bemused and self-satisfied expression on her face.

In the stretch of grass delimited by the curved street, there was a single round deciduous tree with a small animal standing on one of its lower branches. Below the tree, a giant snake (at least ten feet long, and perhaps six inches in diameter) came creeping up, and then suddenly sprang up from the ground and swallowed the animal in what seemed to be slow motion. I was pretty sure the snake belonged to the girl living here.

The last thing I recall before waking up was that I had gone a little further down the street/hill, and was now either floating or being held up by a burly man, three or four feet off the ground, and a different snake of identical proportions was lurking on the ground below. I had every suspicion that it was going to go for my foot.

Technical difficulties with the cookie bike

I had a high-tech red motorcycle, and I drove it from Lake Ridge to Dale City by way of Smoketown Road. Then, I was making my way back, again on Smoketown Road, somewhere on the stretch between Minnieville and Cavalier. I had to weave between a few bicyclists on the road, and then suddenly I realized that the only reason my motorcycle was still moving was because I was pedaling it. The engine had gone dead.

I stopped and tried to fiddle with the controls. I looked at my high-tech dashboard and decided to give the operating system a reboot (it looked like a compact version of Windows 7). However, when I pressed the hard button on the dashboard to shut down the OS, it went into hibernate instead, so that wasn't going to work. Then I thought maybe I was out of fuel, so I looked at the fuel gauge, but its digital readout showed that I had almost half a tank left.

Somehow, I got back closer to home (maybe Wainscott), and my mom was outside trying to help me troubleshoot. I recalled that we were using a special fuel — basically, gingerbread cookies, though we called them something else which I can't remember. My mom had some more with her, and she took a bite of one, and I could see from her expression that it tasted kind of weird. Maybe the cookies changed over time and they had lost their efficacy.

Escape with the apes, and taking a chunk out of a punk

I (female), one way or another, ended up being held in a skyscraper by an evil corporation or militia; also being held there were associates of mine, several chimp-like people who moved sort of like large humanoid muppets. They were smart enough to carry on rational conversations (in sort of goofy muppet-like voices) but they were completely befuddled when it came to technology. We made our escape, and later I was hanging out with them in someplace resembling a mix of a swanked out office building and an Ewok tree village. A couple of the chimp people were sitting in front of a computer (right in front of the railing at the top of a quite wide, shallow, circular ramp that led to the next floor down), shaking/cocking their heads in confusion in sort of an endearing way.

After our escape, I was outside in a semi-urban area (maybe just outside of the skyscraper we had escaped from), and I had just reached the edge of another property, an open area near a dumpster, chain link fence, and tar bike path, not far from the road. A punk on a bike (one who had tried to harass me from his bike earlier in the dream, before the skyscraper) showed up on the path and started trying to bug me. I walked along the bike path, with him keeping up, until we reached a lightly forested area that the bike path continued through. He was starting to swing at me with what appeared to be claws like Wolverine's. I looked at my own right hand as I put out my own claws of the same type, though a little thinner and rounder than Wolverine's. I hacked back at the biker punk and got a good slice in across his right cheek before I woke up.

Scenic train ride to the east

Preparing to take a train back east with a bunch of townspeople. Everyone made sure to collect all their belongings and bring them to the train. For me, this included my bike, bike rack, bike lock, bedclothes, hoodie, half-eaten granola bar, backpack, suitcase, etc.

The train conductor noted that our one guard in town was the only guy with a gun and so anyone who wanted to board the train better be on the guard's good side. The guard was flattered and half-chuckled. I was standing near the guard when that was said, so I gave him a little salute.

The train set out -- source was maybe somewhere around Colorado or Wyoming; the route would take us directly east via the Black Hills of South Dakota. Looking out the window, we saw plenty of interesting scenery (and surprisingly little wilderness). The first thing I noted were the giant dandelions which I had first seen in real life in Colorado. At that time, I had only seen the seed stage, but in the dream, I saw some of the flowers too, and they did bear some vague resemblance to dandelions; bigger, less vibrant yellow, more droopy -- but maybe they were dying off.

I got hungry and dug into my suitcase, finding a peanut butter and jelly sandwich whose two halves were, in some ineffable way, shaped like two chicken fingers. Ate it.

Next, we passed through a hilly area, where these very small clouds were floating, quite close to us, and not far from the ground, ranging from eye level to maybe 50 feet up. There were a lot of them, and as close as they were, they zoomed by as quickly as the train zoomed along. I spotted a fleeting space between a group of clouds that looked like China, and I mentioned it. Mom mentioned she saw one that looked like Ireland, but when I looked up to see it, it had already passed. I went and got my Nikon camera to take pictures of the clouds, but by the time I was ready, they had all passed.

My camera had a little glitch, and I had to remove the battery and put it back in to get it running again. It wasn't a simple operation, as there were a few buttons (all of which appeared to be power buttons) to be pressed and a bottom panel that slid up out of the way. When I touched the battery it was kinda hot.. Anyway, I got the camera on again and fiddled with it, when suddenly a magnificent towery-castly-cathedraly thingy whizzed by on the left (with other, less impressive development on either side of it...). I was on the right side of the train so I wouldn't be able to get a very good shot. But I decided to go for it, so, with camera in hand, I leaned backwards and to the side and hit the button. I didn't hear a click, so I figured it hadn't worked, but when I looked at the review screen, I had taken a surprisingly nice picture of the lower half of it.

I wondered how it had worked if the shutter hadn't clicked. I turned it around and took a close picture of my eye, but that time the shutter worked. I was confused. Mentioned it to Greg and Neil, sitting in the seats behind me.

Yoko Ono, the newly drafted bicycle racer

Yoko Ono was kidnapped from someplace in England by a rich, powerful Jewish sect who owned their own island. Sue Gromm (? news reporter, not a real person) managed to make secret contact with Yoko and got an interview with her. Apparently they had Yoko doing bike races on the island, possibly sitting in secretly for other competitors? (Cue the high-angle camera shot, from the air, of all the bikers racing on a track.) Anyway, the captors found out about Sue and cut communications.

MELBLANC

End of dream - driving up Cricket Lane, seeing the back of a pink coupe with "MELBLANC" on the license plate, through the rear view mirror -- yes, the plate text was backwards. Then, on a bike at the top of Cricket - Randy W is going somewhere to get an autograph from someone.

"Gooo for it, Nabeeel..."

We were standing out in the open, and in front of us, across a very wide expanse, was a granite cliff which created very high fidelity echoes. Something in my mind tells me it was Massachusetts. We didn't go over to the cliff, though :(

-

Mom had some new bike for her library, and she let me ride it while she went off somewhere else. I biked by Andrew K and Nabeel and some random girls, who looked like similar stock to Nabeel. Andy said something like "I think Nabeel would be more comfortable..." and walked off; while biking by, I said "Gooo for it, Nabeeel..."