tuesday night's dream: the gauntlet

i was in sf or the east bay, but i think it started in north beach.

i was doing something with christine and david.

unusual cause the two of us have not done anything together for almost ten years. we met and went out to eat and hung out at cafes. when it was time to go home, for some reason that is not clear, christine was not going home and was leaving her car to me to drive to her place to crash.

i said ok but went somewhere else with david and andrea instead.

it was a little restaurant, kind of ship-shack but cute. it had little wooden tables for four people with small vases of flowers and simple but well placed settings on all of them. we walked into an oblong room with windows on the right wall and on the far wall. there was a view, it looked out over water.

i also have memories of a carnival somewhere along out there.

i don't know how long we stayed there but when we left david turned out that he was driving my old toyota from my art center days. we joked that it probably needed a new registration tag and a new headlamp so he'd better be careful.

he took me to wherever christine was living. i knocked on the door and a young woman answered. she was obviously woken up and dressed for sleep. i explained who i was and what i was doing there and she must have known who i was so she let me in. she showed me to christine's room. it was a spartan but comfortable looking place. all the furniture were made of wood. the bed was unmade.

the girl left me and i undressed and went to bed right away.

next thing i knew was that i woke up to voices or giggles, i opened my eyes to faces peeking through the bedroom door. they shut the door as soon as i sat up in bed. confused, i got up and wrapped something around me and walked towards the door. i pushed the door open and walked through to the adjacent room and was met with a sight that stopped me in my tracks.

it was a narrow long room with rows of beds just like the one i slept in. again, all the furniture here were wooden. the thing that made me stopped was there were about twenty young women sitting there staring at me and giggling to themselves.

there were "ooh's" and "ah's." it obvious i was not supposed to be here or this rarely happened. i felt not embarrassed as much as vulnerable or out of place. i started to walk towards the bathroom on the other end of the room. it felt like i was walking through a visual gauntlet. i remember whispers of mutterings of things like "ooh it's a man" and "whose is he?"

that last comment made me dash for the bathroom and close the door.

that is when i woke up.