magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

I dreamt that I was with my dad and my brother Sam in a cab in some city that was strange to me. We stopped because some people were standing in the street ahead looking up, following something that was coming down. It became clear that it was money, and they began to dodge around and chase it as it was tossed on the breeze. It was just one bill though, and at some point as it passed near to the cab, I saw it through the window and time slowed down a touch, long enough to see that it was only $5. "Why are these people so intent on catching a $5 bill?" Even the cab driver jumped out and took a couple of grabs at it before getting back in the car. Someone did get hold of it eventually, the crowd dispersed, and we drove on. As we passed a smaller side road, I saw some more bills floating down, but only one bag-lady there picking them up.

Later, in the same city, but on my own, I was walking along the side of an industrial street. I felt the wind of something rush by my head, looked down and saw some coins on the ground. A nickel and a couple of pennies. Then another whoosh of wind, and a quarter. I bent down to pick it up, thinking bills are one thing, but coins could hurt someone. Then more quarters. I wondered if I should take cover, as they all seemed to be rushing right past my head. Wondering this, and wondering when I would get hit, it became clear, though I'm not sure how, that the coins were materializing in and falling out of my hair. But at high speed, as if they appeared already containing kinetic energy. They continued to fall, and I picked up as many as I could, stuffing my pockets. As the rush tapered off, I figured that it must have come to $25 or $30 dollars worth.

I met back up with my dad and brother, and relayed the story. We were walking together along a more commercial street lined with ethnic restaurants and little shops. My dad stopped at an incense shop, because, I surmised, burning incense would magnify the good luck that had obviously attached itself to me. Which seemed like nonsense to me, but a few hours earlier coins had been materializing out of my hair. He pulled a stick of incense, and then asked the proprietor about having a special blend made up.

My dad stepped behind the counter, sort of pushing the proprietor out of the way, and started looking at the various jars of ingredients. It seemed inappropriate to me, but perhaps, i thought, he had had some special incense blending training in India. He took two jars off of the shelf, one was something sweet smelling, the other peppery, and handed them to the proprietor, who set about grinding them together. When he finished, his son tallied up the total, which seemed outrageous, and an unspoken tension filled the air. My dad may have walked out and come back in.

The proprietor then had other stipulations. We also had to buy some of these tiny blue spheres, sort of like a kind of cupcake decoration. He started explaining that when you were drinking a cup of coffee with someone you should put one into their cup. Or into your own cup. Maybe into a random cup. But only one of the two cups. That it affected different people in different ways. Sometimes it would counteract the coffee. Sometimes strengthen it. There were tables to consult depending on the person's age, and predispositions. The son retallied the total with this added, but this time it came out lower. We paid and left.

Later that night, we were out again. It was apparently New Year's Eve, and the streets were filled with drunkenness. College kids were doing stupid and dangerous things. I walked ahead of my dad and brother, as they had made some joke that hurt my feelings. I told some of the drunk kids that they were going to hurt someone. I was a little drunk myself, and as I crossed a bridge, we were in Canada I guess, and this was the border back in the United States, I thought the railing was awful low and someone could easily topple off it. Then, don't you need a passport to cross between the US and Canada now? But the border guard just waved me through.

I entered a stairwell that would take me down off the bridge. There were signs that read "This is not a government building." It was sort of like a fire-stair, or the stairs inside a mediaeval tower. I crossed paths with a business man on the way down. Near the bottom the stairs opened up, and entered a ballroom sort of space, where they were shooting the last scene of an episode of Law & Order. It was from the Fred Thompson / Angie Harmon era, and it was an episode that I had seen. Sam Watterson was exiting the scene by walking up the stairs as I was coming down.

I sat down at a table with Angie Harmon and told her that I had liked this episode. That I was glad that they hadn't used the take where Sam Waterson and I had to negotiate around each other on the stairs because it would have lessened the poignancy of his exit. None of this seemed weird. I told her the story of the coins materializing out of my hair. I said "It must have been at least $25 worth." I reached into my pockets and pulled out the coins, which had been mostly quarters and dumped them on the table. They were nearly all now foreign coins. Some from places I had never even heard of. The only US coins were a couple of pennies, although one was from the 1840s. This, the transmutation of the coins in my pockets, seemed very weird. My dad and Sam came down the stairs into the room as I was marveling. "These were mostly quarters," I said. Sam said "Are your sure? We never actually saw the quarters."

---

In a separate dream snippet I was talking about socks with a stranger on the subway.