Making a story out of randomly firing synapses...

I was sitting in the back seat of a bus, wearing my old leather biker jacket with the safety-pins, a black t-shirt, and somewhat faded back jeans tucked into well-worn surplus Canadian army boots-- pretty much my standard outfit when I was in the Fine Arts programme at SFU. I was on my way to school and talking idly with a fellow student in the row ahead of me about how morning classes sucked and how tired I was. He was a clean-cut East-Indian guy wearing a red and white (red sleeves and collar, white torso) tracksuit jacket with a big Canadian maple leaf on the back who pretty clearly thought I was a lazy-assed punk but was being polite.

The bus, however, was not a BC Transit bus (it wasn't "Translink" yet when I was in school), it was a New Jersey DeCamp bus and we were pulling out of the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 8th Ave and 42nd St. in Manhattan. As the bus went down the ramp I was looking at the apartment buiding there with the rotten lawn-chairs and empty flower pots on the balconies and tin-foil on the windows (probably not so much to reflect the sun as for the fact that 100,000 people go by every day with nothing better to do than look in the windows). I had the back row to myself and leaned back sideways in the seat and put one of my feet up on the back of the middle seat at the end of the isle. The East-Indian guy in the track suit gave me a disapproving look and I took my foot down lest the driver (who looked like the actor that played the captain of the Titanic in "A Night to Remember") do the same and interrupt the nap I was planning on taking.

Then, in the dream, I fell asleep (which is an odd thing to do in a dream). Inside the dream I had a vague dream involving a space that was a cross between Grand Central Station and the Mall at SFU. I was late for something, either a train or a class but I didn't really know which, I just had to get across the floor and was pissed I didn't have time to take a picture of the really cool way the light was coming through the glass roof (which is a feature of the SFU mall, not Grand Central Station).

When I woke up from my sleep inside the dream I was still on a bus, but now it was a BC Transit bus, one of the small ones with blue padded seats like they use on the downtown-Granville Island #50 route. I wasn't in the back anymore, but in the third row back from the front door. I was seriously confused. The bus was travelling west on Hastings Street, at a point just east of Boundry - the right path but the wrong direction to get to SFU. I couldn't figure out how I could have changed buses without waking up. The captain of the Titanic was still driving. It was apparent that something had gone wrong with the other bus and we had to change buses, but how I managed to do that without waking up was a puzzle and I had no idea how we came to be drving the wrong direction along Hastings. I sat there for a minute, confused, and then the bus pulled into the Kootnay Loop where I had to change buses to the #135 to get the rest of the way up the hill. There was a #135 waiting already and I was worried that it would pull away before I had a chance to get on (which it often did when this was my daily commute).

And that's it. End of dream.