Last night, I had an AWESOME RinkDream, and I want to post it before I forget all the details...

As some of you may know, I am HORRENDOUSLY jealous (well, not really) of Sam and Leen and Dave for getting to go to New Zealand. My dream last night took that line of thinking and ran with it...

For some reason (this is a phrase which recurs a great deal in my dream descriptions), I found out that under some sort of special promotion, tickets for a flight to New Zealand only cost about a hundred US dollars. My first thought was, "Hey, that's a GREAT deal-- I should go." Then I realized the price was in US dollars, and I stopped for a second. That would be a hundred and FIFTY Canadian dollars. For some reason, this thought was very sobering in the dream. I concluded, though, that it would be worth it, and I bought myself a ticket.

I remember thinking about how crappy the thirty hour flight was going to be. I have troubles sleeping if I'm not in the perfect situation-- even if I'm exhausted, I can't sleep easily on a plane or a bus. For whatever reason, though, the flight passed in an instant. I knew after my arrival in NZ that it had, in fact, been a thirty hour flight, but I couldn't remember any of it. This did not particularly concern me.

When I arrived in NZ, my brother was with me. That's right. I don't know why. I think he was with me on the plane, too, but I don't remember (as I said). He definitely was NOT with me when I was buying the tickets. Anyway, the NZ airport looked almost exactly like the Calgary airport. And yes, I somehow knew that there was only one airport in all of New Zealand, and I was at it.

Well, after landing, I realized that I had made NO plans whatsoever. Nobody even knew I was coming to NZ. Fortunately, I knew Brunnen-G's real name (and upon waking, I was startled to realize that my dream got it right) so I knew I could track her down, given enough time.

As it turns out, this tracking down process would not be too hard. The "city" where the NZ airport was located was more of a village, with lots of trees, old run-down houses, and yards which hadn't been mowed in a LONG time. The village (which was named "New Zealand") resembled Edgewood BC, which probably means nothing to any of you. (Edgewood is the village where my dad grew up, his parents lived and died, and his sister still lives.)

My brother and I picked a house at random, and walked in. (?!?) A nice, elderly lady lived there, and she said we could sleep in the backyard if we wanted to, and she would make us some soup. We took a brief look at the back yard, which was overgrown with long grasses and had a bunch of junk strewn about it, and we decided we should get going on our quest to find Brunnen-G. We asked the old lady if she knew where (Brunnen-G's real name) lived, and she did, and gave us directions to get there.

Well, we got to Brunnen-G's home. I was getting VERY excited at this point. I was going to get to meet BG and Puck and Sam and Leen and Dave! An interesting note at this point is that Randy and Ayako were now with my brother and me, for some reason. This made sense, of course, as so many other dream concepts do.

Well, Brunnen-G greeted us at the door and let us in. For some reason, she was not surprised at all to see the four of us, and we went into something like a drawing room for tea. Sam and Leen and Dave and Puck were all busy or something, and weren't around at the time. Brunnen-G left us as well, and the four of us chatted for a bit. Then, I noticed the computer store-style shelves in BG's living room (?!?) and decided to go and see what was for sale. (Don't ask, this part was pretty weird.) I found something (I cannot seem to remember what for some reason) that I wanted to purchase, and it had a price tag that said it was $270. I knew that it would be $500 pretty much anywhere in Canada, and I almost jumped on the deal. Then I remembered, though, that I was in NZ, and the currency was different here. I realized that in order to figure out the Cdn price of the item, I would have to convert the NZ price to US dollars, and then to Cdn dollars. I couldn't remember the conversion for NZ to US, though. While I was trying to remember this, I also tried to remember what type of currency is used in NZ-- While thinking about this, the dollar sign on the price tag morphed into a British pound symbol (£). I think I was close to working out the conversion when the dream moved on, and I forgot about buying whatever it was. (What does New Zealand use for currency and for a symbol, anyway?)

The reason the dream moved on was because Sam and Leen were now available. Dave and Puck were still strangely absent. The four of us followed Brunnen-G back to the entry room, which (upon closer inspection) turned out to have a large desk and bed in it. This was apparently the room Sam and Leen were staying in. Leen was sitting behind the desk when we came in, and someone else was sitting beside her. I'm not sure who was sitting beside her, but I think it might have been Puck. Whoever it was, we knew each other in the dream, and struck up a conversation. Nobody bothered to introduce any of us to Leen, and she sat very quietly, reading a book or something. Sam was, at this point, nowhere to be found.

I eventually decided to take matters into my own hands, and strike up a conversation with Leen. I started off with "Hi". She looked at me, kind of shyly, and said "Hi" in a very quiet, almost hoarse voice. (No, not a horse voice-- All you punsters back off! I'm looking at you, Nyp...) I said to Leen something about how awkward this was, and how weird it was to make the transition from chat to real life. She responded by "writing" in the air with a finger the word "HI". It was kind of funny, and we both smiled.

All of a sudden, Sam was in the room, lying on the bed. This was, apparently, what we had been waiting for, and we all decided to go for a walk, except for whoever was sitting beside Leen at the desk. As we were heading outside, something happened, and Sam made a joke about it. However, I did not find the joke to be especially funny, and I didn't like the way Sam pounded his fist on the wall to get everyone's attention before speaking. I remember thinking about how Sam was NOTHING like how I expected him to be. Even his physical appearance was totally out to lunch-- He was shorter than me (I am only 5'9" IRL) and he was kind of heavy, and he had what must have been several weeks growth of beard on his face. He looked a great deal like Keith from Survivor, with less white in his beard. I think that is where the appearance came from, as I had watched Survivor before going to bed. Anyway, I remember thinking that it was disappointing that Sam and I didn't hit it off, because I had gotten along with his SO WELL online.

We went for our walk, and as we walked, people kind of disappeared from the group. At some point, a few of us reached a gas station or something. There was a guy (an attendant?) standing outside dressed in a weird outfit. He saw somebody who was walking with me (it was either my brother or Randy, but I don't know) and accused him of being some sort of enemy. I somehow knew that this guy was locked in some sort of fantasy in his mind. Anyway, he was delusional, and there were these two really cool motorbikes parked at the gas station. We knew that these bikes were supposed to belong to the enemies of this guy, and whoever was with me decided that since he was thought to be the enemy guy, he should take one of these bikes. After he took off (with the attendant guy shouting after him) I figured if I just hopped on the other bike, this attendant would assume I was another "enemy" and let me take that bike. This worked EXACTLY as expected.

The motorbikes are deserving of some description. They were not normal motorbikes; they had a big plastic wedge-shaped front end (for aerodynamics, I guess) and were exceptionall easy to ride. The throttle was on the left handlebar, and the shifters were footpedals about a foot in front of the pegs used for resting your feet on. The left pedal would shift the bike down a gear, and the right would shift up.

Now out of the village of New Zealand, I was cruising on the open road, trying to catch up to Randy or Kevin. I was having a little trouble getting used to the shifting on the bike, and was finding myself in too high a gear most of the time. The engine was running very low and I had little power, and I kept having to force myself to downshift to get more power. Most of my problem was that I was weaving around other cars and taking some relatively sharp corners, and I was nervous, so I kept slowing down, but not shifting down. Then when I tried to speed up again, I couldn't.

Well, eventually I caught up with my brother. At this point, he was definitely my brother. He had some sort of weird electronic map, which showed the locations of other bikers. Apparently, pretty much everyone who had gone out on the walk had gotten on motorbikes at some point. A bunch of the other bikers were also gathered around looking at the map. I know that Ayako was there, for one. Anyway, we were looking at the two blips which represented Randy and Brunnen-G's motorbikes. They were about seven miles ahead of us, which could apparently be explained by the fact (which we all knew and agreed on) that both had some professional motorbike racing in their past and KNEW what they were doing on a motorbike. Anyway, we could also see from the map that they had made their way into a little enclosed area which was suspiciously similar to those old racing video games with the overhead view of a twisty little race course. We all decided to go there and practice up on our riding skills in a safer environment (one with no other traffic).

The seven mile ride to this track was fleeting, like the plane trip. When we got there, we had to ride through a gate in a big wall to get in. Past the gate, though, was a small room, maybe thirty feet by fifteen feet, complete with a roof. The track was about two feet wide, and some of the corners on it were shorter than the length of the bikes. I was very disappointed that I couldn't ride around fast and practice cornering, since there wasn't even enough room to get going fast, so I gave up in disgust and dismounted.

Now the lot of us were hanging out and goofing around in this room. Some people were jogging on the track, and I did this for a while. The next part of the dream was REALLY weird. I was discussing with someone the concept of loud noises of a certain type as we jogged, and as we talked about this, we jogged past one of my female co-workers (who had appeared here for some reason.) This next part was, I'm guessing, influenced by a recent conversation with Mousie in RinkChat. As we talked and jogged past my co-worker, she let out a really loud fart. I'm not kidding. I have never dreamed about flatulence before, as far as I can remember. Anyway, the irony of the conversation we were having and the timing of this loud burst of flatulence sent me into FITS of laughter. I knew that I was being horrendously rude, and that laughing at this was horribly childish of me, but I just couldn't help myself. I was rolling on the floor laughing. My co-worker looked at me with a kind of sheepish look on her face, and shrugged.

And that is the end of the dream (or what I can remember of it).

Don "I should not have made two cups of rotini and eaten an entire french loaf of garlic bread before bedtime last night" Monkey