In a shift, I become the male escaping on a bike riding on the shoulder of a busy rural road. I come to a city among dozens of people flying through the air on self-propelled bicycle-like machines. They seem to be led by an older male with a white beard. I am flying below them, following them, but flying by swinging a cluster of metal ribbons over my head.
We - the flying group and myself - are in an unfamiliar city, outside a building where we are expected, but the building is shuttered and looks abandoned. A door opens and inside are several men cleaning fish. There's a long, long row of planks out of which of which a swinging bridge could be made and I need to find a type of plank that would work for me, but each and every of them break when I try standing on them. Near the end of the row I find one I think will work, but it's actually not a plank, but a medical ankle support like I had to wear in waking life last Spring.
The leader of the group is now a middle aged gym teacher figure and we are walking through a wide underground hall. The gym teacher is picking leaders for 8 or 9 teams. I explain I've been losing weight as he picks me as a leader. He asks for my nickname by which the group will be known, I tell him something but immediately forget what I told him.
The wide and winding hall descends slightly deeper and becomes a huge co-op like grocery store, filled almost entirely with unfamiliar produce. I pick up an apple and begin eating it, no-one else is eating anything but no-one seems to mind or even notice. The underground hall/grocery store opens up into a park area and the teams gather around clusters of picnic tables.
The gym teacher is leading a word game, writing the teams' answers on a chalkboard. I believe the point of the game is to recall of the names of the exotic produce we just passed, and I return to the produce to try to refresh my memory. I see a visually stunning row of fruits - a spectrum of watermelon and nopolitos cactus hybrids, but I don't know what they're called. Searching for more produce I open a closet of ridiculous and extravagant coats I strongly dislike - they are owned by women on other teams.
As the game goes on, I realize the objective is to come up with food names made from a list of letters also written on the board. The game will decide the starting or judging order of some further game we'll be playing with the food. I misunderstand this game too, I believe I am to design a meal from anything in the store, but the object is to cook a meal with a fixed set of ingredients.
The game is to be judged at a particular time the next day and the teams disband. I am walking away with a girl I briefly dated in the late '90s. We are carrying garbage cans. She leaves to do some brief task in a greenhouse-like building. While she's gone, I have to extinguish smoldering campfires that seem to have been left by the group. I only have a small cup of water to use, but as my old girlfriend returns I've discovered I can gather all the smoldering firewood and cinders and place them in one of the garbage cans under a stream of water falling through a tree and off the roof of the greenhouse.
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