Trains, traffic, and bottles of juice

I dreamed I was on a train on the other side of the Hudson traveling down from Upstate (Downstate?) to New York City. The air was autumn fresh and the views were stunning. The homes looked like pastel pieces of candy, gaudy and absurd in the sharp sunlight. The family was on the train with "Sir" Paul McCartney, who looked to be about 40 years old and with a daring, shoulder-length mullet. As the train got into more urban areas, it ditched the tracks entirely and roved through the streets, storming past stalled traffic. The engineer was a tall, thin man with a wizened face and long nose who looked like an undertaker. We weren't altogether sure where he was going. The wife suggested that he was once a secret agent, but had retired, and that we were in good hands.

We ended up in a multi-story factory-like big box store with a large atrium and tiered interior walkways that looked to made of intricately woven metal pipes. There were stacks and stacks of gallon bottles of fruit juice, their labels writing in piercingly large fonts. A groupe of young women, who seemed to be wearing school uniforms, were running about and causing a ruckus. The inevitable happened: They toppled a stack of said bottles, which went crashing on the floor, spilling the juice—pineapple, apple, apricot, grapefruit—everywhere. The women found this great fun, and soon shoppers were fleeing as more and more stacks tumbled down. The tide of fruit juice rose. Soon it was up to your ankles. "Sir" Paul was up on the second floor, and had taken to leaping off into the flood of juice, his mullet flapping in the breeze as he fell. Miraculously, he landed without injury, again and again, and never got any juice on him.

*

I dreamed I was at a capoeira roda on Church Street. The guy who seemed to be running things also had an extensive store of Candomblé paraphernalia, most of it draped in plastic. I was looking for a sort of sling for a wooden yo-yo that I had, and asked him if he had anything like that. He handed over a turquoise woven sling, perfect, and, as the jogo continued in the background, I went up to the counter to pay. The cashier tried to charge me $182 dollars, and the owner of the place had surreptitiously slipped another yo-yo into the sling (an expensive yo-yo). I returned the yo-yo to the owner, who was clearly frustrated that the sleight had failed but tried not to let it show, and talking them down to $4, then headed out to the street.

A friend of mine who I hadn't seen since high school (he'd lost his vision and moved to Florida in the waking world) had won a black Mercedes in some kind of online contest, and offered to drive me to meet up with my family. It was a sleek vehicle, and he traveled down traffic-clogged streets, as narrow as you'd find in Monti. He'd used the cars speed to bolt through very narrow openings, nearly hitting pedestrians. I myself got out at one point to observe the standstill line of vehicles in front of us, and found myself dodging as my friend drove in between stopped cars at breakneck speed. Me then running through puddles and past honking vehicles trying to catch up to my friend, who had a delighted smirk on his face. We finally made it to North Newark and parked. There was a restaurant outside, and a creepy guy in a grey hoodie (my daughter went to school with him, in the dream world, and had warned me about this propensity for violence) began ogling the car and then actively touching it. I envisioned myself stabbing him in the neck, but my friend, the driver, and my daughter got me to calm down and we walked toward the restaurant where my family was waiting.