A dream of cereal and slimes

Dream last night, more or less in two parts.

First Part:

I am going to the supermarket with Adam, Sarah, and some other people. I go to buy a box of cereal, which involves scanning it against my credit card to pay for it, which then prints out a barcode that you bring to the register to check out.

For some reason there is an issue, and the barcode it prints out is a null value, which will crash the register. It also means I can’t buy it, since the payment didn’t go through. As a prank, I stick the null value barcode over the normal barcode and put the cereal box back on the shelf. If someone tries to take it through checkout, it will crash the register.

We leave the supermarket, and go out to the car. I am worried that my prank will backfire and get traced back to me, and I will get in trouble. “It’s always the case,” I say, “I can never get away with anything.”

As we are getting into the car, a woman comes running out of the supermarket. It is the manager.

She stops us, and says to me, “You tried to buy a box of cereal, didn’t you?”

“You see?” I intone to my friends, then turn to her, looking down. “Yeah. But I can explain…”

“No,” she says, “I want to apologize for the inconvenience. To make up for your bad shopping experience, here is $25.”

She holds out some money, and looks at me expectantly.

“Oh,” I say, at a loss for words. “Um, thanks,” I say as I take the money.

She looks relieved, then turns and trots back to the supermarket.

I get into the car and we drive off.

Second Part:

We are out of the car now, and riding bicycles along a road. It seems like an old highway, it has a somewhat post-apocalyptic feel to it.

Two boys from our group pedal out in front, I think they are an older and younger brother. I pedal up to them, and we ride alongside each other for a while. Then, the younger boy becomes belligerent, and keeps swerving his bicycle into me, trying to knock me over. “I’m gonna hurt you!” he declares.

Finally I get tired of his attacks and the rest of us hang back and let him get a little ahead, so he’s not near our group.

After a little while someone points out that he’s gone. I comment to his brother, “wow, he must be really far ahead of us, I can’t even see him!” The road is level and visibility is good, so he must be a long way off.

“I’m going to find him!” says the older brother, and pedals as hard as he can, zooming ahead of the rest of us.

We pedal on, and it takes us quite a while to meet up with the brothers.

There is a crevice, a crack in the road that’s fairly wide and about 20 feet deep. The two brothers are down at the bottom, which is a flat area – the steep walls and flat bottom give it the feel of a colosseum. The brothers have reverted to their true forms, which are slimes, as seen in classic video game RPGs. The younger brother is trying to climb out, so he can get at us to hurt us or kill us, but the older brother keeps pulling him back down, keeping him in the arena.

“Keep going,” says the older brother, “I’ll go with you in human form.” He projects his human form out of the crevice next to us, and we continue on the highway with him. We are on foot now, and we have a long way to walk. As we walk away with the older brother’s human form, the older brother’s slime form is still in the trench, keeping the younger slime from escaping.

I’m not sure exactly how he is in two places at once, it has something to do with focussing his consciousness in a certain way.

We walk for a long time, and come to a rise overlooking an orchard. It is a strange landscape, the colors seem extra-saturated, and the trees are shorter than normal, though just as wide around as normal trees. There are rolling hills, which seem exaggerated, so that each hill has a perfectly curved shape. The overall impression is that of an artist’s interpretation of an orchard.

I turn to the older boy. “So this is what your homeworld looks like?” He nods. “It’s beautiful,” I comment, and we continue on with the group along the road, walking into the distance.