The dream engine dispenses fake aspirin

This was a dream so persistent that I woke up at least twice, and even went to the toilet once, and got the next installment on falling asleep again. Excellent, though I’d have liked to have more closure at the end.

We’d been invited to somebody’s party, a relative or acquaintance celebrating his (I’m pretty sure it was a him) work jubilee or retirement, and he was sending a bus to collect us. A bus duly came, practically empty even of seats, but that didn’t matter because there were only about 6 people in it: my other half and me, Prima (aged about eleven, wearing the bright blue shirt she had then), a couple of people I don’t recall, and an elderly woman with a black poodle. The poodle didn’t only wear grey suede boots the right size for a toddler, but actually walked on its hind legs in them like a toddler as well. In the middle of the bus there was a large TV screen, and I stretched out on the seat opposite it saying “I’ve got the best place!” Some more people got on the bus later, but not enough to get in the way of my TV-watching (I don’t remember what was on, and as I’m not really interested in TV in waking life I wouldn’t know if it was anything well-known). There was another bus going to the party as well, full of Turkish men, mostly a little ahead of us on the road though we overtook it, and it us, a couple of times.

The venue was supposed to be in Utrecht but it was more like Amersfoort when we got there, both in distance and in what the town looked like. We had a suite of rooms in a large party centre, very plain and empty and painted pale chartreuse. This filled as the party progressed with people (not the busload of Turkish men though), tables with food, coat-racks, and one room turned out to be a help-desk or information office with a nice middle-aged woman in it. One of the bigger rooms became a movie lounge.

In the hallway there was a vending machine the size of two fifties-movie refrigerators. I first passed it at the back and saw that it had a row of green LEDs with labels, “Aspirin”, “Child Aspirin”, “Fake Aspirin”, and some more over-the-counter medicines. At the front it had a window no larger than my hand with a jukebox-like selector next to it. I chose “Fake Aspirin” out of curiosity and got a smallish white capsule with white powder in it. Then I managed to break the machine, getting showered with Fake Aspirin and other pills and capsules in different colours. After that I could only get single-pack sanitary towels from it, which hadn’t even been listed. Fortunately everything was free.

Later I was outside, presumably no longer at the party (though with two people I’d been at the party with), and entered a very small shop where a woman was selling her knitted objects: among other things, a pair of huge carrots to wear as a scarf. At this point it was getting so diffuse that it took me a while to realise that the soundtrack was my radio alarm, playing too softly to actually distinguish something.