It’s a square straight out of a Star Wars city: clouds, large marble pillars, expansive and sweeping staircases, and lots and lots of sunlight.

This Korean woman wearing an enourmous serving tray over he shoulders carrying every kind of hanging antique in the universe waddled up to me. She was something out of Howl’s Moving Castle or the Fifth Element. And she was trying to pawn off a tea set on me. Thing about the teapot she was shaking at me was that it’s the one I’ve been looking for forever…It’s a Japanese design that features a dragon on a black background. The special thing about these tea sets is that back in the day, they used to create these designs on the base of the cups that could only be seen if you held them up to the light. (Weird, but true, so no extra points.)

There was a door to one of the buildings: Big glass doors with metal handles and signs on either side that read “Push” or “Pull” in clean Helvetica. The door which was a Time Door. Everyone walking in and out of it was a mirage-like hologram of people in the past. Like a sci-fi echo of time, the door was capturing echoes of people walking through doors through the ages. Some were hurrying and then would fade into a mist 3 feet from the exit. Others would keep walking, talking to their invisible friends who were not echoing in this place.They’d be doing the normal act of walking through a glass door, only they couldn’t see anyone around them from any other time period than their own. For example, one of the many people I saw walk right past me was my father. It must have been the 70s for him because he had a funky handlebar moustache and he looked like he’d been out all night partying with friends. Of course, he didn’t see me, and if he had, he wouldn’t have know who I was because I knew that he hadn’t even met my mother yet.

The worst (and best) part about the dream, was that my friend Stephanie came to see me there. She was there with her husband in some Quantum Leap kind of world where they had come to see me and to attend some sort of reunion on this temporal plane, but having attended, they had to go back to their own time (the present, which unfortunately meant they had to zap back over to Texas). She ran up to me and gave me a quick hug and then ran into a building, where her husband was waiting in a room where there were like 5 or 6 men in uniform and a mattress on the floor. They both lay on a mattress and these “Time Assistants” lifted the mattress up to a wall. I thought they were going to get hurt so i pulled the mattress away from the wall again, but they had disappeared. Almost. I could still see the indent in the mattress where they were lying and watching as the last traces of their outlines disappeared, until there was nothing left but the mattress itself. (Multiple points for Weirdness.)

Then my alarm went off.

And that is why I should never eat Indian food before bedtime.