I was out on a populous dark street, speaking with a woman who was telling me a joke.
woman: "What do blowfish, a six pack of beer, and gay people have in common?"
me: "I...don't know?"
woman: (grinning) "They all want to stick a lot of things in you."
There seemed to be a lot of people around, but the environment was fairly cluttered and trashy; as if we were in a street that had become a homeless encampment. I was approached by a woman in something resembling a nurse's outfit, carrying something with a sign on it that said "Relief: Sponsored by AirBnB".
I was becoming lucid and was curious what she was handing out--though I was instantly suspicious it was a scam. I put out my hand and was expecting her to put some pills in it, but wasn't prepared to see that they were little rigid-seeming plastic V-shaped strips. They seemed to stand up on my palm on their own.
The Vs unfolded and were warm and stuck to me. They began to burn, creating a rather strong pain--though I managed to avoid waking. I was unable to peel them off--the adhesion was strong, as if they'd superglued to my skin.
With the nurse having walked away, the woman who had joked before looked at my hand solemnly.
woman: "I get the trick. They are a kind of strong automatic medical bandage--usually legitimate. But these ones have been modified to create wounds. The perpetrators make money on the backside at their clinics--they charge for the treatments of the wounds the bandages are now covering..."
me: (rolling eyes) "...and then the government pays it; the people here are too drugged up to ever know what happened. Assumption is that it was just addicts who hurt themselves. Godawful. I hope that when those responsible are killed, it is performed...slowly."
Wanting to see what else I could glean from the dystopian environment, I wandered off from the street into a building which had a propped open door. I went into a community room where people were watching a television.
Ignoring the people watching it, I just went to muck with the TV and see what kind it was. All the controls I could see were on the front. One was a sliding toggle, which had a setting for closed-captioning. I ticked it on. Yellow writing began to run on the bottom of the screen.
tv viewer: "Whoa. How did you do that? Get those words to show up?"
me: "It's called "Closed-Captioning". It's for deaf people usually. But for my current situation, really anything helps. Maybe it will help you too."
I watched a bit of the end of a show I couldn't quite follow--and then the opening of a cartoon called "Beetron". The animation was fairly lo-fi, and the hero of "Beetron" looked rather similar to the low-budget-costumed "bee guy" character from the Simpsons (who plays a slapstick role on a Mexican sitcom). The theme song gave me the impression that it was a comedy--that Beetron was similarly goofy, and bad at being a superhero.
After taking in a little bit of Beetron, I turned my attention to the people on the couch who were watching me.
me: "Hello there, humans! Or, are you? I'm not. Well...what I mean to say is, that I have a human body elsewhere...I don't know what I am right now or how I'm talking to you. But I presume it's some other body. Anyone want to tell me anything?"
A man on a couch pointed at some posters on the wall for what looked like movies and TV shows.
couch guy: "We still have carpool karaoke. But it's not any good anymore. They shouldn't even be bothering to make it."
me: "So...who am I, to you?"
couch guy: "You are a member of a party of people who are usually found in Prague. But your party is not as powerful as it used to be."
me: "I'm not part of any political party. I'm more a member of the...Jesus party."
Everyone in the room freaked out, and a small young girl jumped up and clung to me.
little girl: (horrified) "Didn't you know? You can't say Jesus!"
A noise happened and some kind of alarm or alert went off. There was a buzzing. I tried to push the girl off of me.
me: (resignedly) "Oh, this always happens. Look, don't worry about me, just save yourself. I'll be fine."
Though I had walked in on a ground level, I either had gone up stairs at some point or the building was split level. Because I could look down a window and see where a small machine that looked like an odd remote control car was running along.
I had told the girl to let go of me, but she wouldn't. She tugged me to hide with her in a dark corner. The little car eventually came our way but it passed us, seemingly not seeing us. We waited and I assumed it would find me (as such things usually do). But it ran by and kept going the other direction.
Though I was surprised to get out of that unscathed, I then noticed it had dropped a small device near us as it passed. I wondered if it was a bomb. But eventually it started rolling toward us and ran directly into my foot.
I woke up.