I was in my grandmother's house and looking at a bunch of what looked like academic materials for young children--bright colors, big print. It was talking about "dioxin" and said something like "dioxin is harmful to the brains of animals and can hurt plants.
Note
Wikipedia confirms dioxins are a real thing, and real poisonous:
"Dioxins are known to increase the likelihood of cancer. Scientists are working to establish their exact toxicity, but a report from the US Environmental Protection Agency indicates dioxins are considered a serious threat to public health. Environmental campaigners describe dioxins as among the most dangerous poisons known. The first disease associated with dioxins was the extreme skin disease chloracne. It causes acne-like pustules to form across the body and can last for several years."
...though I didn't know about this before looking it up.
For some reason I was under the impression that I was asleep and that my parents were in the room with my sleeping body. So I tried to narrate the materials on the cart aloud that I was seeing. I asked them to look up dioxin and tell me what it said on Google, and they refused. Getting angry, I demanded to know why not.
Interacting with the people who I believed were my parents in the dream now, I started running through the usual challenges: how did I get into the body I was in, what relationship does my waking self have with this other body usually, etc. But there was some kind of emergency and some man grabbed me to shuffle me out of the house.
man: "Don't touch anything or anyone you don't have to. Just start moving."
There was a stream of people with aging and broken-out skin who were hanging onto each other like a conga line coming into the house. As we ran out the front door into a vast meadow, we could see lines of these zombies completely encircling us.
man: "We're going to have to fly to get out of here."
me: "How do I do that?"
man: "Point your finger upward and hold your arm in the direction you want to go."
I did what he said, and it worked--but then I started flying out of control and felt like I was going to wake up.
Note
Often dreams have this phenomenon where I feel pulled upwards and accelerate at a crazy rate, which ends the dream. Waking Life had some scenes where this happened to the main character.
me: "How do I stop?"
man: "Bend your finger so that it points down."
Doing this, I found it to stop me and I was hovering in the air. There were some other people up there who seemed to also be learning to fly. I asked how to fly downward and he showed me some kind of complex maneuver involving holding one's left hand in a certain position and making a shape with your right so that you'd smoothly move vertically up or down. I couldn't master it, and neither could another person--who looked like a young Asian fellow.
asian guy: "Yeah, I can't get it either. But you probably don't need to go straight up and down. Point your arm downward and bend your finger up, and you'll go down at a diagonal."
I ended up going down and landing on the roof of some building. I felt myself sort of wake up, but I didn't, yet I felt something had changed. I jumped onto the ground in an enclosed area and then saw a knight with some kind of javelin running at me as if he was going to stab me with it. Pointing in the air nothing happened, and I had sort of a realization...like I'd switched characters and the one I had now hadn't yet acquired the flying skill in the "game" (as it were).
Note
In retrospect, I might have just pointing straight ahead in the same direction as my arm, and didn't have my finger bent upward.
Dodging the knight's javelin a couple of times, I decided I'd just run up and grab him and try banging him up against the wall until his armor came off. It seemed to work pretty well.
Note
I had several "false awakenings" where I was trying to write all this down on crowded sheets of lined notebook paper, or look up dioxin on the internet.