I was a bit lost walking down an urban street. Due to seeing a street sign that seemed to say "Ashby", I asked a passing black man if I was in Berkeley.
black man: "No, you're in Santa Monica, in California. And this neighborhood isn't safe...how did you get here? Did you take the wrong bus?"
me: "I don't know, I don't remember."
Starting to walk toward a bus, a group of three more black men wearing hooded sweatshirts followed me along. Someone called to the black man who had been talking to me, telling him "hey, your boy there is going to get in trouble." (presumably referring to me) I turned to confront the approaching guys, who I worried had malicious intent but didn't do anything to attack.
me: "I don't have any money."
guy: "Ha, then do you want a credit card? Here, take it."
He jokingly tried to hand me silver credit card, which I gathered from context had been found or stolen.
guy: "Won't do any good, the chip in it will have the cops crawling on you the moment you tap it."
other guy: "Who needs money anyway? I just want the things money can get you...food, sex."
me: "Well the deck isn't so much stacked against you, you're in good shape. You look kinda like a young Eddie Murphy."
other guy: (smiling, to group) "Now you all listen to this boy here, he knows what he's talking about!"
We all went and hung out in something like a tent next to a hot dog stand. I tried to get my bearings.
me: "So what year do you think it is?"
group: "2009."
me: "Ah, that's the same as what I thought it was, 2009."
group: "No, we said 1979."
me: "1979 then? Ah. Well, hey...if you want money, see if you can buy Google stock when they go public. It does well."
group: "Then when all of us get rich, and they make the connection, it will prove time travel exists!"
The floor of the room I was in began to turn into something like an ocean, as I started talking about time travel.
me: "Interestingly enough, time travel is possible. The tricky part is that there are holes in the Python code..."
Note
Yesterday I was reading some of The Elegant Universe which spoke about gravity warping time near black holes. I have also been tinkering with the programming language Python.
I stopped talking and started to notice a series of signs posted on a wall. As I spoke about holes, the signs began to warp and form holes in them. The messages on the signs became strange mixes of physics and computer code. I followed them and saw that they were tied into research, such as looking for a "particular neutrino" and there were a number of log entries describing investigation into historic transactions involving checks that I had written.
As the signs became weirder I started to notice that I was in some sort of vast museum. There were no people in it besides myself, just wall after wall of collections of objects in glass cabinets. I could see out the windows a cityscape with a solid purple sky.
I felt as if I were in a flying chair and my teeth began to hurt a great deal. The flying chair swept around the museum and a sort of voice in my head seemed to speak.
voice: "Imagine all the things that we discovered...when we went back, and had the science to do so. Of course, nothing is done this way any longer."
The chair I was in went up to the top floor of the museum and then began sweeping down through the floors to a gray underground area. There were cubicles and in each cubicle was a desk and a computer. My chair came to land on a platform and a female security guard looking person who had solid white eyes used some kind of device to sweep across my body and drop me onto the platform. I introduced myself, and she shook my hand.
security guard: "I call her 'Rudy'."
me: "Um, hello Rudy."
A man nearby also shook my hand.
man: "I am Adam."
me: "It's good to meet you, but if you don't give me something to prevent me from waking up, I feel I will do so very soon."
rudy: "It is remarkable how long you can hold this neural state."
adam: "She'll be here in a second."
After being told that I fully believed myself to have awoken, next to the girl I was in bed with. Which caused me great distress as the pain in my mouth from the pressure of my teeth being so great that I thought the dream had caused permanent damage. Then I noticed the man from earlier standing next to us by the bed, grinning.
adam: "Now... what do you say about this?"
me: "I say, hi again Adam. And whatever crazy technology you've got going on, don't laugh about this tooth hurting thing. It's really bad."
The girl in bed with me took her hand and gestured at my forehead, putting it halfway across my head sympathetically. I was helped out of the bed and taken into another room to meet a group of people who were crowded into what seemed like an engineering environment. There were a lot of terminals and soldering irons. I was naked and people seemed to take note of this, but I shrugged it off and said hi anyway. Some people introduced themselves by names that I forgot and shook my hand while others waved.
woman: "I want you to know that no one has approved of you being verbally abused."
me: "Thanks...I guess?"