Verre

Recall: 2/10 upon waking, 5/10 after finding the thread. It was hard to remember anything at all when I first woke up, but I persisted until a few details came back, and that let me pin down a few detailed scenes at least. The overall plot remained vague. There were a lot of additional fragments from earlier sequences or prior dreams that I've left out.

I'm hanging out a woman who is at least a generation younger and we're getting dressed to go out. I have a vest in grey and black hues that swirl into one another in a cloud-like pattern, resembling the soft color variations of tie-dye, but subtle and not at all gaudy because of the dark colors. I'm wearing it over a thin long-sleeved, collarless knit shirt. I don't remember the color, maybe sort of mustard or yellow ochre. Then I try on a few pairs of pants to figure out which will match best. I decide on the dark grey corduroys but now I can't find them... where did I put them? I was just trying them on! I go through all the drawers of the dresser and they aren't here. Now I'm stuck wearing dark blue denim pants that don't match at all. I go into the next room and am relieved to find the cords on the bed... not sure how they got there since I didn't remember coming into this room, but I assume I was just spacing out and don't think to RC.

Some unclear sequences. The young woman and I go into town, and meet up with a third woman, who involves us in some kind of conspiracy. There is a fourth woman visiting town that she wants to engage in conversation under the pretext of just being friendly, but she has some more complex, sinister plan (that I don't remember in the slightest). We follow the visitor and after she ducks into a cafe, we follow suit. It has gotten cold and rainy out, so we pretend we've just stopped in for a hot drink. We hadn't intended to engage the visitor yet; the conspirator wants to do so but the young woman and I are afraid it will come across as too abrupt and awkward, so we are frantically trying to communicate across the table with our eyes and subtle shakes of the head that she should not go approach her. (The interior is small and no one else is here, so we can't speak aloud about our plans.)

The waitress comes over to see what we want to order. I see a drink named "Raksiteli" on the menu that I'm sure I remember having here before: I recall it is served hot in a tiny glass, tastes like honey mead but is strongly alcoholic. (I think the dream was merging "rkatsiteli," the name of a grape used for Eastern European amber wines, with "raki," a strong spirit that I did once try in a delicious honey-flavored version.) However, each glass was priced at $22, which seemed way too high! I remembered having four or five in a row last time... did I really pay that much? I thought maybe this time I should just get some coffee. I spent so long browsing the menu indecisively that I started to think I must be annoying everyone, so I told the waitress to get the orders of the other people at the table while I made up my mind.

Meanwhile, the cafe was filling up quickly with other people. The whole time I was inspecting the menu, I was also glancing up occasionally at the woman, the one we were targetting, sitting across the room at the bar. I thought it might help if I caught her eye a couple times, making it seem accidental, so that it wouldn't seem so random if we did decide to approach her. I was startled when she began walking over to us, but it turned out she was joining some people who had recently sat down at the table to our right. This worked out well, because overhearing their discussion (the tables were very close together) we made some comments and soon joined their conversation.

They were talking about apples for some reason—probably also deciding what to order—and I commented that I really don't like apples, especially cold from the refrigerator. "You should warm them up, then," said the woman sitting on the bench just to my right. I admitted sheepishly that the one way I do like apples was to hollow out the cores and fill them with butter and brown sugar, then bake them in the oven until wrinkled and brown on top. After I confessed my sweet tooth, the visiting woman, our target, now sitting across from me but at the next table, took a plate of whipped cream from their table and offered it to me. I couldn't tell if she was just being kind or if she suspected our plot and was getting ahead of it... might the cream be drugged? Was it intended to knock me out? But I thought it would look suspicious if I didn't accept some. I exchanged some silent glances with the people at my own table while we tried to assess her motives and decide what I should do. Without saying a word, we decided that I would try some of the cream, but that my companions would not, just in case the friendly gesture was something other than it seemed.

I used an online program to try to create the floorplan of the cafe. I didn't get the proportions quite right, so there should be four seats at the bar in the upper left corner, and two seats across from the wall benches at each of the small tables (allowing them to seat four people each), but this gives a general sense of the layout. I was sitting with the two other woman at the table on the bottom left side of the room, the younger woman to my left and the conspiratorial woman sitting in the chair across from us. The visiting woman was sitting at the bar at first, then moved to one of the chairs facing the table just to the right of ours, where two or three other people were initially sitting.