Monday 7 May 2012

Dream: crunchy chicken noodles

In this dream I'm trying to go to work but for some reason end up somewhere in Kensington heading back to my old flat in Kingsford.

Grace calls and asks if she can have a lift to RPA. I pick her up on the side of Anzac Parade near the Hunanese restaurant and we head back towards Newtown. I look at the clock and it's way past beginning of work time (almost 8am) and I try to rack my brain thinking of which unit I'm working in.

As we are driving along, Grace asks if we can stop to eat something. She's heard about some famous place serving crunchy chicken noodles, and for some reason I agree to stop and have some noodles before we go to work.

We sit down in a tiny restaurant with blue plastic tables and stools on the pavement. It looks like something from Vietnam but it's an Indonesian place. Our noodles arrive almost immediately and it is a pretty big bowl of what looks like mostly noodles with scattered fried shallots and chillies on top.

I mix the noodles in my bowl and take a big slurp. All these chicken bones enter my mouth and I spend the next painful minute spitting out the sharp jagged edges trying not to cut my mouth. I wonder silently in the dream how I managed to get all those bony fragments at once. The next slurp is not any better and I end up with sharp bony bits again. I look down at the bowl and it appears to be floating with nothing but bones.

What sort of place have you brought me to? I ask Grace.

I did say the noodles would be crunchy, just crunchy with bones!  She giggles as she says this and I wake up.