Dream: set 3 crispy chicken

The dream starts in a board room. There are about ten people sitting around a large oval table, all looking very serious in their ridiculously enormous chairs. A powerpoint is in progress and some old man is droning on. I try hard to concentrate but cannot focus on his words.

The old man puts up a table which I try to digest. It is the number of deaths that each surgical team has had in the prior month. I find the numbers quite high – ranging from 50 to 100. I wonder briefly where I must be, for there to be so many surgical deaths. The next slide comes up and my eyes wander down it – it is the number of deaths that each medical team has had, and the numbers are utterly shocking. 17,000? 3,700? Every number has a 7 in it. My mind races to think if there is some epidemic – another Spanish flu? Down the bottom of the slide, the infectious diseases team had 77,000 deaths.

I am so shocked that the dream flicks into the next scene. I’m in a street market, not unlike what I have been seen all over Asia and most recently in Bangkok. The stalls are darkened by their canvas covers, and the air feels stagnant with the smell of dead animals and rotting fruit. The ground is an undescribable murk of grey and my shoes squelch in mysterious puddles. I am looking for a particular stall – and when I find it, a man comes up to me to tell me what the menu is (it appears to be in Thai).

He says that this stall sells pretty much everything now, from fried noodles to iced desserts. But what most people don’t know is that it all started with the fried chicken, and that’s what people in the know always get. I scan the menu and say to the lady, Set 3 Crispy chicken please.

She takes half a chicken from behind the counter and chops it up on a big block fashioned from a tree stump. The sound of the cleaver is surreal as it falls and hits flesh. She gathers the pieces of chicken atop some rice and gives the box to me in a small plastic bag.

Wordlessly, the man starts to lead me away from the stall. People are milling all around me and the stalls are so crowded it is hard to know where the exit is. He brings me to a large house, and opens the gate for me to get in. Inside I am alone, standing in a lush tropical garden. I take my Set 3 Crispy chicken into the kitchen and look for a plate to put it on. The kitchen faces into the garden with glass sliding doors that are fully open.

Soon a nun walks into the garden and pokes her head into the kitchen.

Please, could you help take lunch out of the oven before you start eating?

She has a strange accent that is hard to place – eastern European?

I open the oven door and there is a roasting tray with a chicken and some potatoes around it. The oven is utterly filthy, dripping with black grease. I look for an implement to take the tray out with, an oven glove or something similar – but all I can find is a pair of pink (lotus) coloured fingerless mittens. The tray is hot and I almost drop it, but I manage in the end. I look at my hands, a strange sense of deja vu washing over me.

More nuns are passing through the garden now, followed by some other people dressed in street clothes. Finally a couple of Jewish rabbis stroll in. They all come into the kitchen and start serving themselves from the tray. I’ve lost my Set 3 Crispy chicken somewhere in the process and wonder if I will get any lunch at all.

One of the rabbis pours me a glass of wine. I am confused by the sight of nuns and rabbis eating together in the same room, and also rabbis pouring me wine – aren’t they supposed to be abstinent? The wine is in a tall blue glass – it looks almost translucent in the light and I conclude it must be made from very fine glass.

But the wine tastes utterly horrible and I feel too rude to tip it out. So I go into the garden and take a seat under the canopy of the dense trees. No one follows me and I relish the peace and tranquility the garden brings. I can vaguely hear the chatter of the lunch crowd, but I am all alone. I tip the wine quickly into the ground, and then I wake up.