a portion of last night's dream--a long memory

The part that really stood out last night was when I was at some sort of play or convention, sitting in the audience.
They began handing out gift bags that were made of thick malleable transparent plastic zipped shut and in the shape of women's pregnant bellies. They were so full of toys, the imprint of their parts were pushing against the walls of the bag and deforming its shape. The toys were all colors.

I unzipped the bag and began shuffling through my gifts. They were amazing. Mostly they were little plastic toys. I remember a motorcycle, a bugs bunny, an oddly shaped other bunny, and the famous something-or-other character that I never looked at and never touched, but knew was in my bag and was the central figure of this event.
As I sat there excitedly continuing to shuffle through my things, Rachelle (an acquaintance and a painter) walked by eager to find where her gift bag was. She looked around and then spoke to a man standing in front of the table I was sitting at. He said "sorry we're all out. we don't have enough for everyone." Knowing her, and seeing her disappointment, I felt guilty. I thought about it for a moment, debating what would feel best, then said "Hey Rachelle, come here. (motioning to my bag) See, this is what they gave us, a bag full of toys."
"Does it have the something-or-other figure in it??!"
"Yeah, I think it does. But I don't care about that guy all that much. You can have it. Also, you can have the motorcycle that he rides."
"Really? Cool. Thanks."
She went from flustered and angry to pleasant and suggested we play together afterwards. She explained that her walk home is like a journey and there are many places you must travel through to arrive there.
I agreed to come.

She lead me on a trail outside of the building, up a muddy hill. The mud went on forever. We were both in shorts and no shoes so the mud was slapping all over our legs. I could feel it squishing between my toes, and struggled against the resistance of a wet ground moving under my feet as I tried to push and propel myself up this hill. It was difficult. And she was far ahead. The sun was setting and the sky was a deep orange with some pinks.
We finally reached the top of the hill and immediately she began rolling on her side down the very steep slope. It was nearly a cliff, and on this side it was sand. She suddenly was naked and I watched her rolling all the way down to the bottom. Her hair was flaring every direction and she was rolling so fast her body was bouncing and jolting violently. She got up and smiled at the end of it, looking up expecting me to do the same.
I decided to ride down on my butt. It worked surprisingly well, for sand.

After riding down the hill we walked into the back of a building. We were in China or Chinatown. It was a busy street and night had arrived. The street was heavily lit by decorative hanging lights and lamp posts. Everyone was moving around quickly and we had to push our way through forcefully to get anywhere. We were looking for a store sign that had a cross on it, because we needed to find the church. This was a step in the path she took home every night, but she seemed very unfamiliar with it.
We walked along the street looking up at all of the signs with their busy words and beaming lights. I was getting frustrated, not being able to read any of it, realizing it wasn't Chinese, but a conglomeration of multiple languages. I also realized everyone around us were not Chinese, but from everywhere. People were wearing their traditional garb. I saw lots of African people wearing colorful head wraps and dresses and people with turbans and full beards. We kept walking, and finally turned the corner, to find the cross on a green sign mixed in with ambiguous text.

We walked in, but it was a shopping mall, not a church. We walked to a counter where a woman was doing a beauty thing like manicures or using hair spray. Rachelle knew her well. They chatted but I didn't understand. I was beginning to feel left out. I turned around to check out the new environment we were in. I turned back to face the beauty woman with her feet resting on the glass case in front of her, busy filing her nails. Rachelle had disappeared. It was just me and this woman with a spotlight beaming on us. Everything around was dark. She didn't look up at me. I thought to look behind the large mirror against the wall beside her. I pulled on the edge of it and it opened. I opened it too hard too fast and it knocked some of the woman's things over. One of them was a pink bottle of nail paint remover. I apologized, embarrassed to have disturbed her, thinking she must hate me more now. I looked in to a small unlit space, and looked down to see a hot tub bubbling over and wafting cozy heat at me. In the tub were Rachelle and three other people, all fully immersed with just their faces exposed, clothe covering their eyes and earplugs in. Somebody made the thought, you should come in and join us. (They didn't say it. They thought it, and I heard it.) I closed the mirror and stepped back.
Somebody was there, maybe. It could have been another me. I looked to it and said grudgingly "I don't want to go in there. I don't know what they're doing. I thought we were going somewhere. Ughhh," while thinking "that hot tub looked nice."

Then a next door neighbor was yelling and I woke up.