Morning after something

We were sleeping in this new room, quite a bunch of us, and I sat in a broad wooden basket weave chair, naked but for a pair of small white briefs, with an even larger flap belly than I'm used to, and with a very big bright orange shirt draped around the back of the chair and buttoned once in front of my chest. If I didn't sit in a certain way or slumped too much it felt a little confining and I worried vaguely that the button would be torn off. So I tried to button it up entirely, for there is safety in numbers, even for buttons, because shared strain is lighter strain, but alas, the shirt was too tautly stretched already and I couldn't close the it. Why is it even pulled around the back of the chair, I thought, what a pointless, idiotic thing to do. I proceeded to take it off and because there was nothing else to cover me with even this much, and I'd apparently spent the whole night sitting and reading in that chair anyway - the light had changed, something pale blue glinted though cracks in the roller blind to my right - I got up and waded through the clutter and sleeping people into the general direction of the door. I encountered some dusty hair bundles on the way that I picked up to throw away.

 

Track

The tiny children sat in their tiny cars on the little track that looked a lot like a belt conveyer in the round-angled rectangular form of those at airport luggage retrieval. The track was about half a metre high, its two longer sides maybe 3 metres, the short sides roughly 2 metres long.

An enthusiastic father counted down and opened the race.

They didn't move. Not even one of them started driving, not one.

I, a spectator, turned around to my friends and said something along the lines of: "The children should do this for their own amusement, because they want to, and not because their fathers like it so much. That's stupid."

Then I turned back to face the track and to have my own fun. A friend of mine ("Sid", who actually exists) jumped onto the track and started running on it, and I counted his rounds and cheered him on, also admonishing him not to cut the corners by jumping over them. It was basically hilarity. Until Sid fell and injured his heel. He kept grinning though and said it wasn't bad. He was carried off by medics anyway, well, not carried off, just lifted to be carried away, and then I found it very appropriate how he wasn't Sid anymore, but Nikola (a girl from my high school), who was kind of an athlete. She said something about the injury, was laid back down on the track, which was now in a foresty park by a big old red brick house (a nice one, I think it was a proper villa) - and I have no idea why, but I started undressing her. While I went to work on her I caught a glimpse of my own left arm; I was wearing a camouflage army jacket and on my left upper arm was a dark blue-grey badge in nearly hexagonal shape, if I remember correctly, like a stylised shield maybe, and with a single, simple dark symbol in dark lines, framed by another dark line in the shape of the badge itself. The symbol looked roughly like a square with a lever on each side, or a twodimensional box with hooks, or a - well, I'm not entirely certain of its design anymore. 

Float Home

 
It was night, and I floated out of my little brother's room's window (he doesn't live there anymore, but it used to be his room and in this dream he still did, although it was present-day brother), and there were a lot of flat candles floating in a sort of half-circly array in the air in front of the window, as if on water. I was going to rearrange them somehow, and wondered what would happen if I set them up a little lower or higher. But that couldn't be right, a little lower and they would be extinguished as if underwater, and a littler would be too high. They would be properly flying then. Somewhere in the air was a plane that was just right for them to float. So I nudged them around a little, smiling, and leaving them be at the end. I floated back into the room after exchanging a few words with my friendly brother about his girlfriend.
Or maybe it wasn't back into the room. I floated SOMEwhere. Oh, I should add, that I floated by my own will. I steered myself. Now I know. I floated diagonally down- and sideways, where a garage for a single car stood open and was pretty newly built. I said "Oh, für euer neues Auto." ("Oh, for your new car.") He laughed and said "Das heißt nicht Otto." ("It's not called Otto.") I turned to him and said "I hab 'Auto' gesagt." ("I said 'car'.") He shrugged and smiled. "Es hat trotzdem einen Ottomotor." I smirked and nodded.*
It was late and time to get home. I looked up and the sun glinted, and I began to float on my way, the road ahead. I landed on it and it was night as it had been all the time despite the sunlight by the garage. From flying I went over to running, jogging at first, then I sped up along the street, right in the middle of nightly deserted road. Cars were parked on either side of it and here and there people walked in the opposite direction of mine, some walking their dogs in these very small hours of the morning, others drunk and on their way home, with a friend or a spouse in their arm. It was very exhilarating. Running is easy and makes you so fast and powerful. I was aware of how I didn't quite recognise the streets, although they were familiar to me and I knew for certain than they were the way home.
When I got close, when the sun came up, I slowed down a little and looked around but where I expected my street to be, there was another one, skirting a park or cemetery, and I realised I must have run the wrong way. Without stopping or letting it bother me in the slightest, I thought Let's try right, turned right and saw a huge red brick hall with the brand insignia of a local brewery, and I knew that I had just run a little bit too far. I knew where I was now and which way to go. Right beyond that brewery I knew a broad road to be and I bounded towards the building, took a risky, long jump onto a shelter roof that was angled downwards ever so slightly, and I made it. As I landed and turned to the next one higher up to jump on that one as well, I heard something wild behind me. Out of the corner of my eye as I jumped again I noticed an apeish monster with shaggy black fur that bared long, metallic talons at me and bounded after me. I paid it little mind and kept jumping, and had I not woken up just then I would have loved to outsmart or fight and defeat it.

*["Auto", the German word for "car", sounds similar to the German name "Otto" if spoken quickly and uncleanly. And the old, regular petrol motor in most cars is called the Ottomotor.]