A shady deal at the pharmacy
I dreamt today that I went to the pharmacy to buy something, but some of these things were pointless: some reusable nappy, something else equally superfluous. I gave up on two of the four things, and the pharmacist offered to give me change partly in pounds, because she happened to have them. I thought that, since pounds are expensive, the change she offers me is disproportionately large. I said: “and are you sure this is the correct conversion?”. She checked on the computer system she had in the pharmacy and there it came up to her that the pounds are counted with a factor of x2. It surprised me a lot, but I thought: “well okay, if she wants to give me more than I am entitled to, and she has some confirmation of that, then I will go with the flow of that”. So I accepted to receive the rest provided in this way, even though I had the feeling that it was unfair, and that it was some kind of suspicious deal I was getting into. The emotional mood of the situation was kind of strange, as if this girl wanted me to take this money, as if this was somehow staged or intended. Immediately after this, everyone suddenly started to leave the pharmacy, and a senior member of staff said that there was now going to be a pharmacists' strike, or something like that. When I left the pharmacy I thought: “it was dishonest of me to accept so much change, but well – that’s what experimentation is, living instead of yogaic alienation: I choose to commit a particular imperfection consciously, and I look carefully at the consequences”. I went to the main square of the town I was in to exchange those pounds, and there I saw the huge electronic panels of the main exchange office, on which – similar to the stock exchange, though more in the style of 1980s electronic displays – a great variety of currency rates were displayed. But. there was no GBP rate anywhere! I was very puzzled by this, and started asking what was going on. And then I found out that there has just been made a radical devaluation of the pound in England, combined with moving to an offensive military policy: the pound had collapsed to 2 złoty, and England had started some kind of war campaign, with a universal conscription of young cadets into the army. At one point I became a Korean talking to a colleague who had been conscripted into the cadets, and, escorting him away, I found myself in some dystopian military development estate that was a de facto concentration camp from which there was no escape. Trying to get out of there, I immediately drew attention to myself, and a chase was initiated after me. On the way, I saw how the mobilised young people (of both sexes), whom I recognised, had become workers in this camp, extremely passive and indifferent. They were unable, but also unwilling, to give me any help. Trying to escape, through some abandoned stables and enclosures (something like the backstages of a zoo), gardens, fences, and some small gaps between buildings, I made my way out of this great camp-estate system to its boundary: I came to the edge of a great desert, from which it was clear that this whole system stretches out to the horizon, and that beyond it was only a great, red, dead desert. On the edge of the desert sat a homeless man who had pulled, or dug, a book out of some burrow in the clay. I (or the man who/inside whom I was at that moment in the dream – for I was partly active and partly "it was happening to me") said (has said) to him: “write the word: «Mahārāja»”. He began to write this word, as if in devanāgarī, but for some reason as one symbol, as if it were a Chinese character. I felt that it was unclear whether the pursuit of me would continue in the desert, and I was generally fed up with it all, so I woke up.
Warszawa-Wola, 12.V.21; transl. from Polish: Brzeźno, 16.I.23