Lunch interrupted

Dream Diary

NOTE: During this dream, I have the vague sense that everything that’s happening has happened before, perhaps only moments earlier. Did I dream the same dream twice last night?

I’m in a relatively empty shopping mall with dark areas all around where I assume stores have gone out of business. I’m there looking for a place to eat lunch.

I approach a restaurant at what I believe to be opening time and an Asian man (mid-50s, business shirt and slacks, very quiet, no smile, no eye contact, no interaction) begins to open the glass door. It’s a foreign restaurant of some kind, possibly Chinese, but not American. I sense that the man at the door might be opening it without permission, and I’m glad that he’s doing so, but before I can enter a middle-aged white man who I take to be the owner steps up behind me.

In the instant before the owner’s arrival, my focus has been on the mostly-retracted deadbolt visible at the edge of the door that the Asian man is opening. The owner is wearing a bright red short-sleeved T-shirt with white lettering on it. He’s a somewhat burly man with lots of upbeat energy, which seems incongruous with the state of the mall. He says they’re not open yet. I ask when he will be open and he says that he doesn’t know “with all the stuff going on in here,” … which I take to mean that there’s something going on in the mall that interferes with opening.

The owner seems half-melancholy and half-amused by this state of affairs. He also says that he can’t get anyone to work in the restaurant. I ask, “So what are you telling me?” and he says that I’m free to come back whenever I like, but he can’t guarantee that they’ll be open when I do. I’m confounded by this, wondering how any diner is supposed to make plans to eat there if no one, including the owner, knows when or even if the place will be open. My impression is that “the stuff going on” and the difficulty finding workers are long-standing issues.

POSTSCRIPT: The dream appears to be a recasting of the difficulty I’ve had for the last week in planning and executing a trip to Aryana’s (Afghan restaurant) for lunch. Although the owner is now indicating in a daily menu posted to Facebook which selections are GF, the names of the dishes are meaningless to me, so I still have to look up each item in order to determine whether it contains meat, which is a bother. And for the last two days (Thursday, Friday), she hasn’t posted a menu at all. I considered just showing up on these days and taking my chances, but decided not to risk it. Thus, it’s as if I’m being told by the owner that I might be able to eat there, or I might not, but there’s no way of knowing for sure.