Paraguay Dream

 In a dream, a botched trip took me all the way to Paraguay. 

"Are we taking this helicopter all the way there?" I said to the ethereal narrator guiding the dream. The chopper was one of those wire work Rat Patrol looking things with the sea foam pontoons for water landings instead of the metal runners.

"No, that would take too long! But we will fly to the Plaza de la Victoria and leave you there. After your talk you can find a way back up north."

In this dream I am to meet in a small un airconditioned conference room at the base of a tall monument. The monument is four stylized metal brush strokes zig zagging up towards the sky and maybe 200 feet above the base, each tip comes together to hold a golden globe. At the bottom of one of the arms is a unassuming handle less door with a wooden table set outside. On it is a placard denoting the meeting

"Tenth Annual Pan American Conference on River Travel"

This placard is neatly framed and printed in looping font under pictures of paddleboats and reed canoes.

But the door doesn't open and I wait until the one thing that happens is a wingless giant transport plane comes slowly falling off the horizon until right before landing it fires off a skirt of hover bags so that it plunks softly onto a tarmac. I don't feel the earth shake and I wait under the shadow of the golden globe and the quiet of the sleepy plaza.

I then find myself on a loaded school bus texting my family from the wifi of a gas station. "I hope to be back north by end of the week. At least the Mexican border." Once the message is confirmed I go and get two five gallon jugs of water from the gas station and three buckets of fried chicken served with a dozen ears of corn.

The ride on the bus is musical. I have never been to Paraguay but my dream makes it look like the interior of home save with taller mountains and denser canopy. The roads are paved yet narrow and cluttered with lot of dirt bikes and horses and llamas. 

The bus pulls over again for food and we get to a road side restaurant built over a hill that look at a dried up lake. The once large lake now dotted with deep yet isolated pools of water among red clay. At the restaurant the owners hawk sea bass and arapina to us letting us select cuts they shuck off with a machete. The last image of the dream is looking into the mega fish's mouth and the undulating back and forth of the ribbed mouth and insides in hues of pink and watermelon bruise red.