I met a girl and her husband in a bus station. I knew the girl had recently advertised that she was taking riders in her car. I stopped her and asked her if she were still taking riders. She didn't seem quite sure. She said something about furnishing a car one way if the rider would furnish the car the other way.

She sat down on a table and began looking at the cover of a magazine which appeared to be either "Time" or "Newsweek." Her husband sat down on the other side of the table and began looking about the room.

I sat next to her and also began looking at the cover of the magazine. The picture seemed rather abstract and the girl tried to clarify what it meant. At first I thought it was a picture of part of the eastern coastline of England which was being battered by a tidal wave. On closer scrutiny I saw a jumble of old cars from the 1950s which seemed to have been washed up in a pile by the wave.

I announced to the girl my interpretation of the picture. I said it was a part of the American coastline, probably in Florida. Pointing out a Japanese flag with it's red sun in the middle and a smaller British Union Jack which could both be seen on the shore line, I said that the waves represented the inundation of America with foreign imports.

The girl seemed quite impressed by my perspicacity and she saw immediately that I had correctly interpreted the picture. She began rummaging through a pile of magazines looking for another picture.

I meanwhile began thinking that if she wanted to play the picture-interpretation game that it would be better to use art paintings. A pile of paper with pictures of paintings on them was lying on the table; I began looking through them. I pulled out one which was a famous abstract-type painting of four nude dancers holding hands in a circle and dancing on a dark blue background. I concluded that Matisse had been the artist. The picture had apparently been a two-page spread in a magazine and when it had been torn out, it had been torn in two. I held a page in each hand and held the two sides together.

Meanwhile the attention of the girl had been caught by four young teenage girls who had walked up behind us. They were carrying a large painting which appeared to be on cloth and was about three meters wide and a meter tall. The painting was of the faces of the four teenage girls. They were arranged in a zigzag order from top to bottom and each face was a different color. It was a bit amateurish but still quite well-done.

Apparently, the girls had brought the painting here to sell and were in the process of auctioning it off and were accepting bids. The girl I was with offered them $10 for the painting. They smiled at so low a bid, but wrote it down anyway.

The girl showed me another picture to unravel. She opened a book and showed me a map of Europe. It was apparently a historical map and had a legend which said something about "Hamburg." It looked as if at one time Hamburg had been the capital of a large area which was colored orange. At the borders of the orange color was a line with crosses on it which represented a railroad.

The map was distorted. It looked as if it were a photograph taken from above the earth and was therefore curved. The middle was in proportion but the edges weren't. Apparently, the girl wanted me to somehow determine whether German-speaking people had any claim to land not presently occupied by Germans because their ancestors had once owned the land. But I only surmised that was what she wanted and was unsure.

I said, "Well, first lets see if we can find Warsaw."

I began looking for Warsaw on the map.

Copyright 2004 by luciddreamer2k@gmail.com