I was staying at an exotic luxury place in a high-end location in the center of some city. I knew these things in my dream. No reason for being there was ever given. Everything was very fancy, chrome, blue windows, steel, and muted white furniture, modern, and new, although never named. I’d been put up in the place and was newly arrived and just familiarizing myself with it. A ground-floor location, several parts of my huge place was open to the street, something that I didn’t find odd, but enjoyed.

Background done, the action began when I walked across the place and accidently kicked a can, sending it out into the traffic. Dusk was settling in and lights were just coming on. Exasperated, I resolved to retrieve the can because everything looked so clean and gorgeous. As I went out to get it, a car hit the can, sending it flying further down the road where another car coming from the opposite direction flattened it.

More irritated, I hastened to get the can. I could see a line of cars accelerating up the double lane toward the can. I would need to rush.

I didn’t make it. Forced back by the oncoming traffic, I then saw a stream of such flattened cans in the street under the cars. I was disgusted.

“Asshole,” someone shouted. I saw two men. Both were white, with mustaches and long brown hair. One was tall and the other was short. One of them had yelled. I thought they meant me.

Seeing me seeing them, they chuckled and said, “We weren’t calling you an asshole. We were going whoever threw their can out an asshole. Unless it was you who did it. Then we are calling you an asshole.”

“No,” I answered, “I didn’t throw a can.” I explained what’d been going on.

They noticed a small hardcover book I carried and began talking about it. An older book, the tome was about three racing drivers, but the novel was considered ‘literary’. The two men highly recommended it. I responded that I was a novelist and the book enticed me because of its literary reputation, but I’d also been a racing fan.

We were walking by then. I was looking for my place and couldn’t find it. They invited me to join them at a restaurant for a drink. I agreed and we went into a red-theme place — red carpet and bar, red leather seats, red lights, red walls and curtains, red neon. As we chatted, the tall one went off for our drinks and the short one said that he hoped I was serious about what I said about the book and that I wasn’t just going along with them.

I told him, no, and we started chatting about racing. I told him that the late sixties and early seventies had captured my deepest racing interest. I enjoyed the three-liter Formula 1 cars of that age, especially Lotus and the 72, but also the Tyrrells, the Indy cars dominated by the Offy and Ford engines, the sports-racing cars of LeMans like the Chaparral 2D, and the Can Am cars like the McLarens, the Lola T70, and the 2J. (Yes, I actually said all of this in the dream.) They remarked with smiles that it sounded like I really knew my cars. The tall one said, “You should meet my sister.”

We’d finished our drinks and I decided to go. The dream’s final sequences involved me retracing my steps, looking for where I was staying, and then finding it.

Dream end. It was all quite vivid and sharply remembered.