very expensive restaurant

Dream 1

I was at a restaurant. The restaurant was busy, probably full. I sat on a tall chair at a tall, round table that may have been pretty wide and made of thick wood. The table may have been cluttered with some stuff.

A waiter may have brought a menu. I may have looked over the menu and ordered something. The food I ordered came to something like $100. So the waiter took my order but also told me that I needed to order something else, or maybe he just put this other item on my order. But the total for my food, I now knew, would be $353.

I started to worry. $353 for food was way more than I could afford right now, while I was in between jobs. But the waiter brought the food I'd paid $100 for. I ate it, partly because I was hungry, but also partly because I didn't want to look like I was too poor to pay for the food.

In the middle of my meal, the waiter brought the check, which was probably this huge, yellow piece of paper, like the yellow page of a carbon paper receipt, except as big as paper from a large drawing pad. The check had the $100 item and the other item scrawled out in huge letters, probably in a huge, lined check grid.

I now understood that the other item I'd paid for that had brought my total to $353 wasn't actually food or even a product. It was just something I paid for, because the waiter had brought it up and I'd agreed to pay for it. The waiter smiled at me.

I may have been alone again, eating my food. I thought that it had been really unwise for me to pay so much money for an expense that I'd actually receive nothing from. Plus, now that my total bill was $353, it was really going to eat into the money in my bank account. I started to get afraid that I wouldn't be able to pay for this month's living expenses, including rent.

But I kept on eating. I knew I couldn't turn back on the bill now. So I figured I might as well keep on eating the food. The food may have been some huge plate of stew like goat stew with chickpeas or something in it.