I am riding on a bus. A girl has a stomach ache. She doesn’t know what it is. She is laying flat and being examined – by me? By someone else? They find she has ringworn. She is really upset. I am concerned about it spreading to the others on the bus. There is a bit of chaos and she jumps up at the same time that others do. The bus driver is a big burly woman and she yells at us to sit down and she is complaining that she has “been on the job for 5 or 6 days and doesn’t want to put up with this. Whose driving the bus? She yells. Me or you?  I am. So let me. Sit down. Shut up.” Etc. We do. And as we do I think how do we get rid of this parasite and how do we prevent it from speading.

Then the girl with it stands up and comes to me and she wants to show me the worm which has coiled itself near the skin. I can’t bear to see it. She lifts her shirt to show me her stomach and I raise a pillow to block the view. I just can’t look. She tries hard for some time but then gives up and starts showing others.

We get off the bus and walk for some time. The walk iss energizing for me. I am carrying a very large load and others look at me surprised and I say I’m good and I can manage. Which I can. I fasten a belt around me which makes the load feel lighter and I walk ahead of the group. We are walking up hill. I get to a place where it is quite damp and there are two directions to go. I don’t know which one is the best on but then a neighbhour tells me which path leads to the right area which is a small hidden pathway and then he is leaving. I am about to go that way but I consider that if I go there, the others won’t know which way to go and will think the other more obvious way is the best. So I wait around for the group to join me and then when they are ready I go through a tight passage way. We walk through a cave area and come to an opening. The doorway is high and we have to pull down the stairs.

Pulling them down reveals a knome and the woman says something funny about the knome being there. He jumps up and starts talking. He wants a job but he is the one that I saw at a festival (in waking life) that I didn’t like and had a mental problem and had his busker licence revoked. I shake my head no to the friend so she doesn’t fall for it. We climb up those stairs into another room and have to wait for something, a guide, I think. As we are waiting, another worker comes by and she says they have discovered a new arrangement where they have put the lions with the turtles and the bears with the penguins in new enclosures. The calmness of the turtles makes the lions calm and the lions treat the turtles with gentleness. The penguins do the same for the bears and result in less violence. (As I write this part, another dream image comes to mind but I’m not sure in which order I had it — the image is of a big black grizzly bear running at me and then biting me. I pretended I was dead and closed my eyes and waited for a woman who was calling 911 to come. It didn’t hurt so much but there was intense pressure on my arm and I felt paralyzed. I wondered how big the bite was and how much damage there would be.)

So we climb up the stairs and go into a building. I head to the washroom. There I find that when I have a bowel movement there is a worm also. It’s big and white and mucasy. As I am leaving I wash my hands and am trying to think how to get rid of it and a woman at the sink tells me that it must be big because it made my breath smell bad even.

So I leave and am thinking “Damn, how do I get rid of this?” And a tall First Nations man approaches me and says that I am good at identifying parasites and they have had some found in their food. He asks, “Could I please stand at the table and let him know if I see any?”

“Yes, sure,” I say.

So I go there and after a few hotdogs served, sure enough I see one in a hotdog. I show it to him expecting he will toss the whole thing but he doesn’t, he peels away the worm and then goes to give the dog away. I interrupt him and say I would like that one. So that I take it and toss it when he’s not looking.

After that, I find another one which is like a centipede and by this time I begin to have fun feeling good about making their food safer.

Then it is time to go. I am told my apartment is ready.

As I am opening the door to my apartment I am told that they painted while I was away and I find that the colour is now an army green colour instead of the sunny yellow that it was before. And I find there were things that weren’t put away when I left that I now have to tidy up.

I go to the washroom and find another big long parasite comes out. I take a long stick and move it to see if it is alive. It is the kind where even if it breaks both pieces still stay alive. Yuck, I think, I’ve got to get rid of this.