The dream takes place on the morning of a test. As a tradition, I usually eat breakfast on test mornings around 4:30 or 5:00 AM, and then study until the test at 8am. Lately I have been eating at Waffle House, but it is always extremely crowded at 5am.

In my dream, I wanted to avoid the crowd, and I had heard that there were good homestyle breakfasts in a certain black neighborhood. My city is very segregated, and me being white, I haven't seen most of the black neighborhoods. But sometimes I do eat or shop in black neighborhoods to avoid crowds. I can't recall the name of the place I visited in my dream. It was probably "Generic Black Neighborhood I Have Never Been Too."

I don't remember any detail about the drive over there, but it was still dark. I came to the business district, and it was typical southern, pre-war, slightly run-down storefronts. I decided to eat at PizzaHut. The PizzaHut was a sidewalk cafe and was the only place open for breakfast. I was a little mad at whoever told me that this area was a good place to get an early meal. On top of all of this, it was raining, and there was only inside seating.

Because I don't like breakfast pizzas, I ordered a Coke and breadsticks with tomato sauce. The chain-smoking waitress looked at me like I was stupid and informed that they didn't serve tomato sauce with their "breakfast biscuits." Amazingly, I had trouble finding a seat at the sidewalk. I eventually found one, and wolfed down my breadsticks in the 5am rain, surrounded by a bunch of soaking-wet black people who looked as grumpy as I did.

After I was done, I paid my check, and the waitress told me I would probably need some duct tape. I asked her why, and she said that soon rush hour would start and the sun would rise. The sun would be shining down the mountain at a funny angle. The people would be driving in towards the factories, and the sun would be in their eyes. Since I was heading in the wrong direction, the commuters would have trouble seeing me, and I needed to make myself as visible as possible.

She told me to turn on my headlights, and tape over the top half of the lights. She also told me to tape the duct tape on my chest to make myself more visible. I looked around me, and other people at the Pizza Hut were beginning to tape themselves up in complicated zigzag patterns. I took the duct tape, but left without applying it.

It was a very treacherous drive back. The sun was blinding, and the people coming in from the opposite direction were swerving all over the road. The sun was shining off my rear-view mirror directly in my eyes. I was also swerving all over the road. I looked at the roll of tape in the front seat, and thought I was an idiot.

Because it was now light, I could see the landscape on the way to school. I drove through a large empty field where the homeless people lived. They lived in beds along the road, and most of them were bunk beds. They had their few possessions scattered around the beds and cardboard boxes. There were address numbers nailed to the beds or boxes. I realized that I had never thought that the homeless had addresses.

I drove back to school to continue to study for my test, and I don't remember any more of this dream. Notes: For the last two nights, I have eaten dinner at restaurants where I am the only white person there. One of those dinners was at a pizza restaurant. During yesterday's drive home, I was blinded by the setting sun and almost ran through a red light. I also saw a homeless man setting up a cardboard box under an overpass.