An unusually chaotic dream sequence

I dreamed I was taking my sister to a restaurant in Taiwan. Before entering the restaurant proper, there was a small stone building you had to pass through first. I went into this building through an open arch, and my sister waited outside. I got a piece of chalk and wrote on the stone wall, inside but where she could see it from outside, the Chinese character for “Buddha.” The restaurant staff complimented me on my excellent chalkmanship. Then under that I wrote the Latin letter p. Realizing that wasn’t clear enough, I added another letter, making it po. This could represent any of several Chinese characters thus transliterated, but the possible meanings I thought of in the dream were “old lady” (including the slang sense of “wife”) and “break, broken.”

My sister, who doesn’t know Chinese, thought what I had written had something to do with tofu and said something like, “I try to avoid eating tofu. This isn’t a restaurant that specializes in vegetarian cuisine, is it?” I assured her it wasn’t, and together we walked through the stone building and out the other side.

There was a stream we had to cross to get to the restaurant itself, and the way across was a narrow earthen bridge overgrown with grass. As we crossed this, I said, “This place has changed a lot. They used to have a tiger here in a cage. Oh, there it is!”

The tiger, uncaged, was swimming in the stream nearby. Wanting to reassure my sister, I said, “Don’t worry, that tiger’s never attacked me. But you know what did attack me once? A goose!” This was not true, but I said it as a way of lightening the mood.

The scene changed, and I was in a library in America with a woman I thought was an ancient Egyptian or something like that. Pointing with her lips in the Navajo fashion, she indicated another library patron and said in perfect if rather stilted English, “Excuse me, why does that man have a long black cylinder tattooed on his arm? Can you explain its cultural significance?”

“Sure,” I said. “He’s probably an admirer of President Abraham Lincoln, who is by convention depicted with a black cylindrical headdress.” I felt as if I were explaining ancient Egyptian iconography to an American rather than vice versa.

When we walked out of the library, there were a bunch of kids outside, dancing around and singing, “Wing-xing-xing! Wing-xing-xing! It’s a wing-xing-xing! Look out, boys, it’s a wing-xing-xing!”

I understood wing to be English and xing-xing to be Chinese for either “great ape” or “star.”