“Do you ever have it where you don’t know if something was a dream or not?” She asked me.

I said without much interest in the conversation, that yes, there were I suppose things I had like that. There were times I had memories that I was not sure if they were real or not, or memories that I had, but once I truly focused on them I would realize that they were completely untrue. I’m not sure if this was what she was talking about or not.

“This will probably sound silly, but I have this really vivid memory or something, and I’m not sure if it is real or not.” She continued as she stared into her beer, as if what she was saying was written in her dark beer.

“I thought it would’ve tasted different, it’s just a normal dark beer.” She said.

Before this, I had been talking about how I wasted the other day just watching TV.

“What had you been watching?” She asked.

Netflix.

“Oh really? What are you watching on Netflix? Anything you can recommend?”

Not really, I really like Star Trek. I’m recently addicted to rewatching Deep Space Nine, the Star Trek series from the late 90’s when I was a teenager, a show that was perfect for a dorky teenager, with plots about a foreign religion, and delving into the complexities of foreign races. I don’t say all of this to her though, I don’t really want to admit how much I actually like Star Trek, so I ended up (without consciously thinking of any of this) just saying that I’m watching a Star Trek show I liked when I was a kid.” That’s when she asked about dreams.

“This dream, well, I am now assuming it was a dream, but I’m really not sure, was about Star Trek. I’ve never watched Star Trek, so it is a weird thing to dream about, and perhaps a weirder thing to be true, but there was this book which was about people from now, from our time, who were transported into the time of Star Trek. It was about their life there.”

“I have searched my parents house up and down for the book, but I can’t find it.” She continued as she finished her beer. She scans the menu again for a different beer, pausing at one that caught her interest until she noticed it was only 4.5% alcohol, and she continues scanning up and down the list.

“The beers are expensive, I don’t want to spend 1,000 yen for a pint and not even get a buzz! We’re trying to have fun here!”

“Anyways, as I haven’t seen Star Trek, or at least I don’t think I have, and while the memory of this book is vivid, the contents are not, and so now I can only guess what exactly this book was exactly about, why the memory of it is so vivid, and what it all means.

She had decided on her next beer. It was 8.5%. I had finished my fruity beer, and was thinking of having a wheat beer next. We had commented how she was having manly beers and I was having girly beers. Neither of us minded, well, she minded that her dark beer tasted so average, but not about much else.

“To me Star Trek is this world where everyone wears these gold uniforms and looks all serious. There’s some sexiness, but in a very 1960’s American way. Is that when Star Trek started? It’s all futuristic and serious, but people are sexy in that pre-hippy way. I’m not even sure if that makes sense.”

“People travel on expeditions in small groups. They get transported to locations. They look around. They have lasers.” (I didn’t interrupt to say “it’s phasors”).

“There are green people and blue people. Each different race has one facial difference compared to us. A big chin, a weirdly coloured nose, pointy ears. Anyways, that doesn’t matter.” Our next beers came, and while I didn’t think her semi-correct description of Star Trek was especially deep, I enjoyed listening to it. My wheat beer was good, and she enjoyed her beer too. I forget what it was besides the alcohol percentage.

“They transport to those locations. They go to a small village. There’s a peace, but then a confrontation and some lasers go off, the Star Trek people learn something, they are serious, but there is some sort of moral and they all transport back to their space ship.”

“This beer is good, do you want to try some?” I didn’t. My beer was already making me feel full, and we had another pizza coming.

“We can always take the pizza to go you know. May as well enjoy the beers without worry! Anyways, that’s how I imagine Star Trek, I guess. Now, the book was about people from our time going to that world. Can you imagine? If right now you and me, eating pizza and drinking beer just suddenly were transported to this world? There were serious 1960’s sexy men and women all around us, making peace with us, they are nice to us. However, then there is a confrontation, perhaps we do something that they find morally wrong. Perhaps people don’t kiss anymore? Maybe alcohol is banned? I guess if it was banned there would be none to drink though. Anyways, we upset them somehow, and then their lasers go off. Maybe one of us would then die. That would make all of them serious, looking at us, thinking about how they killed one of us and what it all meant. All we wanted to do was kiss or something.”

“They’d probably kill you I guess. They wouldn’t kill me. If this was a book, a woman being angry would probably give greater pause to the reader, no? It would also give pause to the Star Trek people. They’d empathize with me crying, or being hysterical, assuming that I was crying or hysterical. They would look at each other, and they would have all learned something. You would be dead, and I would be stuck in that Star Trek universe.”

Our next pizza came. It had lots of veggies on it. I was sipping my beer to make room for it, but she was already half done her beer.

“I guess there would need to be a happy ending though, right? I mean, would the point be that people in our time can be viewed as weird? Then we would need the happy ending. Or would that just get ignored, and would whatever moral lesson the Star Trek people learned be enough?”

The pizza was great. It was a little hard to eat, and I didn’t want to eat like a pig in front of her, but I settled for destroying the napkins around me instead of actually attempting to eat it with the class that anyone over the age of 12 should have. Washing down the pizza with my wheat beer was great. As I do this and she is now focused on eating her pizza, and washing it down with her beer, I think about the story where I, or someone like me, is dead. Where she, or someone like her, is (hopefully?) hysterical, and what sort of ending the story could have.

I went to go to the toilet and look at my phone. I scrolled through a feed on social media of people angry, happy and nihilistic about various things. I came back, and she goes to the toilet, so I continued to use my phone. I posted a picture of the pizza and beer with some dumb comment.

When she came back and we got ready to pay the bill.

“I wonder if this book really exists? I wonder if it is similar to what I described? What a stupid thing to have such a strong memory about, isn’t it?”

Then with clarity I remembered being 6 years old, living in the Haida Gwaii, and having someone offer me grey potato chips. I’ve never seen grey potato chips before. I wonder if this was a dream. I wonder what it meant.