AND THEN I wonder why my dreams are all transportational in nature! I drive to Ohio and back. I drive to Idaho. Drove to Utah once to look at a car, I'm not proud to admit, and didn't buy it. November I'm going on tour – East Coast and back. I drive because, like Madden, I'm afraid to fly. And at night I dream about flying because I'm afraid to fly. On the rare occasions when I don't dream about flying, I take the train. Or I drive, like in real life. And those dreams are boring and I sleep good, those nights.

I hate when people write about their dreams. I'll write about one dream, and then it's all-you-can-eat buffet time in Berkeley.

In this dream I'm not in the airplane; I'm in the middle of a stadium, standing on solid ground with a lot of other people, watching. I'm part of the crowd, enjoying the oddly macabre spectacle of a small, single-engine plane tethered to the stadium trying to fly away from the stadium and not being able to, of course, because it's tethered to the stadium. Big stadium. Thick, strong rope. Like a chained dog, if you'll pardon the metaphor within the metaphor, the plane repeatedly roars forth and falls back, the crowd catharsisystemically grooving to the futility of it all, the persistent pilot's collectively imagined mounting frustration. Then I have an idea: if he can cut the rope with the propeller ... and this is obviously a trick pilot; even as I think the thought, the plane goes nose down into a temporary dive, slackening the rope, and snips it with the propeller. The crowd gasps. Freedom is a possibility. The plane wins! It's loose, except that in the act of cutting the rope the engine has stalled out, and the pilot is now forced to make a crash landing – which, in revenge for the crowd's sadistic, lusty spectatorship, he chooses to make inside the stadium, taking out with him a big bunch of people, but not me.

As usual, I live to tell about it. Crawdad thinks it means I should get over my fear of flying, as it's obviously not all that much safer down here on solid ground. But she has a vested interest: she loves to travel, and not just by car, which (she argues) is a better way to get to Idaho than to Europe, or Thailand.

My therapist, who is objective and vested interestless, interprets the dream to mean I need to keep going to therapy. This in spite of the apparent subconsciously felt futility of trying to access some deeply embedded inner kernel of realness, or personal liberation, by sitting around in a small room talking about it instead of, say, smoking more pot. Cutting my ties to the past amounts to a psychic disaster, blah blah blah blah feelings blah blah blah blah responsibility.

Yeah, I can't help thinking, but it wasn't me in that plane.

"Then who was it?" the therapist wants to know, eyebrows arched.

Plain as the noses on all of our faces ... And a chorus of cross-eyed Cheap Eats readers responds in unison with me: the 49ers, who will struggle mightily to make the playoffs, it has been revealed (just in time for this year's Pro Football Preview column), only to crash and burn, killing many loyal fans in the process. But not me.

I live to tell about it, as always. Like yesterday after playing music right through lunch, me and Yo-Yo and a lucky-to-be-alive stand-up bass player I won't name on account of laziness went speeding and screaming up San Pablo Avenue from Oakland to Albany, bending yellow lights and breaking every traffic law in the books, that's how hungry we were.

Yo-Yo was steering us toward the best Japanese noodle place in the Bay Area, but, to our dismay and to the danger of drivers everywhere, they're closed on Mondays. The second-best Japanese restaurant on San Pablo, to continue the nightmare, doesn't open for dinner until five. It was four, and none of us had had lunch. Some of us hadn't even had breakfast.

We zoomed back toward Berkeley and Bacheeso's Garden Bistro, a buffet place Yo-Yo's also been talking up. They serve breakfast and lunch stuff – eggs, sandwiches, pasta dishes – but we were there for the buffet ($6.80).

Good things: beef kebab, green beans and okra, celery-rhubarb chicken, stuffed tomatoes, all kinds of salads ... I think the best thing I had in my three times through (in about as many minutes) was roasted red and yellow peppers with sesame seeds on them.

Bad things: roast turkey (dry), and the chicken-and-rice patties (just bad).

A lot of things were cold and/or crusty and/or dry. Get there earlier than we did.

It's got a big fruity mural, nice tile floor, chairs on wheels, an out-of-order fountain in the middle of the place, and a couple of indoor street lights. Dreamy, in other words.

Bacheeso's Garden Bistro. 2501 San Pablo (at Dwight), Berk. (510) 644-2035. Daily: 7:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Takeout available. No alcohol. MasterCard, Visa. Wheelchair accessible. Dan Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).