beautiful, funny, sad & true

Last night I had a strange and funny dream.

I was working at a family-style restaurant (something I’ve never done in real life), and I’ve been told to hang up some flyers in the foyer by the door.  I started to hang them, when a grubby farmer walked into the restaurant, looking as if he had just stepped out of his field.  He had parked a pair of tiny tractors outside the building, next to the window of the foyer where I was hanging flyers.  Whenever I moved in the window, the fronts of the tractors would follow me.  I moved back and forth, testing them, and then turned to the farmer and said, “They’re like goats or something.”  He laughed and walked over to sit down, by which time the twin tiny tractors had driven themselves into the restaurant to park themselves near where the farmer was sitting.  A minute later, a herd of actual goats traipsed into the restaurant and filled up the entire lobby, where there were also people waiting in line to come inside the restaurant.

I finished hanging the flyers and squeezed my way through the myriad of goats to check the waiting list and start seating the people.  On my way past a woman wearing a sundress, one of the buttons of my suit jacket snagged a strap of her dress and made it fray.  “Oh my gosh,” I said, “I’m so sorry!  Wow, the only thing I could have snagged you with just happened to snag the only thing you’re wearing that could be snagged.  I wonder what the odds of that are.”  She didn’t seem concerned about it, and in fact seemed much more worried about the goat herd.

I decided it was time for my lunch break, so I made my way through the people and goats and went outside to the parking lot.  I walked to a convenience store that was at the far end of the lot.  My plan was to take a shortcut through the store to get to the main street, but once I was inside, it was extremely difficult to get out again.  Aisles turned into dead ends, and there were no other doors to speak of.  I found an enclosed seating area with a kids’ playroom, and I crawled over the wall of that to get to the street.

I was on the lookout for McFamousCrappyBurgerPlace, and there were actually two within easy walking distance.  The one to my left, across the busy street, was slightly closer, so I opted for that one.  I walked in and was greeted by a cute girl with dark blonde hair.  I ordered a chicken sandwich and some fries.  “Small.  No. . .medium.”  She told me the total would be ten dollars.

“What?  That seems a little high.”

“Well, you did order two of each.”

“No, no, it’s just me.  I only need one.  Thanks.”

She smiled and tapped some buttons on the cash register.  I handed her my debit card, which she swiped and then turned around to grab a bag of chicken nuggets, which she set on the counter in front of me as she returned my card.  “The rest will be out in just a second.”

Before long my food arrived, although not exactly as I had planned.  The girl grabbed two large, flat, clear plastic bags and filled one with an enormous amount of chicken nuggets and the other with an enormous amount of French fries.  “Um,” I said, “what am I supposed to do with all of this?  And I ordered a sandwich, anyway.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said sweetly.  “That’s all we have at the moment.”

“Well, I guess this’ll have to do,” I said, and then I smiled flirtatiously at her.  “I thought we had a relationship that was built on trust.”

“Uhh. . .we do. . .I guess,” she stammered, not wanting to play along with my little joke.

I was undeterred.  “I still trust you, for what it’s worth.”  She smiled, but didn’t say anything else.  “Well, I guess we have a relationship based on our mutual love of music, then.  Or maybe it’s just our animal attraction for each other?”  She smiled more widely, and I said, “Can I please have some ketchup and some sweet-and-sour sauce?  Maybe two?”  She retrieved them from under the counter, and dropped them into the bags I was holding open in front of her.  I gave her a smirk and walked outside with my bags of McFeces.  I reached into the chicken bag, opened the sweet-and-sour sauce, dipped a nugget, and popped it into my mouth as I walked back across the street toward work.

Last night I had an especially detailed, bizarre and beautiful dream.

* * * * *

I’m at my dad’s house (although he’s not my real-life dad) watching some television show about government secrets, everything from technology to covert special-ops agencies.  Just for fun, I decide to grab a piece of paper and write down some of the things that are mentioned on the show, so I can check them out on the internet some other time.  My dad comes home, and he has a couple of friends with him who I’ve not met before.  They walk into my dad’s home office room and close the door behind them.  I walk into the kitchen, and just as I do, I hear a snippet of their conversation, and they’re talking about these same secret agencies.  I compare the names to the ones I’ve written on the notepad, and they match up perfectly.  This is how I come to realize that my dad works for one of these agencies.

I leave and go home to my place, which is a small building of one-bedroom apartments that’s located on the edge of a bluff overlooking the ocean.  I live near the end of the row; there’s only one apartment behind mine, and then the hillside slopes down toward the parking lot, with another bluff behind that.  So our building is built on a jetty, of sorts, that sticks out into the ocean.  It’s a beautiful place, but very isolated, and the only other person who’s ever around is the guy who lives in the unit behind mine, at the back of the building.  His name is Raymond Hsu, a Chinese-American guy about my own age, who is very quiet and reclusive.  He’s a computer guy, and spends long hours programming.  His apartment is immaculate, and it’s obvious that he takes great pride in living there.  He has a little white cat who often comes over to visit me, but I never see Raymond and the cat together at the same time.  After a while, I begin to wonder about this non-coincidental coincidence, and finally reach the conclusion that Raymond is the cat. He can somehow morph from human form into cat form, and I am determined to find out how he does it.

The next time the cat comes over, I say, “Hello, Raymond.”  The cat looks surprised, turns away, and walks back into his own apartment.  A minute later, Raymond walks outside to where I’m standing against the railing, looking out to sea.  “So,” he says, “you’ve discovered my secret.”

“For a while now I’ve thought this was the case, but I didn’t exactly know how to bring it up.  I just had to test my theory.  Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret safe.”

“I’m too shy to interact much with people,” he says, “but I know you like cats, and I figured that would be a safe way for us to meet, even though you didn’t really know what was going on yet.  But you figured it out.  Well done.”

He invites me into his apartment, where he pours two glasses of white wine, hands one to me, and shows me around.  His comfortable living room has a view of the ocean on two sides, and there are long tables of computers and monitors and bookshelves that run the length of each wall, underneath the windows, so he can gaze out the window while he’s working.  I tell him this is by far the nicest home office I’ve ever seen.

“Thank you,” he replies.  “I decided at some point that if I was going to work from home, I ought to make my home as beautiful and enjoyable as I could.  I was very lucky to find this apartment.”

“I agree,” I say.  “I love living here.”

“You’re welcome to stop by any time.  Really.  No matter what form I’m taking.”  We both laugh a little.

A woman of undeterminable age suddenly appears on the sidewalk outside our apartment building to speak with Raymond.  Actually, that’s not entirely accurate; it’s as if her age is fluctuating between ten and fifty years, slowly but perceptibly.  Her face has a greenish tinge to it that is also fluctuating.  I see her a handful of times over the next few weeks, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend or two, and they seem to be interviewing Raymond.  Her two friends are also of fluctuating age, so I assume they are related somehow.

A few days later, while I’m out walking on the beach, I discover the nature of their interviews when I see the four of them (Raymond, the woman and two slightly younger men) in the surf, talking quietly.  The woman seems to have the ability to change herself into a frog, Raymond into a cat, and the two men have similar abilities that aren’t apparent.  I wave to Raymond and walk over to join their group.  He introduces me to Rachel and the two men.  They look a bit concerned about my presence there, but Raymond reassures them, “He’s okay.  He knows about me.”  His features become slightly more feline for a few seconds, but he retains his human form, to show me how he does it, and that he’s in control of it.  Rachel, who is the ten-year-old version of herself, starts to change to a frog, then reverses it in the same way that Raymond did.

These people are their own separate race of shape-shifters.  Rachel and the two men explain to me that they’ve been looking for others like them for quite some time, without success, so when they found out about Raymond, they wanted to be sure that he was one of The People, so they interviewed him at great length.  So far, I’m the only one outside of their race who knows of their existence.  I tell them I’m prepared to keep it that way, if that’s what they want.

The dream changes just then, and I’m back at my dad’s house watching that show again; this episode is about a series of factories in which aliens disassemble humans and rebuild them from the separate parts.  They create these humanoid creatures, and then they pull out human eyes and cut off human noses and ears, whereupon they attach them to the hideous creatures they’re creating.  This is apparently one of the secrets the government is keeping. The show continues, and talks about veterans of the armed forces who have lost body parts in various wars, and who have been restored using this kind of technology.  The process requires massive amounts of medication in order to keep the vets alive.  Most of these men are little more than deformed vegetables, whiling away their lives on beds in remote hospitals.  Some can be seen and heard crying loudly, some are merely lying prostrate and silent.  One complains into the camera about having seen people who could change into animals while he was in Iraq, and then he spirals off into stream-of-consciousness gibberish, but I decide that my new friends need to know about this.

I go back home.  Raymond sees me, comes out, and asks if I’d like to go for a walk.  “Sure,” I say, and shut the door behind me.  We walk along a narrow, curvy highway that runs along the edge of the cliff beyond the jetty on which our building is located.  He tells me he’s gay, and asks if we can hold hands.  I don’t see a problem with this, so I agree, and we hold hands the way children do, without the fingers interlocked.  He says, “That’s very nice of you.  Gay guys always want more, like kissing and all that, but sometimes it’s nice just to hold hands.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that with me,” I tell him.  “I’m not gay, so I don’t go for the kissing or anything, but holding hands seems like it’s harmless enough.  Besides, you’re a shape-shifter; it would never work between us.”   I laugh.

Suddenly there is lots of traffic on the highway, and we have to let go and walk single-file.  There’s been an oil spill of some sort on the road, and it’s very slick, so much so that we’re having difficulty walking, and we almost slide over the edge of the cliff a couple of times.  A truck barrels down on us, and I grab Raymond’s hand and jump into the air with him in tow behind me.  We are flying over the ocean and over various parks and places that look like they’d be safe – albeit uncomfortable – places to land.  I’m unable to land, however, so we just keep flying until we come to a place where a small river meets the ocean.  Rachel is sitting in the sand next to the river.  She sees us and waves, and I’m able to land near her.  Raymond and I land feet first and knee-deep in the mud alongside Rachel.  She claps and laughs, telling us that was an excellent landing.  Raymond and I are laughing too, and we extricate ourselves from the mud and trudge down into the river to wash the mud off ourselves.

We climb out of the river and start to walk along a path in the adjoining park.  I tell the two of them about the vet I saw on TV who seems to have seen more people like them.  We talk about how dangerous it would be to go over to Iraq, and Rachel asks, somewhat sarcastically, “Why couldn’t they be somewhere nice that’s NOT a war zone?  Why do they have to be there, of all places?”

Rachel leaves us then, and we walk home, not holding hands this time.  I decide it’s probably not the smartest idea to encourage that very often.  We arrive at home and walk down into the parking garage behind our building.  There are these huge wooden beams that support the roof over our cars, and beyond the parking lot is a small grassy area.  We walk through the wooden beams toward the grass, and as soon as we get to the grass, a very strange feeling comes over me.

“I’ve seen this before,” I tell Raymond.  “I’ve watched this discussion happen, but I’ve seen it from a different vantage point. . .from over there!”  I point to a spot in the distance, toward a group of houses nestled along the edge of the wooded hillside, trying to work out how and when this could have occurred.  Am I a time traveler, or am I merely hallucinating?  I don’t feel as though I’m hallucinating, so the answer seems to be that I’m a time traveler.

In my first dream of the evening, I was on a vacation with Brother, Dad and Stepmom, and somehow we spent a decent amount of time looking for a liquor store.  I ended up with a backpack full of bottles, including a gigantic bottle of whiskey.  This is not, however, the dream I’m going to focus on in this story.  I did need to reference that tidbit, though, because it showed up in the dream I AM going to tell you about.

It started on my bike.  I was riding down a long hilly road that got progressively steeper and steeper as I got closer to the stop sign at the end of the hill, where the road made a ‘T’ intersection with another.  (If you happen to be familiar with the town of Yakima, Washington, it was that bit of 66th from the top of the hill down to Summitview, although it was much steeper in the dream.)  I was riding at full speed, and there were two other people riding near me on their own, a young guy and a young woman.  The woman was riding fast too, but not quite as fast as I was, so I passed her and gave her a smile as I did.  She put on a bit of speed and kept right up, though, and we both watched the guy, who was attempting a stunt.  At forty miles per hour, he lifted his feet onto the seat, let go of the handlebars, stood up to his full height and jumped off toward the side of the road.  He landed perfectly, like a gymnast dismounting from a high bar, and landed near the stop sign.  His bike went skittering off to the ditch on the opposite side of the road.  It was amazing; a perfectly executed stunt.

“Oh, nice!” I yelled, as the woman and I pulled up and stopped at the sign.  “I’ve never seen anything like that before!”

The dream’s location changed, and the three of us (along with many others) were walking in the hallway of a college building.  I walked between them and said, “Isn’t that a great hill?  What were you guys out there for?  The high speed [to the woman], and that stunt [to the guy]?”  They each said something funny in response, and while I can’t remember the exact wording, each answer had something to do with waiting until the last minute to get to Professor [wordplay on the professor's name, which had something to do with physics]‘s class.  We went our own ways, and I told them I’d see them around.

Then the dream changed, and I was in the hotel room that Brother and I were sharing.  There were two beds in the room, and he was up earlier than I was, rummaging through my backpack (that was full of the liquor we’d bought in my previous dream).  He pulled out each of the bottles and inspected it carefuly, as if to check the ingredients for a recipe he was concocting in his head. He had set a glass of red wine on the bedside table.  I rolled over and looked at the clock.  It was 1:51 in the afternoon.   I groaned and rolled back.  “If that wine is meant for me, it’s too early,” I said.  “It’ll just be sitting there for hours.”  He disappeared into the other room for a minute, then reappeared with a second glass of wine that he placed nearer to me.  Clearly, he intended to drink the wine in addition to whatever he was about to create.  “What are you making?” I asked, rolling over to watch what he was doing.

“Blemmys.”

“What the heck is a ‘blemmy’?”

“See for yourself.”  He held out a bag and poured a small amount of light, airy candy that looked like unpopped popcorn and miniature lemon slices into my hand.  He made a comic gesture of raising his own hand to his mouth, to show that he expected me to do the same.  The candy crackled a bit in my hand, and exploded like Pop Rocks the second I put it in my mouth.  It was a delicious combination of blueberry and lemon; hence the name of the drink.  He mixed blueberry vodka with a slosh from the giant whiskey bottle, then added a bit of the lemony candy stuff.  It fizzed as if it was boiling over, but he took a sip and smiled.

I rolled over and attempted to go back to sleep, which is when Mom walked into the room (not Stepmom, with whom we were on vacation), saw the liquor and wine flowing, and was horrified.  She walked right past Brother to the bed in which I was turned away from the mixological chemistry experiments.  A long-time teetotaler, she saw the wine glass on my bedside table (which she had no way of knowing was untouched), and assumed I was drunkenly passing out.

“Will you look at yourself?” she scorned.  “It’s not even two o’clock in the afternoon!”

I still had the covers pulled over my head, and while remaining rolled over, I reached a hand out to point at Brother.  “His idea,” I groaned.  “I had nothing to do with this.”  She stormed out of the room, without a word to Brother.  I got myself vertical, climbed out of bed, and threw on a pair of jeans from my nearby suitcase.   My friend John walked in the room a couple of minutes later, and Brother offered him a drink, which he gladly accepted, but hesitated slightly before sipping, when he saw the fizz.

“That’s delicious,” John said.  “What is it?”

“Blemmy,” Brother and I said, in perfect unison.

“Do you have anything inimitable to say about it?” I asked John.

“Yes, actually,” John replied.  “I’ve learned that ‘inimitable’ and ‘imitable’ have the exact same meaning.”

“Now, see, there you go,” I said, laughing.  “That’s just the kind of thing I was hoping you’d say.”

For the last three or four weeks in a row, my subconscious and libido have been bombarding me with dreams – sometimes two in the same night – of romantic connections.  A couple of the dreams have involved people I know in real life, but the vast majority of them involved new people.  The shortest possible way to describe them is that I’m usually out somewhere doing something, and I meet someone in one of a variety of ways, and we have this instant and deep rapport.  Sometimes we end up going off together, and sometimes we don’t, but there’s always the feeling of overwhelming mutual connection.

Last night, though, I had a very interesting variation on this theme.  I had two dreams, the first of which was a surreal version of this type of dream, but the second I spent trying to explain it (in a very nonsensical, funny and completely incorrect way) to my friend, after he and his wife got in an argument.

The first one I’ll keep short.  I’d just met someone, and we had made plans to meet later that day.  I was home changing my clothes, and the air started to ‘wobble’, and she slowly started to materialize in the room near where I was standing.  “Wow, you can do that?” I asked, as I pulled a black sweater over my head.

“Sure can,” she said.

“But doesn’t it negatively affect space-time?”  [ASIDE:  That's a very 'Doctor Who' thing to ask, and so is the materialization out of thin air thing; clearly I've been watching a lot of that show lately.]

“Yes, it does, but I try not to do it very often, so I don’t accidentally end up in two places at the same time.  That would be a problem.”  She had become fully incarnate (such a strange word) by now, and stepped into my arms.  We kissed each other gently.  As the dream progressed, and we’d been seeing each other for a little while, she would occasionally materialize somewhere, and we got to the point where I could reach through the air and find her at the slightest movement of air, so that she’d pretty much show up right in my arms.

The dream changed, and I was driving in Northwest PDX in my red Honda to meet her at her place downtown.  It was during the winter, and the roads were icy.  My car slid crazily across both lanes of the narrow residential road, and ended up on the sidewalk.  I kept trying to regain control of it, but it was to no avail.  It slid along the wall of a large brick building, which smashed the passenger side, and then it bounced into a telephone pole, but still kept running.  I uttered a rapid-fire series of F-bombs under my breath as my car slid all the way to the end of the street, and finally came to a rest when it slammed sideways into a guard rail.  Unhurt but unable to find my cell phone, I climbed out of the car and started to walk in the direction of downtown, thinking, “How am I going to get to her, or to let her know about this?”

* * * * *

That’s where the first dream ended, and when I finally was able to get back to sleep three hours later, that’s pretty much where the second one picked up.

* * * * *

I was walking along the road, trying to remember where I’d left my car.  I had a feeling that my lady friend was going to be angry, or at least disappointed, by my extreme tardiness.  Just then, one of my friends drove by, with his wife in the passenger seat.  They rolled down the windows of their four-door Cadillac and asked if I needed a ride.  I agreed, and quickly jumped into the back seat.

Before long, they started to argue about something, and I became very uncomfortable.  My friend got angry and started driving erratically, at sixty miles an hour along Burnside, weaving across all three lanes.  I told them, “That’s okay, really; you guys can just drop me off anywhere.  I can get around fine.”

He slowed the car down and pulled over, but when he stopped, his wife got out, shouting, “How could you do this?  I’m so angry at you!”

He retorted sarcastically, “But you were only angry from twenty-five to sixty,” referring to how fast he’d been driving.  “Until then, everything was just great.”

The dream changed again, and he and I were at his house, in the kitchen while he made dinner for his two young daughters.  I was telling them all that I’d had this crazy dream and met this woman who could materialize at will out of thin air.  “I wish I could remember her name – MacLean or MacKean, or something like that – she was a model for a jeans company of the same name, which she owned, and she was also going to create her own flavor of Doritos.”  From nowhere, I pulled out a bag with plain black packaging.  I held the bag toward my friend and his daughters, who looked skeptically back and forth from the bag to me and back again, so I told them the first thing that came into my head, which was an absolute lie.  “I work for Frito-Lay, and they’ve been developing these for quite a while now, so it’s totally okay.  They don’t taste like normal Doritos, though; see for yourselves.”  I grabbed a handful and popped them into my mouth, and the three of them tentatively followed suit.

Oh, how I wish I could remember the rest of this dream, but you’ll have to take my word for the fact that this one was by far the most interesting of the bunch, which is why I haven’t shared any of the others.

Thank you, Subconscious and Libido.

I had two dreams this morning that were slightly related, and their common thread was that I had two quasi-separate lives.  Two apartments, two sets of friends, two cars. . .and it was getting to be a bit much to deal with, so I was attempting to merge them all and simplify my existence.

One of my apartments (I never did go to the other, I just knew that it existed) was a large studio on the top floor of a hundred-year-old, three-story mansion (where I used to live in real life).  The building was being renovated in a very unusual way.  The construction company had cut the top two stories off of the house and placed them in the yard, then rebuilt the entire rest of the house cheaply, while they renovated the part that was in the yard.  The plan was to fix up the unattached section, then reattach it somehow by demolishing what they’d done to the original house.  Totally bizarre, and from the street, it looked like there were two big houses on the lot.  The unattached half still had our stuff that was in storage inside, so I and the other tenants made a bunch of trips back and forth between the two buildings looking for whatever we needed.

There were people from the neighborhood crawling all over the unattached building, so they could look inside and see what the beautiful house looked like.  There were even people who wanted to rent units in that section not realizing that it was only a temporary structure.  I had a few friends over, and we were starting to get annoyed by all the people running around on the roof, and up the stairways.

Then the dream changed, and I was in a movie theater.  It was a very large room that was laid out in a square, with three movie screens, each on a different wall, with three separate areas of bench seats, each of which faced the nearest screen.  You entered at the back of the room and sat wherever you wanted.  I asked one of the ushers how that worked.  Three movies at the same time?  One movie over three screens?  He said that it depended.  Sometimes, they’d use only one screen.  If it was an especially popular movie, they’d use all three simultaneously.  Occasionally, they’d rent the space out for parties, and use the screens to show videos or display images from the party itself.

I sat on my bench, and a blonde girl a few years younger than I came over and started talking.  She must have made the assumption that I was Jewish, because she immediately started speaking in Hebrew.  I told her that I didn’t speak Hebrew, and that if she spoke English we’d have a much better conversation.  She agreed, and switched to English.  We ended up talking for a really long time, and having this great connection.  She invited me to come sit up near the front with her family (older sister, parents, and grandparents), but for some reason I chose to stay where I was.  The usher had seen us talking, and walked over toward me, his hand raised above his head, ready to give a congratulatory high-five.  “Duuude,” he said, “it looks like the Hebrew found a Shebrew!“  I cracked up laughing, and then the lights went out and the movie started.  The dream fast-forwarded a bit, and now the movie was over, and the lights had come on.  I walked over to my new friend, put my hand on her arm and said, “Hey, I’ll come meet you in a second.  I have something to do really quick, but I’ll be right back.”

Her mom overheard me and came running over to us, shocked at what she had heard.  “You can’t do that!  You’re not going to eat my daughter! What a terrible thing to say!”

I laughed.  “No, no. . .I said I’m going to MEET her.  Big difference.”

She looked relieved, and even laughed a little to ease the tension.

That’s the point at which the dream ended, and I woke up.

* * * * *

For the record, I’ve never heard of a ‘Shebrew’ before, and I thought it was really hilarious that it appeared in my brain.  Turns out to be an actual slang term. . .I’ll let you look it up on your own and see for yourself, though.  I hope it’s not considered offensive, and that’s why I’m not going to name this entry ‘Shebrew.’

Incidentally, the name “Mr. Duality” is taken from a hilarious song by the group The Bobs.  I wasn’t able to find a version of it online, but maybe you’ll have better luck scrounging than I did.  It’s a cool and funny song, and the singer sort of raps the lyrics in a nerdy, rubato way.  “My personality. . .h’has a plurality, and that’swhytheycallmeMisterDuality.”

In other news, it was thirty years ago today that Mount St. Helens erupted.  I’ve written about this before, so if you click on the picture below, that’ll take you to the entry, if you’re interested.