beautiful, funny, sad & true

Dream 1:

I was at a small coffee shop in the lobby of a large building.  I ordered a latte (the type I usually get in real life, even) and while I waited, I picked up a watch that was on the counter.  It was just like one I had, except it was in terrible condition, and it didn’t work.  I put it back in the box on the counter.  When my latte arrived, I looked at the receipt as I walked off, and I noticed that the barista had charged me for the watch, so my total was over ten dollars.  Great, I thought, I’ll have to come back again later to deal with this.

Dream 2:

I was co-hosting a radio show on a college station, and my friend the host got up and walked into the music library to search for more songs to play.  The song that was playing ended, and there was a long stretch of ‘dead air’ as I tried to figure out how to work the control board.  I decided that there was a computer there that I could use to find something to put on the air.  I set the internet browser to YouTube and played the first thing that came up, which was the them from “Jason and the Argonauts”, and it sounded like XTC, which luckily fit right in to the format of our show.  My friend still hadn’t come back by the time the song ended, so I just played it a second time.  After about thirty seconds, I decided I’d better track down my friend, so I walked out into the hall just as he was coming back into the studio.  “You’d better note that we played ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ twice,” I told him, and turned left down a hallway, past a bunch of dorm rooms, and into a bookstore area.

As I entered the bookstore, a police car drove in slowly through the front door and parked.  “Hey, you can’t drive in here!” I said, with a mock-serious tone in my voice and a smile on my face.  Naturally, the cop ignored me and parked the car nearby.  I turned to see another police car suspended from the ceiling.  It was part of a display, something to do with police awareness on campus.   There was a TV set up, playing a video about safety, and in the video the narrator used an obscure nonsense word like ‘helliatated.’  A student walking by at that moment laughed and mocked the cop.  “Helliatahted? What in the world does that even mean?”  He had slightly mis-pronounced the word when he attempted to use it.

The policeman sternly corrected his pronunciation.  “It’s ‘helliatated.’  And you should learn to say things to police in a nicer way.”  He placed his hand on the end of the night stick that was hanging from his belt.

I walked away to look at some books, and I found a couple that looked intriguing, so I kept them in my hands, like you would at any bookstore.  A few seconds later, a guy who was younger than I but looked older asked me, “Were you the person asking about Paper-Mate Ultra Ball pens?”

“Uhhh. . .” I stammered.  “Uhhh. . .sure.  I mean. . .yes, that was me.”  I looked on the counter and saw some pens of all types that were already opened and strewn around the counter.  I was thinking about taking one of them.

“Well, they’re right up here,” the guy said, and pointed to a small pack of blue pens that was hanging right above my head.

“Excellent,” I replied.  “Thanks very much.”  As soon as he left, I grabbed one of the loose pens off the counter and whisked it into the inside pocket of my jacket.  Just then, an old lady who was the bookstore’s cashier walked over and accosted me.

“You aren’t a member of this fraternity,” she said.  “You won’t be able to buy those books until the students have had a chance to buy them first.”  She took them from me and set them on a shelf right next to where the pens were.  They were completely out of place, but she didn’t seem to mind.  I told her that I worked at the radio station, and that I’d come in a couple minutes and buy them as soon as I could find my phone (with which I keep my bank card and driver’s license clipped).  I contemplated pocketing the books, but decided not to.  She walked away and I walked back down the hallway in the direction of the studio.

On the return trip, however, I was unable to find my way back to the studio.  I walked into two or three different dorm rooms, one of which belonged to a young girl.  I apologized and turned to walk back out, when her mom appeared in the door and got irate at both of us.  I pushed past her and continued down the hall, and into an empty dorm room.  I quickly walked back out.  The studio was further down the hall than I had remembered.

Dream 3:

I was walking down a busy street with a female friend.  Suddenly a very cute homeless girl in her early twenties walked toward me, and we hugged each other tightly for a really long period of time.  She told me how nice that was, and how she didn’t get hugged very often.  I said I was happy to oblige.  I asked her if she had a place to stay.  She started to tell me, and my friend interrupted us.  I made some sort of arcane joke to my friend that I can’t quite recall, but that involved the name of a homeless shelter and somehow implied that my friend was staying in it as well.  I struggled to regain composure in front of the new girl.  “Um, I meant that in a GOOD way. . .I wasn’t saying that YOU were staying there–”

The homeless girl laughed at my pathetic attempts to save face.  “Yeah, you kinda did, actually.  But that’s okay, at least to me.  Obviously.”  She smiled and walked toward a limousine that was parked nearby.  It was the limousine I had been riding in.  I stayed behind and talked to a really tall guy friend of hers who was there on the sidewalk.  We talked for a few minutes, and then I realized I had left my shoes in the limo, and was standing there in my socks.  I walked around the far side of the limo, and saw the homeless girl leaning against it, urinating onto the street.  She was standing up straight.  Apparently she was a trans-sexual, but I had no way of knowing that until I saw her urinating.  I said, quickly and a bit awkwardly,”Sorry!” and opened the back door of the limo.  I rummaged around on the floor to find some shoes.  I found a sandal and a running shoe, neither of which I remembered bringing with me.  I rummaged around again, and came up with a matched pair of black shoes, which I put on.

The girl’s friend was walking toward me, so I decided to feign sleep.  I curled up on my side in the back seat of the limo, and I overheard a sotto voce conversation between the girl and her friend.

“Do you think he knows about me?”

“He saw you pee; of course he knows.  He has to.”

“I don’t think he saw me.  Oh, I would just hate for anything bad to happen.  I’ve never known such a great guy before.”

My eyes were closed, and I was trying very hard to remain motionless.  I could hear the guy turn and walk to the door of the car, which was open.  He stood up onto the running board, and I could feel the car shake as he spoke to me.  “You’d better not do anything to hurt her,” he said menacingly.  “If you do, you’ll have to deal with me and a lot of other people who are looking out for her.”  He stood there for a long time after, but I could still feel the car shaking under his weight.  After a moment, he stepped back to the ground and walked away.  I thought, What does he think I’m gonna do to her?  Nothing will happen, because she’s a BOY.

* * * * *

After a week or two of colossally boring dreams, it would seem that my dream life is back to ‘normal’ again.  Although, as a friend likes to say, “Normal is just a setting on a washing machine.”

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.

1. Unicorns never cheat.
2. Unicorns always lend a helping hand.
3. Unicorns don’t talk to strangers.
4. Unicorns respect the Earth.
5. Unicorns are never late.
6. Unicorns aren’t conceited.
7. Unicorns don’t judge people.
8. Unicorns always give 100%.
9. Unicorns graze on peace and love.
10. Unicorns don’t do drugs.

How in the world did the universe make sure that I would stumble across this?