beautiful, funny, sad & true

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.”

“Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate.  For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in [things of beauty].  This is the very purpose of education.  What does education imply?  One must offer [things of beauty] tirelessly, in order to escape the natural impulses of our species, because those impulses do not change, and continually threaten the fragile equilibrium of survival.”

–“The Elegance of the Hedgehog”

This afternoon in rehearsal, I experienced déja vu for the first time in quite a long while.  I was playing the snare drum, and the five of us were sitting in a particular way, working on a particular song, stumbling over a particular section, and then working out that particular section.  It lasted almost a full ten seconds.

This reminded me that I have a drummer friend (as of four years ago, anyway) claimed to have never experienced déja vu, and to the best of my knowledge, he still hasn’t.  He revealed that fact while we were on a long road trip, the kind where you talk about everything and nothing for hours on end; it’s one of the best things about being on tour.  One of us in the group – there were six of us riding together in a motor home – had a déja vu and described to the others, and that’s how the subject was started.  The drummer claimed not to have had one, and we all fell about with shock.  “Really?  How is that possible?  How can you have made it into your thirties without having one?”

At that point, he asked us what the feeling is like, and we had a very funny time trying to describe it.  Each of us said miniscule variations on the same theme.  “It’s like you’ve experienced the situation you’re in. . .before.”

“Somehow you just know that you’ve done this thing, whatever it is, before.”

“You feel it while it’s happening; that it’s happened before.”

It was like trying to describe an orgasm, or what it feels like to be drunk or high.  Each is very difficult to explain to someone who’s never experienced it.  For the record, I’ve had plenty of orgasms, and been drunk plenty of times, but still never been high, which is probably a whole separate story in itself.

Monty Python has a classic Flying Circus episode called “It’s the Mind” that explores this phenomenon in a very funny way.

Oh, and if you’re my drummer friend and you’re reading this (assuming that you still haven’t experienced déja vu), it isn’t really like that.  It’s more like. . .you’ve experienced the situation you’re in. . .before. Somehow you just know that you’ve done this thing, whatever it is, before.  You feel it while it’s happening; that it’s happened before.

Tune in next time when I describe what an orgasm feels like.

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.

This beautiful little animated short film needs to be shared with the world.  Fans of the accordion and of Hugh Manatee–a.k.a the human spirit–will find it particularly touching.

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