I had an interesting dream last night. . .I think you’ll agree.

I’m working for a foreign-aid organization that sends people and reporters to small towns in foreign countries that need. . .well. . .aid, whether it’s in the form of food, education, infrastructure, or a variety of other things.  I am with a group of about ten people, both aid workers and reporters, and we’ve been sent to Nicaragua to build a school and bring food to a tiny village in the middle of a rain forest.

In my rare moments of spare time, I am giving singing lessons to a very talented ten-year-old boy.  Our group is only in the village for a few days, however, so as soon as the school is completed, we have to say our goodbyes to the people of the village, pack up our battered cargo truck painted in yellow and camouflage, and drive away from the village.  The rest of the group is in the cab of the truck, and I’m riding in the back by myself, as we traverse the narrow, bumpy, muddy mountain switchbacks.  The back of the truck is open, like an army transport, so I can only see behind us, but I can hear what’s going on around us, and it isn’t pretty.  There are guns being fired into the air, and I can see dirty, desperate people from other villages emerging from the jungle and running along the road behind our truck.

The road becomes so treacherous that we are forced to slow down drastically, until the group of running villagers catches up with us.  They attempt to jump into the back of the truck where I’m sitting, but I close the glass door on the back of the truck and lock it in an attempt to stop them.  Two of the men from our group climb out of the truck’s cab and hand a few bags of food to the villagers, and they thank us and let us go back on our way again.  We stop at two other villages along the road to drop off bags of food and pick up two older couples, also members of our organization, who are stationed elsewhere.   They climb up in the back of the truck, and I remove the iPod speakers from my ears so that we are able to talk.  I tell them what happened at the last stop, with the guns and everything, and they tell me, “It’s crazy to travel through the jungle without the protection of a glass door.  You just never know what these people are likely to do.”

The dream’s location changes, but we’re all still in the back of the van, which indicates that we have been driving for days on end, from Central America, through Mexico, and finally north through the United States all the way back to our home base in Portland.  Out the back of the van, we start to see signs, buildings and businesses that we all recognize, and we know we’re getting close.  Finally we arrive at our headquarters, and we climb out and stretch our weary bodies.  My girlfriend (C, a Portland friend in real life, but not my girlfriend) is there with the group of friends and family members who are greeting us as we arrive.   She runs over to me, and I give her a kiss and a huge hug, then I tell her I want to change out of my dirty traveling clothes and into some clean ones.  While I’m rummaging around in my suitcase, the leader of our group walks over and says hello.  He tells me, in his English accent, that I should get in contact with the boy I’d been tutoring, because he has suddenly become a very successful singer, and that I may be in a position to capitalize on this opportunity and make some money, for either our organization or for myself, at the very least.  Also, my boss says, the boy’s father is convinced that the boy will somehow become gay if he joins the music industry (despite his young age), and my boss is encouraging me to call the father and explain how ridiculous that idea is, and what the music industry is really like.  He tells me that he’ll get the family’s contact information and send it to me.  I thank him and agree to contact them as soon as I get back to work in a few days.

I wave to my boss, and to the other members of my team, and walk with my girlfriend in the direction of my car.  We are walking side by side, our outer arms holding one of my suitcases, and our inner arms around each other.

After a crazy fun evening (and, indeed, the entire week has been pretty over the top, both busy and fun), I had a ridiculously boring dream about being at my mom’s house loading the dishwasher before I went to work, so that when I got home three hours later, the dishes would be clean and waiting for us.

When I woke up, I thought that my subconscious must be trying to make up for my crazy waking life by providing really dull dreams, but when I went back to sleep, I discovered that was not the case.  I had an epic, three-hour dream that I’m not sure I’ll be able to stitch together into a coherent narrative, but it really was one of the longest dreams I’ve ever had.  You’ve been duly warned.

* * * * *

I’m visiting Brother’s family at his house, which in the dream is more like an art palace.  Its design resembles that of the Guggenheim museum inside, with multiple circular levels and rooms with no stairways between them, only floors that slope and curve around within the house.  The walls are painted dark brown, and there is orange and blue ultra-modern furniture everywhere, as well as very tasteful modern art.  It’s a bit like Guggenheim meets Dr. Seuss, but somehow it all works and looks very beautiful.

I find a piece of mushy chicken on the floor, and, thinking one of the kids must’ve dropped it, I pick it up and start looking for a wastebasket.  Sister-in-Law is trying to ask me something, and I’m trying to tell her that I’ll be there in a second, but she can’t seem to hear me.  She keeps having to shout from elsewhere within the house, “Are you there?  I’m asking you something!”  Brother is in the kitchen, so I ask him about a wastebasket, which he produces from under the sink.  Within the one large basket are three small bags, each for recycling or food or whatever.  I ask where to put the chicken, and he points vaguely toward a corner of the basket.  I deposit it where I think he means, but he grabs it and places it gently in a different bag.

The dream changes, and I’m walking in a sort of industrial park along the waterfront of Puget Sound south of Seattle.  I’m not there for any real reason, but I find myself intrigued by this large stone double door that appears to be the portal to a ship on the other side of it.  I stand in front of the door, and it opens.  I step forward into the lobby area of the ship.  The ceilings are very high, and the room is opulently but sparsely furnished, a bit like a hotel lobby.  The walls are the painted the faintest shade of pink, and there is a downward spiral staircase not far from the entrance.  I am greeted by a short man wearing a tight body suit and a black fencing mask so thick that his face isn’t visible through it at all.  He seems to be a security guard of some type.  He walks over and gruffly asks me my name.  I tell him, just after I take a bite of food, so my answer is garbled.  He understands me, though, and he says, “You didn’t even lie.”  He’s surprised that I give him my real name, which he somehow knows.  “Of course not,” I reply.  “Why should I lie?”

I get the feeling that this man is planning some sort of harm to me, so I make a slow movement to touch or remove his mask.  As soon as my finger touches it, the mask disappears and the man shrinks down to about eighteen inches tall.  He is all head and feet and arms, with a tiny body connecting everything.  He’s suddenly gone from being a threat to a joke, and I find myself trying to suppress laughter at the sight of this pathetic excuse for a watchdog.  He motions for me to follow him down the spiral staircase, and I do. When we walk to the bottom, there is a group of mobsters standing around in suits.  It seems that the man I encountered is either a scout for new members or a deterrent for nosy rubberneckers, or both.  I make a run for the stairway, and slide down the inner rail to the next lowest level, which is a Japanese store of some sort.

The room is square, and painted bright white.  The store is filled with Japanese toys and gifts and trinkets of all sizes and colors, and the shelves are piled high with clothes and art and DVD’s and posters.  There are large paintings on the walls, in vibrant reds and blacks and blues.  There are two employees working, and they both greet me in Japanese as I walk down the stairway into their store.  I wander through the aisles for a moment, but when I find another stairway, I step into it and walk down to a different level, which is a not-particularly-nice furniture and stereo equipment showroom.

I grab a stereo brochure from a little box near the base of the stairway, and I’m glancing at it when an older gentleman approaches me.  He’s a salesman, and he’s wearing an old-fashioned suit.  “What can I help you with?” he asks.  I look up from the brochure, a bit surprised, and I walk over to the tiny display of a few small stereo receivers.  I tell him I don’t need anything, and that I’m just there to look.  The man replies, “That’s just what I was hoping someone would come in today and say.”  I thank him, and go back to the stairway, which has a second downward offshoot, which I walk down.

I am surprised at the bottom of the stairs by a large group of mobsters and men wearing fencing masks.  These men all have guns, and they are actively out to get me.  They start shooting at me as soon as they see me, and I have to run away from them as fast as I can.  I run to a door, push it open, and find myself outside on the flat cement deck of the ship.  I look out at the waves on the water and think to myself, I forgot I was even on a ship.  My brain sure is doing a good job of remembering details. The men burst out the door behind me a moment later, guns blazing, and I run to the far edge of the ship’s deck.  I seem to have lost the men, and I take a moment to breathe.  I look up from my breathing to see that a few of my friends from real life (a Japanese aerialist and a group of martial artists) are there on the ship too.  They seem to be on the run from the same guys, so we agree to stick together.  “Did you guys go through the stores and everything too?” I ask them.  “I’d forgotten I was even on a boat at all.”

At this point, something happens and we get separated.  I find myself at the stairway with no one else in sight.  I grab hold of the rail, and I get whisked up the stairs at breakneck speed, around and around and around, until I am deposited on the pier outside the stone door at the entrance to the ship.  I decide I need to tell Brother about this, so the dream’s time and location changes.  It is now early evening, and I’m at my brother’s dark, small, three-bedroom, second-floor apartment.  We are sitting in the living room on the plush white sofa (all of the furniture is white), and I’m telling him about the crazy experiences I’ve just had.  While we’re talking, the door is open, and two attractive young women walk by on the apartment’s landing.  I say to Brother, in my best Butthead voice, “Hey, bay-beh.”  He laughs and rolls his eyes at me.  We get up and he shows me around his place.  I look into the bedrooms, expecting to find kids’ clothes and stuff, but the other rooms are furnished with double beds, and it’s clear that he has roommates, which I was unaware of.  “Who else lives here?”  I ask him, looking into one of the rooms.  One of the young women has appeared behind me.  She is wearing a Chicago Cubs baseball uniform, and has just gotten home from practice.  “I do,” she says, and smiles.  We talk for a minute, and then she tells me to get down on my hands and knees.  I do, and she sits down on my back as if I’m a horse.  She’s petite and not very heavy, so I crawl around with her for a while.  We crawl under tables and chairs, and we come to a coffee table that is lower than other things we’ve gone under.  “We’ll make it,” she says encouragingly.

“Okay,” I say, smiling, “but we’ll need to get low.”  She leans forward onto me, and I can feel her breath on my neck and cheek.  We try to pass under the coffee table, but we’re not quite low enough.  “Lower,” I say, and she flattens herself against my back and shoulder, leaning her head against mine and putting her arms around my chest.  We try again, and the table is still too low, but we decide that we like being that close, so she stays wrapped around me as I crawl slowly and deliberately across the living room, down the hallway, and to the bedroom where Brother is reading to the three kids.  Niece sees me, stands up, and walks over to the doorway to lean down and give me a hug.  Somehow I’m able to reach an arm up and hug Niece without dislodging my lovely passenger.

* * * * *

There were a couple of other scenes in the ship, and another Japanese component to the story, but those details are sadly eluding me at the moment.  If I do manage to remember them, I’ll be sure to add them later.

2010 has been very strange.  At the beginning of the year, I was still on blogging hiatus, so it took a while to get back up to speed.  Springtime was crazy, with lots of great musical endeavors and memorable trips.  By the summer, both my life and this blog went into overdrive, when I really started writing again, and found my full stride while sharing a bit too much about my childhood.  Suddenly it was October, which is the month of my birth, but this year was also the month of my stepdad’s death, which has sent everything into a tailspin since then.  A surreal trip to Yakima for the funeral was followed by multiple trips to Seattle, both for gigs and for family functions.

There were some standout moments from this last year that didn’t manage to make it into the blog, for various reasons.  For example, here’s a video of a particularly interesting recording session that I was lucky enough to be involved with, albeit in a small way.  A local singer-songwriter, who is also a friend, put the word out on SocialNetwork that she wanted to create a cacaphony of 50 pianos, all playing an F chord at the same time.  I jumped at the chance.  She rented a piano showroom downtown, and my friend and I (and forty eight or so other people) joined in to participate.  I brought my camera to capture a bit of the action.

Another memorable moment from this last year was Trek in the Park.  This theater group gets together every year to re-create a famous episode from the original Star Trek television series.  This year’s was Space Seed, in which we meet the infamous character Khan (who returned in the movie The Wrath of Khan).  It was a very well-done production, with live music and everything. . .and it was all free of charge.  Here’s the climactic fight sequence between Kirk and Khan.

IrishBand released our self-titled EP this year, as well as an amazing animated video that a friend created for us.  I would post that here, but our band name is very unusual, hence the pseudonym.  To celebrate, we went to Port Townsend, Washington (the hometown of three of the band members, and an adopted home away from home for the rest of us) to play a CD release party and catch the Rhododendron Festival and parade and everything.  It’s always a huge party weekend for PT, and this year was the tenth reunion for PT High School, which included Violinist and a bunch of other friends, so I actually went to the reunion barbecue in Chetzemoka Park during the afternoon, since I knew so many of the people there.  (God forbid that I actually go to any of my own class reunions; I haven’t yet.)  I also performed in the parade, in disguise, as an honorary member of Nanda.  I’m the guy with the Mexican wrestling mask, playing the bass, miming along to the dance music that was blaring from the speakers in the back of the truck.

I had the opportunity to see the Oregon Symphony perform many times this last year, with some pretty big-name performers.  Violinists Midori and Hilary Hahn, violinist Pinchas Zukerman and his cellist wife Amanda Forsyth (who, incidentally, gave a cello master class at the Old Church that afternoon, which I also attended, even though I’m far from being a cello master) who performed Brahms’s Double Concerto together, and a number of others.  This month, I have a ticket for pianist Emanuel Ax’s concert, which I’m very much looking forward to.  Yo-Yo Ma performed here a month or so ago, but his concert was sold out in the spring, only a few weeks after tickets went on sale.  Curses.

So it’s been a good year, overall, but I’m really hoping that 2011 is better, or less confusing at the very least.  I have lofty goals for the upcoming year, which include finding a job, finding love and a real relationship, taking care of some things that have been dogging me for a while now, and producing more CD’s.  I have a bit of news on the music front, actually.  A friend of mine hurt her arms a year ago, and has since been unable to play the piano, but that hasn’t stopped her from singing, or from writing lyrics and melodies, or from having tons of ideas.  She e-mailed me at some point to ask what people in her position do in the music business.  I told her I don’t know about ‘the music business’, but I’d love to give the songs a listen, and that maybe I could put music to them.  She sent me some mp3′s, and I instantly felt like I knew where the songs should go.  They felt familiar without being predictable, which is always a good sign.  That was about two months ago, and we already have five or six collaborations in the works.  Pretty awesome and exciting.

In other news, December is the fourth anniversary of this blog, so it seems appropriate to have a little birthday party, no?  Come on, let’s have some sis-boom-bah.

So anyway, on to the Best Of.  Here are the lists of what I consider to the best entries BFS&T has to offer from this past year, which naturally includes a list of the most interesting dreams, as well.  Enjoy!

THE ENTRIES:

SteamCon – the steampunk convention in Seattle in which PolishCellist and I played, and had a total blast doing so

tragedy – the death of Stepdad

struggle – the early aftermath of the death of Stepdad

sitting here thinking about the Holocaust – one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard on the radio

folk festival fun – Portland Folk Festival, starring IrishBand, Dan Bern, Roll Out Cowboy, etc.

I’m kind of an a-hole – see for yourself

birthday present – prostitute schmostitute

the unicorn code – love it, learn it, LIVE IT

no one’s laughing – a peek into our family dynamics

déja vu – what it feels like, and a friend who claims to never have experienced one

the truth is out there – interesting UFO story, I promise

it’s not for shaving – Occam’s Razor, and how it applies to recording music

what if it is? – a very memorable and touching moment from the show Six Feet Under

THE CHILDHOOD STORIES:

shuttlecock

love and curiosity

he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother

the final innocent tryst

synchronicity

THE DREAMS:

lights, camera, dream

festival dream

shape shifters

inimitable and imitable

subconscious and libido

this needs a name

frozen

Just in case this wasn’t enough for your insatiable appetite for blog entries, here’s the Best of BFS&T 2009 entry, for your gluttonous pleasure.

Thanks for being here and reading all this, and for supporting this blog for such a long time now.  I really appreciate it.  I hope we all have an excellent New Year’s Eve, and Day, and that 2011 allows us to learn, and to grow, and to change for the better, a little bit each day.

Happy New Year!

Despite the fact that I have a multitude of vivid dreams, I rarely fly in them, so when I do, the results can be pretty spectacular.  Last night’s dream didn’t disappoint in either respect.

* * * * *
I’m walking in a hospital [hospitals sure do seem to feature prominently in my dreams lately] to visit a friend who recently had a baby.  She used to work at the hospital in previous years, before a career change.  She’s been recuperating there for a month or so now, and she’s both rested and restless, so she takes walks around the entire hospital to stave off boredom and visit with her friends and former colleagues.  I see her walking down a long hallway, and jog over to where she is.  We walk together into a large open room that is a sort of lounge area.  There is a grand piano in the room, and a group of tables nearby, where a few employees are sitting and talking amongst themselves when we walk into the room.  The other people see my friend and instantly light up.  They wave her over to where they’re sitting, and I hang back for a minute to let her talk with them.  I walk over to the piano, which is positioned next to the door of the supervisor’s office.  It’s kind of a tight squeeze, and there are a bunch of other instruments (mostly drums and cymbals) stacked over there too, which are actually blocking the door to the office.  Since I seem to be the only one who notices this, I decide to do a little mitzvah and move the instruments out of the way.

As I start to move the cymbal stands around, a very tall, lanky acquaintance of mine appears and says hello.  He puts his arm around my shoulder and leaves it there awkwardly while I’m trying to move instruments around.  “Not the best time for that arm to be there,” I tell him.  “Maybe wait until I’m not trying to move a bunch of stuff.”  He moves the offending arm, and I reach for a cymbal.  The friend I came to visit calls to me and gives me a little come-over-here motion with her hand, so I walk over and join them.  She introduces me to them, which attracts the attention of the supervisor, who walks out of his office and sits by himself at a table in the middle of the room.  He is a very heavyset man in his mid-fifties, and his gaze moves from person to person.  He says nothing at first, but the jovial mood of the group instantly changes to a more somber one.  The supervisor knows my friend from her time there, and obviously knows all of the other employees, but there are three of us who are visiting, so when everyone else is quiet, he motions for the three of us to stand together so that we can answer a question.  He asks us what we do for a living, and the first person is a young guy of around twenty-one.  “College student,” the guy replies, to which the supervisor thinks for a minute and says, “Six hundred dollars.”  Apparently, the man is estimating each of our various levels of income.

The next person to respond is a woman of short stature who’s nearing fifty. “I’m sort of a cross between a social worker and a nurse,” she says, wearily but proudly.

The man is clearly impressed with her answer, but his voice remains gruff.  “Sixty-five thousand,” he says, and turns to me for my answer.

“I’m a musician,” I tell him and the group.

The man sputters with laughter, which makes me angry, and I look away.  “Three days,” he says.  “You’re lucky to work for three days in a row.”  He stands up from the table and walks back into his office, still chuckling to himself.  The three of us in question rejoin the group of employees.

“What was that all about?” I ask my friend.  “We don’t even work for him.”

“It’s just his way,” she replies.  This isn’t an answer that improves my displeasure, so I tell her that I need to go for a walk around the block and cool my jets for a few minutes.  I walk outside and take a look around to get my bearings.  The hospital is a hundred-year-old stone building, surrounded by well-manicured shrubs and trees, with colorful groups of flowers at various places along the sidewalk.  It looks more like a church than a hospital, and the neighborhood is similarly beautiful.  The sidewalk is very uneven, and there are lots of up or down steps here and there to make walking easier.  It’s not an easy walk, though, and there are even small bushes growing over (or even up out of) the sidewalk in a few places.  As I walk along, I find myself jumping over the bushes and steps when I come to them.  Before long, my jumps are getting longer and higher, and I think, I might as well just fly.

As soon as I have that thought, I leap into the air and fly around in circles over the neighborhood, next to a few tall buildings nearby, and finally toward the high roof of the twenty-story hospital, thinking, I probably should’ve done this before.  When I arrive at the top, it occurs to me that I should be careful not to attract attention to myself, since nobody else can fly, and I might arouse suspicion, or jealousy, or worse.  I decide to go back to where my friend is, so I fly down toward the ground, attempting to stay close to the large trees near the edge of the hospital grounds.  As I lower myself to about thirty feet off the ground, I feel a small electric shock on my right arm.  I look down to see a man with a type of low-voltage taser gun pointed at me.  He pulls the trigger, and a green bolt of electricity hits my arm again.  It’s not powerful enough to hurt me, but if a small group of people used their tasers at the same time, it would be more than enough to drain my energy and render me flightless.  I fly away from the man and land nearer to the hospital.  I run to it, and duck into a white, unmarked door along the outside of the building.  It’s a supply room, and I rummage around in there until I find a box full of ugly purple polo shirts with the hospital’s name embroidered on the breast in white letters.  I grab one and put it on, hoping that this will be enough to fob off at least some of the people who would try to stop me, or to ask me questions.

I walk back in to get my friend.  “I’m sorry, but we have to leave now,” I tell her.  “I can’t really tell you why, but we may be in some danger.”  She gives me a look and starts to protest, but I grab her hand and quickly escort her outside.

“Wow,” she tells me, “you sure do know how to get in trouble quickly.  You’ve only been gone for a few minutes.”

“I know,” I say, “but I’ve found out about lots of things in those few minutes.”  I put my arm around her shoulder and raise my other arm to fly.  “Hold onto me.”

Now she’s really starting to protest.  “What the heck are you doing?  Are you crazy?”

“I love you,” I tell her.  This takes her completely by surprise, and she stops pushing against me, which is what I want.  It’s much easier to fly someone else around if they’re relaxed than if they’re not.   I leap into the air and my friend clings on for dear life, looking between me and the rapidly receding ground.  I try to reassure her by telling her, “In my experience, I’ve found that a little bit of shock value, or at least surprise, makes people relax, which makes it easier for me to ‘fly’ them.”  She doesn’t seem to like what I’m saying.  I continue flying, until we’re on a precipitous hilltop that is as high as the hospital.  The hill is covered by grass, and is only a few feet across at the top.  It’s so high that there’s actually a bit of snow on the tiny ledge, which makes keeping our footing difficult.  My mom is up there too, as well as the college kid who was in the room with me, being questioned by the gruff and blustery supervisor.  I tell my friend, “Sorry for having to do that, but I just did what I had to do in order to get us out of there, and that’s the first thing I thought of.  We’re safe now.”  I hope she believes me.

I tell the three of them to wait for me, and I’ll come back for them when things are safer.  I fly down in wide circles toward the hospital.  Along the way, I feel more taser blasts on my arm.  I look down to see about twenty people, in different locations, all working in conjunction to bring me to the ground.  I think, This is disappointing, they don’t even know me. I land on the ground and run into the hospital’s parking garage.

The dream’s time frame changes, and I have already brought my friend, my mom, and the college guy down from the precipice.  I’m walking through the parking garage, and when I look through a stairway to a lower level, I can see my mom walking by herself toward her car, unaware that these men are after us.  I think, I need to get to her, but I can’t risk flying. I decide to jump off the level of the garage that I’m on, and down the outside of the building, feet first, using my hands and shoes to slow me down.  I do this successfully, sliding down two levels and crawling into the window, where I land with a thud.  I remember that gravity gets stronger the longer you fall, so I need to be careful here.  I see my friend walking outside on the sidewalk, so I dash over to where she is.  She’s visibly angry with me.

“Hey,” I start to explain, “I’m really sorry about all that, but I had to do it in order to keep us both safe.  That’s what counts, right?”  She’s not impressed.  “I do love you – that was true – but I know you’re with someone (and you guys have a kid!), so I would never do anything to interfere with all that.  There’ll probably never be a chance for us to be together, and I totally understand that.  You guys have nothing to worry about.”

“Listen to you, talking like an old person,” she says.  “Why did you have to go and say that?  It’s not appropriate.”

“I didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers.  But there are people nearby who want to hurt you, and me, and your friends, and even my mom.  I had to get us out of there.”  My friend is clearly finished with this conversation, and is starting to become exasperated.  She gets up in a huff to walk away.  I start to ask her something, but think better of it.  “I’ll leave you alone,” I say, “IF that’s what you want.”

“Yes,” she says tersely, “that’s what I want.”  She walks away from me across the sidewalk toward the grass and the parking lot at the far end of the lawn.

I need to get to where my mom is, and the dream location changes quickly to the top of the parking garage.  I try my sliding-down-the-wall-trick again, but after the conversation with my friend, I’m flustered and not thinking clearly, so I forget to factor in the amount of gravity that I’m dealing with.  I slide out of control down the side of the building, slicing my hands and destroying my shoes.  I continue to fall and fall, but I never hit the ground.  Somehow I curve and fall horizontally about ten feet off of the ground, constantly gaining momentum and speed, until I’m traveling feet first, face down, at hundreds of miles an hour.  I try to stop, but I’m unable to, so I decide that some sort of force must be acting on me now, and I decide that I’d better not attempt to fight against it.

I wake up on my stomach, completely calm and relaxed, despite having the feeling of flying low, face down, only moments before.

Last night, I had something I’ve never had before (WAIT FOR IT. . .); a dream within a dream.  In fact, it could be said that I had multiple dreams within a dream.  It was a very strange night indeed.

* * *

I’m walking in an airport to meet CollegeGirlfriend and her fiancee, as well as my Cincinnati friend DoctorLove and her fiancee.  They’re all arriving on the same flight, so we agreed that it would be fun to hang out together for a while.  The plane lands, and the four of them walk past the security gates.  We exchange hugs and handshakes and introductions, and then we walk down the middle of the airport concourse, talking about the various shops and restaurants as we pass them.  Somehow, CollegeGF and I get separated from the group, and we find ourselves walking through a very nice restaurant that overlooks the main runways.  The curtains are pulled back, and the sunlight is streaming through the enormous windows.  Everyone is sitting in groups of three and four, talking animatedly and watching the planes out the window.  It’s a lovely scene, and we both comment on it.  I tell her she should see the nicer restaurant upstairs, so we decide to walk up and take a look, but when we reach the top of the stairs, the heavy curtains are drawn, and the scene is very dark and gloomy.  The customers upstairs are gloomy too, especially juxtaposed with the festive scene happening downstairs.  We both have the urge to get out of there as quickly as possible, and we see a stairway going down at the far end of the restaurant, so we walk toward it at top speed.  Her top speed is faster than mine, however, so she leaves me behind and I have to say her name rather loudly and tell her to wait.  “I’m trying to keep up, here,” I tell her.  She stops and waits for me, and we descend the stairway together.  When we reach the bottom, we find the rest of our group waiting for us, so we walk over and join them.  The five of us walk outside the airport, and DoctorLove points out a stairway along the side of one of the buildings.  She tells the group that the stairway leads to a really great bar that she and I have been to a few times, and that it would fun to stop in there.   I agree, and tell the group that it’s a really fun place to watch planes, and that the food and wine there is particularly excellent.  The rest of the group comes to the concensus that there’s no time like the present, so we decide to head over there.

The dream’s location and time changes, and I’m parking my car outside the front door of a hospital.  It’s fairly late at night, and I’m going to visit Mom, who is still very depressed after Stepdad’s death.  I go into the hospital and ask the receptionist for my mom’s room number.  She tells me, and I take the elevator up to the appropriate floor.  I see Mom’s room, and notice that the door is open, but the lights are low.  Her bedside lamp is turned on at its lowest setting.  I walk into the room and notice that an estranged friend from thirty years ago (I’ll call her AmwayJudy) is standing in the room, so I say, “Oh. . .hey.”  I turn toward Mom and AmwayJudy gets the unspoken message that she’s not welcome there anymore.  I sit on the side of Mom’s bed, and ask how she is.  She starts to cry and I put my hand on her shoulder.  I stay until she finally manages to fall asleep, and then I go outside to get some fresh air.  I see three cats standing a short distance away from the building, so I walk over to make their acquaintance.

“Hello, little friends,” I say, reaching out to pet them.

As soon as I reach down, one of them grows to a height of about four feet, stands vertically on her hind legs, and puts one of her ‘arms’ around my back.  She speaks to me.  “My name is Nesspaw,” she tells me.  “What are you doing here?”

I laugh to myself at her name, which is a homophone of the French phrase n’est ce-pas, which means something like “Isn’t it?” or “Isn’t that so?”  I also realize that she and the other two are sirens, and that I need to get away from them.  “Ohhh, that’s right. . .Nesspaw!  We’ve met before, actually.”  I extricate myself from her clutches, and walk quickly in my original direction.

“I remember you now,” she says, starting to walk behind me clumsily, obviously unaccustomed to being vertical.  “What brings you to the hospital?”

“I’m here to meet my mom and brother,” I tell her.  “I have to go now, unfortunately.  See you later!”

I walk back through the darkness toward the entrance to the hospital, when Brother pushes the door open and walks down the steps to greet me.  We walk toward the hospital’s large side lawn, where a kind of conference is happening, with various public speakers and booths, all dealing with the subject of depression and death.  One speaker in particular is talking about a Death Council (which is related to a news story I was listening to on NPR when I went back to sleep) and a Depression Council, so I mention to Brother that we should make a point of attending this guy’s actual seminar when it occurs.  I see a little stone gazebo at the edge of the lawn and walk over to investigate it.  When I get close, I notice that there is some loose dirt underneath it, with some plastic toy animals scattered in the dirt.  I pick one of them up, and I get sucked into the dirt.  This is how the dream-within-a-dream section comes about.

I’m now a woman, who’s some sort of secret government agent.  My work partner (a man) and I are swimming in the ocean, wearing SCUBA gear and looking for an alien craft that was reported to have landed just off the coast of someplace tropical.  The water is warm and clear and beautiful, as is the perfect weather.  Suddenly another alien craft appears overhead, flying low and out of control.  As it passes over us, we notice that it has a sort of invisible energy field (even though it’s invisible, we can see the water and spray being disturbed by the field, which is how we know it’s there) surrounding it, which will allow the craft to safely land in water and allow the crew to survive, even if it the craft is destroyed in a crash.  We don’t wish to be seen by the craft, so we swim down to an underwater house where a friend of ours, a fellow government operative, lives.

As we get closer to the house, we notice that it looks like any other house, but it just happens to exist on the ocean floor.  There is an SUV parked in the garage with a small white trailer (called a Ewe-2, with a very funny little sheep logo on it) attached.  We swim to the front porch and find that we’re able to stand and breathe normally despite being submerged, so we knock on the door, which our friend opens and lets us inside, greeting us warmly.

Our friend is housing a boy who has special powers of some sort, and I attempt to talk to him.  He makes a strange sound in response to my queries, and our friend tells me that the boy is unable to speak, but that he can communicate in writing, as long as it’s in Spanish.  I make a quick mental shift and try to dredge up the tiny amount of Spanish I used to know back in my high school days.  I motion to the boy for a pen, and then some paper, which it takes us both quite a bit of difficulty to find.  Eventually, however, he scrounges up a large pink ball-point pen, and I find some pink sticky notes to write on, and we start the process, which is when the dream-within-a-dream ends, and the location changes back to the hospital.

I’m sitting in the hospital’s waiting room, which looks like it was designed and furnished back in the 1980′s, with lots of teal-colored fake leather sofas and stylized flower prints hanging on the wall.  My two stepsisters are in the room too, sitting on a sofa next to the one I’m reclining on.  They both tell me that they’ve just woken from an amazing dream in which they were in a house at the bottom of the ocean.  We compare notes on our dreams, and we decide that we must have been having the same dream, although a few of the details about the boy are different.  “That makes sense,” I tell them, “because your perspectives and mine are different, so we’d naturally interpret things differently in our dreams.”

Now the dream’s location changes yet again, and Brother and I and about fifteen or twenty friends are staying at a beach house.   A few of us have stayed there before, and we’re explaining to the others that despite the fact that the house is currently sitting on wet dirt, it will actually float when the tide comes in.  I point at the waves and tell those who’ve never been there before that “the tide’s coming in now, and it comes from that direction.”  The waves come rolling in, and the house begins to float and bob a little from side to side.  Those of us who’ve experienced the floating house are cheering and running toward the windows, while the ones who haven’t are huddling toward the middle of the room, surveying the situation nervously.  The house floats toward some small piers with individual boats tied to them, so when the house floats near one, Brother, his ChineseFriend and I climb out the window onto one of the piers and into three of the tiny boats.

We each grab an oar as they float by, and the three of us have a blast as we paddle around the bay.  In this part of the dream, we are younger versions of ourselves.  I’m ten or eleven, and my brother and his ChineseFriend are four years younger.  We see some reeds poking up from the water near the shore, and it looks like they have been trimmed into paths of rapids and tunnels, which we row over to explore.  ChineseFriend gets separated from us, and a guy named Scott who grew up on our street joins us.  We find the rapids, and let our boats be thrust down the middle of the three paths we come to.  It carries us through a tunnel along a wooden ‘trough’ track, which curves through the grassland to the shore, where it deposits us on dry land at the end of the ride.  We shake ourselves off and exclaim what an amazing whirlwind that was.  There are two younger kids who arrived a couple minutes before we did, and we can hear their voices echoing back to us as they climb up one of the side chutes next to the wooden track.

We attempt to climb back through the same hole that the kids climbed into, but we seem to have grown back into our adult bodies, so Brother and NeighborScott and I can’t fit into the small chute anymore.  My head won’t even fit through the chute, that’s how small it is.  We look at each other and wonder what our plan should be for getting back to the bay.  A snippet of the younger kids’ conversation floats down the chute from above.  The kids are maybe eight years old, but one of them says to the other something very strange.  “Y’know, when you’re playing a cello, if you get a dog to lick the bow, that’s really sexy.”  My brother and I crack up laughing, and I turn to NeighborScott, who also plays the cello (at least in the dream), and say, “Did you hear that?  That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.”   He claims not to have heard it, so Brother tells him.  We all have a good laugh, and that’s when I wake up, for real, from all this craziness.