beautiful, funny, sad & true

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.

The other night I had a myriad of interesting dreams, which were good enough to share despite the fact that I can’t remember their entire scenarios.  The first few flowed together and were related, even though I woke up between them.

* * * * *

I’m driving in a really old car that I’ve just purchased, which is a 1960 Pontiac Trans Am.  There’s no such thing in real life; in fact, it looked like this (but more run down). . .

. . .which is a 1961 Cadillac Coupe DeVille.  How did I know what it was?  Because A) it was a dream, and sometimes you just know these things, and B) on the floor of the passenger side, embedded in the salmon-colored carpet, was a small black metal plate embossed with the words ‘Trans Am’, which looked a lot like those miniature license plates that kids put on their bicycles.

So I’m driving around in this gigantic car, and I decide to take a road trip to Seattle to test the thing out.  I leave Portland and drive up the freeway for a while, getting used to the car all the way.  I’m enjoying the novelty and comfort of it, but I keep ruminating on things, like the fact that it’s easily twice as big as anything I’ve ever driven before, and that it can only go for a few miles on a gallon of gasoline.  The dream’s location changes, and I find myself driving a few miles south of Seattle, near the airport, where the steampunk convention took place.  I recognize the hotels and streets and everything, but this time I notice that there’s a new Elliott Smith museum, so I decide to turn into the parking lot and check it out.  It takes me a while to park the behemoth, and I opt for a spot near the far end of the parking lot. I close the door and survey the car, making sure that everything seems to be working correctly.  Everything does, so I walk into the museum.

I don’t see anything about Elliott Smith, but I do see lots of antique clothing and miscellaneous other things.  I see a section of mens’ overcoats, and I’m intrigued by a blue one that looks like it was from the early 1920’s, which I try on.  It fits me perfectly, but I decide not to buy it since I don’t know if this trip will cause my car to need any repairs.  I leave the museum and walk back to the car.

The dream’s location changes again, and I’m now driving on a bridge between downtown Seattle and a very small, rustic island a short distance offshore in Puget Sound.  (For those of you readers who live elsewhere in the world, this is not a place that exists in real life.)  Dad and Brother are renting a house for the weekend, so that the three of us can have a relaxing getaway together.  (For those of you readers who live elsewhere in the world, this is not a thing that happens in real life.)  I get to the end of the bridge and see a yellow road sign with divergent arrows that recommends drivers stay at twenty miles per hour.  The sign is at the intersection, though, so I have to stomp on the brakes, skid, and back up in order to make the turn.  Clearly, this is a place that doesn’t get many visitors, despite its proximity to Seattle.

I make the sharp left turn onto the narrow road that travels the perimeter of the island (in fact, it’s the island’s only road) and pull into the driveway of a somewhat dilapidated barn next to a farmhouse.  I park the car inside the barn, and Dad and Brother walk out of the house to greet me.  They look at the car and ask me how the trip went.  “Well,” I tell them, “if I’d known what this little island was like, I’d have brought my motorcycle instead, and done a bit of exploring.”  I also have a vintage motorcycle, and since my so-called Trans Am is too huge for the road on this island, I’m really wishing I had the alternative.  We walk into the farmhouse and they tell me that dinner – an egg dish of some sort, similar to a Benedict – is ready to be served.

* * * * *

The second dream is much shorter.  I’m a ghost hunter, and I’m walking in a hall and a downward staircase in a medieval castle in Germany.  I’m wearing a bodysuit that makes me invisible, and I’m also wearing goggles that allow me to track ghosts in the castle, if there are any.  The goggles give a gray, pixellated view of my surroundings, and if a ghost is present, the word ‘ID’ appears on the screen.  (I should probably clarify that ‘ID’ refers to identification, not the part of the brain.)  I’m also wearing headphones that allow me to hear what the ghosts say, should they wish to communicate with me.  As I turn and walk down the curved staircase, a flurry of ID’s appears on the screen.  There is a huge group of ghosts coming up the stairs toward me.  I stop walking and stand motionless, a few steps from the top.

“I can see you,” I say.

A voice speaks in my headphones.  “No. . .you can’t.  That’s ridiculous.”

A ghost appears in front of me; a tall young guy in his mid-twenties, dressed in the style of a punk rocker.  His name is emblazoned on the front of his shirt.

“Yes, I can. . .Derek?”

He is visibly taken aback.  I tell him I can show him who I am, too, and at this moment I realize that in this dream I am female.  I can control the invisibility suit to reveal as much or as little of myself as I choose, so I start with my arms.  I reveal my right arm first, and then my left, which are very skinny and appear in the air before him.  I then reveal my face and head to him, and I shake my long blond hair free.  He seems to trust me, and he gives a signal to the other ghosts in the stairway behind him to materialize, which they do.  There are more than I can possibly count, but this doesn’t make me uncomfortable or frightened at all.

* * * * *

There, you see?  Well worth sharing, even though there was much more to these dreams than I’m able to recall.  That was a good night.  As usual, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that tonight will be just as eventful.

My dream life, in case you haven’t noticed, has been on overdrive lately.  Practically every night I’ve had at least two vivid ones; some of which are worth sharing, others are not.  This morning’s dream was particularly vivid and beautiful, and here it is.

* * * * *

I’m walking along a street near the waterfront here in Portland (on the east side of the river, just south of the Fremont bridge, if you’re familiar with Our Fair City) and I see a group of people surrounding a gate at the edge of what appears to be a movie set.  Being on the outside, however, means that I can’t see what kind of movie set it is, since the perimeter is built of wood, and it’s all a façade anyway.  I decide to walk over to the gate and the people and investigate the situation.

It’s a beautiful sunny day, but the end of autumn is near, so everyone is bundled up against the wind.  The crowd turns out to be a group of actors and ‘regular’ people who are hoping to be cast as extras in this movie.  It seems that one of the actors is a no-show, and they need one more male character for a speaking part.  One of the production assistants sees me and assumes that I’m one of the group of people hoping to be an extra.  She points at me and says, “You, there, it’s your lucky day!  Come with me.”  She turns and walks briskly toward the middle of the set.  A few people nearby usher me through the crowd and guide me through the gate.  I have a second to glance at my surroundings while I’m catching up to the assistant, and I notice that the set is built with a medieval theme.  There is a town to my left, in the direction that we’re walking, and on the right is a large, grassy hill area that slopes down toward the river.   One corner is raised, to accommodate a small crowd or chorus of singers, and the other corner is filled with a tall hut and a group of palm trees, surrounded by high grass and colorful plants.  I catch up to the assistant, and she walks me down to the water’s edge, where a large boat is waiting.  We walk across a thick wooden plank and climb aboard.

The boat, too, is part of the set.  It’s built in a very stylized, medieval way, with white walls and dark wooden trim.  This is where the actors and directors congregate when they aren’t busy, or when they’re waiting for their scene, or when they’re taking a break.  This is also where the food service is located, so everyone has something food-related in their hands.  “Congratulations,” the assistant tells me.  “This is a great opportunity, and you’ll have fun.  We’ll need to fit you with a costume, so I’ll need you to change out of your clothes.  They’ll be safe in here,” meaning the room we’re in, “and you can help yourself to some food.  I think you’ll find that we have a little bit of everything.”

I thank her and start to take off my many layers of clothing.  It’s cold and windy outside, so I’m wearing a wool trench coat over my gray suit jacket and a black long-sleeved T-shirt.  I remove all that stuff, followed by my jeans, until I’m standing in my underwear.  An older lady wearing a track suit appears at my side with a large blue blanket, which she hands to me.  I wrap it around myself.  “You’re clearly a professional,” I tell her.  “You knew to bring an extra set of clothes.”

“It’s true, I’ve done this before,” she says, smiling.  We become instant friends.  She makes it her mission, there and then, to look after me and to always know where I am, even if I don’t necessarily know.  We walk over to the craft table and survey the food situation.  There is raw fruit and fruit salad, some various creations that look almost (but not quite) like pizza, different types of cake, cookies, juices, and the requisite bottles of water are everywhere.  My new friend and I sit down at a long table by the window, next to two young women.  We make the usual chit-chat, and then the girl sitting next to me makes a face and drops her food onto her plate.  “This isn’t vegan, there’s sausage on it,” she says disparagingly.  “I was told specifically that these were vegan.”

“I know,” the girl across the table agrees.  “I just got a piece of steak in mine.”  They both visibly slump in their seats.

I say to the young woman next to me, “I’ll give that a try.  I’d hate for it to go to waste.  What is it?”

“You want an Eiro?” she replies, pronouncing it almost like ‘aero’.

“What’s an Eiro?”  I ask.

“Kind of like a pizza with a really thin crust, but it’s this company’s own creation.  They have a million different varieties, like crepes; sweet and savory.”

“Sounds good,” I say.  “What’s on this one?”

She points at each of the ingredients as she finds one.  “Sausage. . .peppers. . .cheese, obviously. . .and a bunch of vegetables.”

“Yum,” I say, and she hands me the plate.  I take a bite and turn to look out the window.  There is an action scene being filmed on the river with a lot of fast-moving boats and a battle scene.  Our boat seems to have changed location, since we’re now a mile or so upriver, between the Morrison and Burnside bridges (again, if you’re familiar with Portland).  Our boat is parked in the corner of the set, and boats are zooming all around us, with old-fashioned guns being fired, and people jumping from boat to boat.  The camera boat is moving slowly between our boat and the action, so we’re able to see approximately what they’re filming.  Our boat starts to move downstream on a sort of wooden track.  I overhear someone explaining to a group of extras that the upper deck of our boat is used for cameras as well, and that lots of things do double duty in order to keep costs down.

From where we’re sitting, we have an excellent view of everything.  I sit and watch the action, and hear a sudden bang as a boat sporting a vertical plywood structure slams into the side of the Burnside bridge, and the plywood structure falls into the water.  Nothing else is damaged, and no one is hurt.  We can see the agitated director on his boat, flailing his arms and yelling to one of his assistants that they should have known how high the water level is, because this is Portland in the winter, and it rains more, and this had better not happen again or else.

The director decides to take that entire shot once again, so all the boats have to turn around and go back to their original positions in the shot.  Coming back, our boat is in such a position that we can see the wooden track we’re traveling in.  My new woman friend says, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before.”

“It’s pretty brilliant,” I tell her, “like having a dolly track in the water.  It’s anchored to the shore instead of to the river bottom.  We can go as fast as we want, up or down the river, and we always line up in exactly the same way.”

We wait until our boat is parked in its position for the shot, then we turn back to our food.  I take two more bites of my Eiro, and I’m chewing when the production assistant appears.  She motions for me to come to where she is, and says, “Okay, it’s time for you.”  I stand up, adjust the blue blanket that I’m wrapped in, and walk over to join her.

She takes me back across the plank, through the small ‘town’ area, and across to the top of the grassy hill, overlooking the hut and the chorus area.  By now, this part of the set is buzzing with activity.  The shot that’s being filmed is a large-scale musical number, and some small speakers rise out of the grass to pipe in music, so that the characters can sing and dance along to the actual soundtrack.  The characters are like characters from a childrens’ book, about eight feet tall, with oversized heads and bodies, and many of them with exaggerated buck teeth.  There is indeed a chorus of singers in the corner, and in the hut are the most important characters (and the tallest, at almost ten feet); the king and queen of the tribe.

It’s absolutely enchanting to watch, and all the human-character actors and extras are sitting on the hillside looking down and watching the proceedings.  My old woman friend and I look for a spot on the synthetic grass, which is very uncomfortable and slippery.  There are small indented areas that are designed for people to sit in, but they’re too small, and the hill is too steep, so people are having difficulty getting comfortable.  The two of us sit along the edge of the set, overlooking the town area, next to a thick wooden rail.

She says, “You should have asked for a carry-out plate.  You hardly got to eat any of your food.”

“I know,” I say.  “I guess I’ll have to grab some later, if I get the chance.”

She looks around a little, sees a group of friends waving at her, and excuses herself to walk over and say hello to them.  I sit and watch the action for a while, and then I hear a few people saying my name quietly.  I turn to see someone telling the production assistant where I am, and pointing in my direction.  She sees me and motions for me to come up to where she is.  I stand and start to walk toward her, but I am stopped by a row of people who are lying on their backs in the grass.  “This is not a walk-through,” one lady tells me.  “You’ll have to go around.  It’s too steep here, you might fall if you come this way.”

I stop at her feet, and I feel my own feet start to slip, so I lean forward to stabilize myself.  A couple guys at the end of the row laugh and give me a thumbs-up, motioning me to walk in their direction, slowly.  One of them laughs and says encouragingly, “You’re an actor.  It takes more than a little hill to stop you!”  I walk to the middle aisle and start up the hill.  Someone from a different row calls out to me, “You’d better run.  People get paid for things like this.”  I see a girl in a long, shiny black dress climbing the hill ahead of me, who seems to be heading in the direction I need to go, so I run after her.  As I pass the assistant, she smiles and tells me, “Just go through there and into that building to meet with the director.  You’ll see.”

“Thanks,” I say, jogging after the girl, who disappears at the end of the fake-cobblestone road behind a glass door.  I arrive a few seconds later and poke my head in the door.  She’s already slipped out of her dress and is standing there naked, getting her costume ready.  I turn back around and see a larger, double glass door. open it, and walk into a large, empty room with a fake-stone floor and a large fireplace on one wall.  I’m still wearing only the blue blanket, and I’m starting to feel a bit self-conscious about it.  No one else is in this large room, so I walk toward a little door at the back of the room, and that’s when the director appears.  He’s dark-haired and in his mid-forties, wearing a black dress shirt and slacks, with wire-frame sunglasses.

“Greetings,” he says, and gives me a smile.  I walk over and shake his hand.  He gives me a smile and says, “Looks like you could use a costume.”  He motions to a door I hadn’t noticed before, that’s built into the fireplace wall.  “Come right in here, and we’ll get you started.”  I reach to open the door, and that’s when I wake up.

* * * * *

I could have happily slept for many more hours, living in that dream.  It was absolutely amazing; full of such color and beauty.  Ahhhhh.

Yes, you read that correctly.

That phrase originated in last night’s dream, naturally.  In order for the dream to make any kind of sense at all (which it won’t), you have to know that when my brother and I were teenagers, we used to call each other ‘cork’ as a funny insult.  It was a harmless word that sounded vaguely dirty, so we really felt like we were getting away with something.  It was never meant as a genuine insult, it was always used in a tongue-in-cheek way, as in, “Take three, cork!”

In the dream, Brother and I were our current ages, and we were visiting Dad at his old house along the river in Vancouver.  We were upstairs in his bedroom, and he was talking to us about something, but we weren’t particularly paying attention.   Brother said to me, in a sotto voce ventriloquist way, barely moving his lips, so that Dad wouldn’t overhear, “Don’t forget to get the you-know-what.”  We were standing next to a large bookcase, so I thought Brother was referring to Dad’s collection of risqué books and soft-core pornography.

“I remember,” I whispered, gesturing ever so slightly with my head and eyes toward the bookshelf.

“Don’t forget about the check,” he corrected.

“I didn’t forget about it,” I said, faking anger.

“The check is coming to you,” he said.  Apparently Mom was sending a check for me to give to Dad, and I was supposed to call her to let her know when we arrived, so that she could send it.

“I know it is,” I replied, a bit stronger.  “Shut up. . .Power Cork!”

We took a beat while that ridiculous phrase hung in the air.  I chuckled quietly, to show him that I was just as surprised by what had come flying out of my mouth, and repeated under my breath, “Power Cork.”

We both cracked up, and that’s what woke me up, still laughing in my bed.