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This morning I had, the strangest dream*
Mar. 12th, 2021 10:02 pm
Dr. Seuss' The Bippolo Seed and Other Stories, the volume which seems to have given me an extra hour or two of sleep this morning.
The strangest dream? Maybe not, but strange enough that I actually remember it now (as I start typing this entry at 19:53), nearly 12 hours later.
I had, for some bizarre reason, flown into LAX (Los Angeles, for those of you not hip to airport acronyms | I say, "for some bizarre reason" because I have been to LA once, which was enough. It was everything I had thought it would be: a hypertrophied version of Sudbury, Ontario, all desolate suburbs surrounding a mediocre downtown core. Mind you, the food was better. But I digress), only to find that I had lost both my phone and my wallet.
So there I was, lost in that gargantuan concourse, bearing a single knapsack, no money and no identification.
A nightmare? Well, not quite.
I don't know about you, but a not insignificant subset of my dreams are anxiety dreams, in which I am basically a leaf drifting along an unknown current, heading maybe to disaster, and maybe not.
This morning, not.
Instead, I was approached by a 30-something black woman — very dark skinned, but very American: very large, very loud, very friendly — who sensed my confusion and vulnerability and asked me what was going on. I told her, she disappeared, then soon returned with her family — all equally dark skinned, all as large (or larger), and all as friendly.
She pressed into my hand a wad of bills (I wouldn't check the amount until the end of the dream; it turned out to be hundreds of dollars in new and fancifully slick bills, not the shabby grey-green of real American money) and invited me to come along with her and her family to ... wherever it was they were doing.
It was a dream, after all.
I didn't take them up on the offer right away, preferring to spend some time wandering around the airport and beyond, but I had no money, no ID, no phone, and so returned and found that they still hadn't left. So I went with them.
We crowded into their car, their fleshy American bodies crowding me against a door that was sometimes in the back and sometimes in the front seat, but the atmosphere was always friendly, never threatening, though I was always also fully aware I was a white guy suddenly thrust into a black world.
Until, somehow, we were in Mexico, in a a restaurant which in my dream was a bodega. I was even more lost than I had been at LAX, but once again the woman who had first rescued me told me how and what to order and, at last, I was able to use the money they had gifted me — and when I found out just how substantial a gift it was.
And that was roughly when I woke up. At around 08:22, nearly two hours later than Baobao usually makes enough noise from her room down the hall to drag me from my slumber. She had been busy with a book Mama Raven left her with the night before; but for just how long will forever remain a mystery.
As will the significance of that dream, if any. Nevertheless, it is a rare dream I remember a half-day after dreaming it, so I leave it here, on a semi-private social network(s) for my own posterity. Possibly, it will have entertained some of you, as well.
Photo of Baobao finishing up one of her epic works of kitchen art, taken March 8, 2021. Needless to say, I played with the colours becauz dreamz.
____
*With apologies to Pete Seeger
