I’m having strange dreams lately. Every morning for the last week, I wake up in the shadow of an ambiguous dream, dripping with beads of cold sweat, curled up in the centre of my thrashed bed. Yesterday I awoke crying; and to think, it may have been avoided if I could have just saved the drowning poet. Last night, I watched a friend, whom I don’t know, get sucked into a swirling, violent chasm of quicksand, whislt I watched helplessly from the side. My basketball coach, with a gigantic nasal piercing, patted me on the shoulder, encouraging me, “go Tigers.”
My whole life I have dreamed vividly. Not every night, but nearly every night, I lie down and watch a production in technicolor. Most mornings, or mid-nights, I awake and try to piece together what I can from the dream before it vanishes, never to be seen or remembered again. I sometimes marvel at the spin my brain puts on the previous day’s conversations and incidents. I have never parked my car on the roof of the house, for instance. I have yet to walk into a group of my peers in nothing but my underwear and tell them to “suck it.” No wait. Yeah, that one did happen, I think.
When I was younger, my dreams were more lucid and I could control my them almost as if I were God himself. “You,” I’d say. “Get naked,” though I’m sure that God doesn’t need to command anyone to get naked, I imagine, he has quite a brilliant imagination. Clearly he must, look at the platypus, the camel and Ryan Seacrest. The point is, anyway, that I was in charge of my dreams when I was a kid, and if I didn’t like what was going on, or if I suspected I was going to piss all over myself, I’d just politely excuse myself from tea with the Mad Hatter and Alice, and wake myself up. It’s was good to be king.
Now, I’m stuck with dreams that make me fear I’m going mental. Not really, of course, because everyone is allowed to have crazy dreams, that’s why we call them, “your wildest dreams.” Just once though, I’d like to make friends with a friendly, brown monster, or play paintball with the late Queen Mother, or talk women with a eunuch. I just need some reprieve. I’m not having nightmares or anything, but close to it: I was a basketball player.
