If you want to read my crazy, trippy dream that I woke up remembering in
remarkable detail, involving a famous director with an
almost-Shakespearean name, a childhood crush, Pablo Schreiber as the
uncle of a child baker, and a foresty slum in Detroit whose trees' limbs
might or might not have been of the human variety, then read on. If
not, then you can just skip this one....
It was about
10 a.m. on a hot summer morning, and school (at my high school back home in Indiana) didn't start until 11 a.m., so I went
to a bar (as one does before high school classes) near Lincoln Center
in NYC to hang out for a bit before class. As I walked into the super-dark,
smoke-filled bar from the blinding mid-morning light outside, my eyes
took a long time to adjust. When they did, I tried to decide if I had
time to sit at the
bar and order a coffee or if I should just sit at a table and hope no
one noticed me so I could sit and enjoy air conditioning for a bit
before leaving. I sat down at a table and noticed a good-looking,
distinguished gentleman in his 50s a few tables away. He looked a lot
like Carson Drew (Nancy Drew's father in the old Nancy Drew mystery
books -- not that there exists a picture of Carson Drew or anything. But
nevertheless, I was sure this guy looked like him.). There was also a
beautiful Italian actress at another
table nearby (I'm pretty sure this bar was in the 1940s). I recognized
the man and realized he was the famous
director Juliuf Ceasar. (Now, in my dream, I
thought nothing of this name; it was just a name. Awake-me knows that
centuries ago an "s" sometimes looked like an
"f." So my dreaming subconscious just spelled the name in old-timey
writing, but dream-me misinterpreted it as an "f." Ignorant dream-me.)
He and the actress starting
chatting/flirting, and I got engrossed in listening to the actress
figure out she was chatting with the famous director Juliuf Ceasar.
Then I looked
at my watch, and, much to my horror, it was already 10:58. School
started in two minutes, and I knew I would most likely be late. It was
definitely not a problem that the school
was half a country away, because I was home at our house in two seconds,
but apparently
that extra 15 miles just couldn't be done in the remaining minute and
58 seconds. So now I was
at home getting ready for school (maybe I should have done the "get
ready for school" part before I went to a bar?). I realized I would be
super-late, so I debated whether I should just call in sick for the
whole day or only part of the day. It was one of the last
weeks leading up to finals, so a lot of the classes were review
sessions rather than learning anything new, which to my mind made them
not important, because I already knew everything they'd taught (dream-me
is apparently very confident). I wound
up asking my Mom to call me in sick for the morning, but then I
realized
that I didn't know what class I was supposed to be in when I arrived.
My schedule had different classes on different days, and I knew that the
class I would be arriving there for was either French or Art. But I
didn't know which was Mon/Wed and
which was Tues/Thurs. And I didn't know who was in any of my classes, so
I didn't know whom I could ask. And I wasn't sure if I could remember
where all the classes were because I hadn't actually been there in 10
years. But despite the fact that I knew I hadn't been there in 10
years, I was still very confused about how I didn't know my schedule,
because presumably I had been going to classes recently. So I wondered
what I had been doing the last few weeks....
Anyway, after
a lot of trouble with my hair (it was very greasy, and I couldn't get
it to look nice), I left for school. Going to school apparently
involved racing a boy (whom I went to school with off and on from 1st grade through the 12th grade and had a secret crush on for most of
those 12 years) up the hill to the house opposite ours. When we
got inside, he
disappeared (wait -- couldn't he have at least asked me to prom first?
It is my dream, after all), and there was a Swiss (or Swedish) family
there with a
little girl (4 to 6 yrs old) who was a famous biscotti baker. She had
an
apron with a big kangaroo front pocket, and the top of the pocket was
lined with biscotti crust. She explained that it was supposed to just
be a
regular crust, but it didn't turn out quite right, so she used it to
decorate her apron. She showed us some of her biscotti, and then she
pointed to the big painting on the wall (which was blue and watery) and
asked her Swiss uncle (played by
Pablo Schreiber, who in real life was very nice to me when I subbed on a
show he was in, and who Google tells me is in fact part Swiss, so my
casting is not entirely off-base here) where the wavy things had gone.
Not-Pablo-Schreiber replied, "Oh,
you remember that?" and took down the painting and flipped it over to
show another painting on the back that also had water, but the water
(along with everything else) had a lot more detail. So this time the
water had waves, and the trees had leaves, and the ground had flowers.
The girl nodded that yes, she remembered it, and she said she had been
wondering what happened to it. He hung it back up on the wall, this
time with the detailed side facing out, and as the girl nodded with satisfaction, all of a sudden I was
with both of my parents and we were driving through the backwoods of Detroit
(bet you didn't know there were backwoods in Detroit, huh?).
It was
forest, but it was a slum forest…. We passed a Bath and Body Works
attached to a Natural History Museum. I wanted to go in (to both --
Dream-me is interested both in learning and in smelling like flowers and
berries), but I thought
it probably wasn't a good idea since it was such a slum. But somehow
our car morphed into driving through the museum, and then all of a sudden
we were inside. I was carrying my monstrous backpack with all my stage
management stuff in it. There were lots of homeless people
everywhere, many of them acting more like residents of an insane
asylum. One of them started doing a pat-down on my dad (like the guy
thought he was a cop doing a pat-down of a suspect). I took out my
pepper spray, but we were clearly outnumbered by crazy homeless people,
so I watched him to figure out what he was up to. He turned his
attention away from my dad, came over to me, looked at my giant
backpack,
and said, "I know who you are. You're one of those reporters from the
Pittsburgh Gazette. Well, I wasn't going to hurt him. I just like to
pat
guys down and then throw their limbs in the forest." So then we bolted
out of there and got in the car and kept going. And then I woke up.
We never did get to go to Bath and Body Works, and I never did speak to
my 10-years-ago, 12-year-long secret crush. But everyone left with all
their limbs still attached, and I never had to go to school, so I think
it was a
success.
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