I don’t always remember my dreams in vivid detail and I know that’s also true for most people, otherwise it would be a daily belly laugh topic between co-workers at the lunchroom table. In between bites of a salami sandwich or forkfuls of left over penne bolognese, somebody could be detailing a dream about a harrowing climb up Mount Everest just because it was the best launch point for their favorite paper airplane. But, no. Dreams are often private scenarios that people don’t typically want to share or if you’re like me, even the memorable and weird ones are forgotten as soon as I refocus my eyesight in the morning light of the bathroom while fumbling for the tube of toothpaste. The memory of most all my dreams is lost before I rinse the blueish-white, minty foam down the drain.
But, not today. The colorful backdrop from a strange morning dream is still in my head.
Today’s dream came to me just after a 4:30 AM trip to the bathroom, because you know, sometimes you just have to go number one. It was too early to start the day so I climbed back into bed, covered up and fell back to sleep. Except, I wasn’t asleep.
The Weirdness Begins
I was standing in the middle of a large hotel ballroom surrounded by people milling about. There were long and narrow banquet tables in a few locations, the kind you might see lined up for a conference or a training session. My story starts there as I began to unpack and organize the contents of my backpack on an open space at the table directly in front of me.
I had apparently packed multiple cameras and lenses in anticipation of whatever event was happening inside this dream, as well as a large plastic rectangular bin of unwrapped red licorice. The actual licorice pieces were thicker and smooth sided more like the licorice ropes I remember getting at Tiger Stadium on Michigan and Trumbull. Somewhere in the midst of unpacking my camera, I accidentally dropped the plastic tub where it bounced once, flipped over and dumped the licorice all over the ballroom carpet. Before there was a glint of hope about this mishap going unnoticed, another adult near me saw me on the floor scooping up licorice pieces into my hands as I rescued them from that perfectly sanitary food prep area. A little carpet fuzz was apparently of no concern to me, even though the licorice was intended to be shared with a number of kids about the same age as my son.
The scenario comes more into focus now, because I am there to support my young son and a group of other kids his age who are there to drive race cars on some sort of a grand prix style street circuit just outside the hotel’s front entrance. It felt like the kids were all part of some club where the group of people gathered included parents and grandparents who would attend a kid event like this. With my daughters it was very much like the adult group waiting in the wings of the dance studio for the class to end, or those gathered for their soccer games. It was closer to the group of parents associated with my son’s travel hockey teams because a hotel was usually involved, but in any case the licorice was my donation to the treat table as all parents would contribute a snack for when the event was over. Compared to apple wedges or orange slices, I felt like I was pandering to the kids a little by bringing something they would prefer over all that healthy crap. I always wanted to be the cool dad.
I could not see my son, but I knew he had gathered in the center of the ballroom with the other kids and some parents for what I assumed was a pre-race meeting. It’s the sort of safety and rules meeting you see on television before automotive races begin, but I believed I still had time to rectify the licorice situation before the kids started to head out to their cars.
Quickly scurrying out to the hotel parking lot and to the back of my SUV, I had hoped to find some sort of a serving plate or bowl I could put the licorice in. Why did I expect to find a serving plate in the back of my car? I have no idea. Because scooping the candy back into the original broken plastic storage bin was uncool? Was I trying to pass off the candy as home made? Correction. Home made with a little carpet fuzz for added texture? Of course there was no plate or serving bowl to be had because why would there be, so I headed back into the hotel ballroom to find my open table spot and unpacked my cameras again. When I looked up towards the middle of the room, the crowd had already moved to the right side ballroom exits and out onto the streets. I had apparently missed my son as he and the rest of the kids were already outside.
Leaving the licorice and the broken tub behind, I ran towards the ballroom exit, through the lobby and past the hotel entrance to the front walkway. A crowd of adults had already gathered. It was a thick, shoulder to shoulder mass of people and I had to push my way through the crowd to get to the curb. Drivers were already pulling up the front of the hotel as a staging point before driving to the right and beginning their initial lap of the street circuit. I fumbled for my camera in the backpack to hopefully snap some shots of each driver in their cars before they pulled away. One of the cars pulling up was a circa 1960’s brown Dodge Coronet with a dad in the driver’s seat and his son on the passenger side. None of that made any sense, unless the son as part of this racing club was too young to drive. Also, the rest of the hotel and race setting was much more modern so I wasn’t sure where the old sedan image came from. What spices were actually in that Pico de Gallo I ate last night? I swear; no gummies or mushrooms of any kind were involved here.
It was at this point I looked up across the street to see a block long series of identical apartment buildings with shiny aluminum trim and blue tinted, curved glass adorning each apartment. The buildings were all oval in shape with curved balcony protrusions wrapping each floor. They looked a bit like corn cobs or the famous cylindrical parking structure on the Chicago river, except these buildings were elliptical. The blue tinted and curved glass seemed to wrap the exterior of the balcony which in retrospect completely defeats the purpose of an open air balcony. The residents seemed to use those spaces as glass display areas. Some showed off a small furniture setting. Others faced a piece of painted art outward so that outsiders could see it, one featured a jewelry display including an ornate and heavy necklace of some type. Again, no drugs were involved in the fabrication of these images inside my head.
While still looking for my son to pull up to the front of the hotel for his staging and launch, I was interrupted my a local man speaking a language I didn’t understand, and trying to sell me a pin I’m assuming was a souvenir for this particular event. He held up a piece of cardboard with many of these pins displayed there for my choosing and of course inferring a donation was required. It was one of those old very cheap stamped metal lapel pins you would fold over your collar and it would stay there until you bent it open again. I had not seen or thought about a pin like this since the 1970’s. It had an image of a red Swiss flag on it and some writing down the rectangular length of the pin that I didn’t understand. It was at this point I figured out that we were somewhere in Switzerland and I was already supposed to know that. I felt a little trapped as other parents and onlookers had surrounded me and blocked my view of the street, but just then another parent who I think I was supposed to recognize, stepped in to speak the same foreign language and rescue me from the pin salesman. I was in fact rescued, but I had missed seeing my son drive away in whatever car he was supposed to be driving. Hopefully it was a little cooler and faster than an old Chrysler four door sedan.
And then I woke up to the sound of my Beagle yawning loudly, followed by shaking his head so that his big floppy ears make popping sounds while his collar jingles. That’s his alarm mechanism and his way of saying; “Hey man, I’m ready for breakfast!” It was also the end of the dream.
Translating the Craziness
I’m not sure I can make sense of any of the dream. I feel a little like I’m in the middle of an episode of Shrinking, where Harrison Ford throws the dream details back at me and asks, “what do you think it means?”
Some of the images and situations in the dream have nothing to do with any past memory. I’ve never brought or dumped a container of red licorice at any event. None of my kids were ever involved with any racing activity. Why Switzerland and what’s up with those weird buildings with balconies that aren’t balconies? The only thing that pops up on my radar is that when I used to travel a lot for work, I would wind up missing out on some of my kids events like my daughter’s soccer games and my son’s hockey games but that was decades ago. We did have a mid sixties brown Dodge station wagon when I was a kid, and I remember those old metal folding pins, but haven’t thought about either of those things in more than 30 years. It’s all weird and apparently strange enough for me to remember the details before they washed away in the toothpaste filled sink. Maybe tonight I’ll go heavy on the garlic and basil for a pasta dish and see what kind of trouble I can get in again tonight!
What the hell DID I eat last night?
(Examples of those old metal folding lapel pins, circa 1960)
TFW Woodworking 