My Best Dreams

Point: “Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”--Henry David Thoreau

In the grips of a fever dream years ago, I was having a mundane conversation with a friend when a stranger burst into the room to ask us a pressing question.

“Does anyone have a thumb or a rectangle?” he said.

That's when I woke up, sweaty and vexed. It seemed my mind was vomiting nonsense, and a short while later, as I knelt over the toilet, my digestive track followed suit, by way of my gagging mouth.

So many dreams account for little more than neurotic gibberish. When we dream, anarchic madness tends to hinder any semblance of reason. In my estimation, that sort of lawlessness of the thought process entertains more often than it enlightens. What's more troublesome, some dreams are mere bothers, surreal annoyances that serve as the mind's answer to getting stopped at a lengthy red light late at night when it feels like you must be the only one behind the wheel of a car in the entire county.

Dreams are not always without merit, though. In fact, I would go so far as to write that a cosmic disservice is incurred when we ignore the significance of the best of the bunch. With retrospective grandeur, I must confess that I owe the idea for “The Dark Knight and Brett Favre” to a dream. In a haze of awakening from that otherworldly mush, it struck me that one of the lines from the latest Batman flick could be applied to the career arc of the Old Gunslinger.

And I went from there, just as I'm about to go from here. These are my best dreams.

I. For reasons I can't recall, I got into a scuffle with the Undertaker.

The menacing pro-wrestler who tells his opponents they will “rest in peace” before he (pretends to) drive their skulls into the mat? Yes. The very same.

Rather than inside the squared-circle, the nasty dispute between the Undertaker and me took place in a disused warehouse. He lunged at me with those balled-up purple gloves flailing viciously. And since the Undertaker has never been known to inject performance-enhancing drugs, we have to assume Natural rather than 'Roid Rage was the catalyst of his attack.

Luckily, I was armed with a shot-gun. The Undertaker gave me no choice. I didn't want to get Tombstone Pile-driven—not even in a dream. I blew his head off. It combusted not with shards of grotesque brain and skull fragments, but in a burst of confetti.

It quickly dawned on me that if anyone found out about the murder, I'd be kicked out of college. The bleak prospect of imprisonment never came to me, for some reason; it was only the dread of being expelled (for the homicide of the Undertaker) that struck me with worry.

I realized I was going to have to change my residence and rushed home to the apartment I shared with my roommate Pat (my actual roommate in college, years ago). Confused and offended, he wanted to know why I was so suddenly intent on moving out. I dodged the question and continued to hastily gather my belongings. Instead of practical things like clothing and toiletries, I focused on rifling a vast mound of Lego's into an opened suitcase.

“Why do I own so many damn Lego's?” I wondered resentfully.

Rarely does a dream adhere to guidelines of dramatic form. Our subconscious scribe is not likely to present a cohesive narrative in three acts. Convention is not merely circumvented or even bucked; it is massacred—as though an eccentric hack who writes and directs community theater debacles has wrenched the script away from a more reliable source. Dreams tend to devolve into experimental theater in which the experiment goes awry and something abruptly vanishes into nothing worthwhile.

Accordingly, my hurried packing of Lego's is where the story of my killing of the Undertaker and the cover-up that ensued concludes.


II. It was a picturesque summer day and I was lounging on the beach when I spotted three gorgeous women in bikinis. The women were half-encircled by a film crew intent on capturing every frame of the enchanting lust they exuded. It soon occurred to me that I was viewing the production of a porno flick of the all hole, no pole variety. I realized I was dreaming and could not recall delivering a pizza to any of the actresses and was therefore content to sit this one out and watch from the fringe. It seemed my subconscious was treating me to a trial run of late-night Cinemax.

From a stagehand I was told that in the upcoming scene the brunette was to have a frightful brush with a killer whale about 50 feet from the shore. The killer whale was to be added with CGI technology in post-production. Her girlfriends, a redhead and a blond with lithe and buxom figures to match the brunette, were to watch the encounter from the shore, dumbstruck by nervous concern. Thankfully, the CGI killer whale would swim away, having caused fear but no harm, and the brunette would wade in, rattled but without wounds.

The brunette's anxiety was to be subdued by her friends through seduction. Yes, there was going to be chicks making out with each other, some serious tongues-to-hooters action, and maybe even mutual going down while the blond did her best to keep busy.

I was cool with that. Six boobs and three vaginas and butts? Beautiful faces, trim physiques? Thumbs up to this dream, I thought. I plopped down on the sand and sat Indian-style with a clear view of the women. The brunette was all-done panicking about a make-believe killer whale. She swam toward everyone.

Then the director yelled: “Cut!”

They took a break in filming just before the lesbian three-way scene. I watched on, mouth agape, as the redhead sat down on a lawn chair and sipped from a bottled water. The blond's cell phone was brought to her so that she could send a text message as a middle-aged, scruffy man held up an umbrella to shade her from the Sun. My treasured brunette wasn't doing anything especially sexy, either. She covered herself from shoulders to shins with a tightly drawn towel as she gazed down disinterestedly.

The director had picked a lousy time to announce a break on set. I had to laugh. Tickled by the joke that had unfolded and free of inhibitions, I approached the brunette. She had the appeal of a sexy wet taco wrapped in a shell of cotton.

I struck up a brief conversation of simple verbal volleys exchanged with casual interest and coy smiles that culminated, rather quickly, in me asking if she wanted to make out.

She giggled and peered upward in the way women do when they mean to say they like you but you simply must work on your timing. She conceded that she could remember my phone number if I told it to her.

Because it had clicked that I was asleep, I didn't see much use in getting the digits of a porn star I met in a dream. It seemed futile, like committing to memory the password to a Nintendo I hadn't played in years and was not inclined to ever play again. I came up with a fib.

“Sure. My number is 6-1-2 etc.”

With that I walked away and sat back down on the sand. I figured maybe I could wait it out until filming resumed, but I had a weird hunch I was bound bound to transport to somewhere else soon—whether it be consciousness or a different dream. A rueful grin spread across my face as I glanced adoringly at that brunette and, in Quantum Leap fashion, consumed by zapping-electric shocks, suddenly inhabited a fresh and random environment that was not at all as sexy as on the beach with three frisky vixens. I think it took place inside a dimly lit piano bar, where Urkel was trying to convince me we were both born in Fond du Lac. I called bullshit on Urkel's claim and longed for my previous dream between outbursts of his nasal yammering.

III. Although imagery provides the basis for most dreams, once in a while a weird succession of thoughts steals the show during my REM sleep. It's as if sunlight is pouring in through the windows of a classroom to diffuse the stills displayed by an old projector and the ramble of my own voice comes to the forefront.

I saw a faint image of my brother Dave and recalled with a tinge of resignation that the two of us share little in common. On a given night, while he handcuffs and wrangles abusive husbands and degenerate drunks into the back of a cop car, I'm immersed in yet another daydream holiday, ducking responsibilities in a basement or a friend's house. We are bereft of similarities—whether physical, temperamental, or political, but he was on my mind because he had just visited along with his wife and infant son. When in each other's company, Dave and I constantly banter quotes from The Simpsons as a sort of fluent second language to counteract the distance between us. One of our beloved exchanges is excerpted from an episode in which Homer happens upon a mound of spilled sugar on the highway and shovels the load into the trunk of his car with dreams of selling the “Texas Tea Sweetener” to make a cushy living. In his obsessive devotion to this goofy scheme, he neglects his job at the nuclear power plant. Marge confronts him while he's playing hookie from work in the backyard.

Nick, mimicking Marge: “Homer, the plant called again today and said if you don't show up tomorrow, don't bother coming in on Monday.”

Dave, mimicking Homer: “Woo-hoo! Four-day weekend!”

Nick and Dave laugh--giddy, revived, and indifferent to the groans and rolling eyes of other people in the living room who don't care much for The Simpsons and have been subjected to this same routine so many times before.

In my dream, the indistinct still-frame of a zombie flickered on the projector screen and I was reminded of a chat Dave and I had the day before. The ghostly picture of the zombie soon disappeared and I was left with the memory of Dave telling me that he too is a fan of the AMC series The Walking Dead.

Although I have no inclination to memorize lines of dialog from The Walking Dead, I was satisfied to find another way to bond with my older brother. In the unlikely event of a zombie uprising, he will be better prepared and enlightened on the ways of survival, he will be a capable protector of his wife and son. He owns a handgun and has access to a police station rife with shotguns, ammo, riot shields, and—if real life is anything like Resident Evil 2—cans of first-aid spray that cure zombie bites. I made a mental note to remember to call and meet up with Dave moments after my first encounter with a Walker.

Dave would be a worthy ally in the unlikely event of a zombie uprising.

I spotted an image of the Ghostbusters logo, the spirit encircled with a bold diagonal line slashed across it, and then the idea took off and I was left to frolic in offbeat thought.

If zombies did exist, there is no guarantee their presence would lead to Armageddon, as is the case in The Walking Dead. Nor is it a certainty that mankind would in no time snuff out the rise of the zombies, as is the case in Shaun of the Dead. There is a solid chance neither of these extreme cases are likely, that the reality would be somewhere in the middle, and the real upshot is that zombies would be like public nuisances, supernatural pests, that a crew of wisecracking cut-ups will have to be called in to exterminate, as is the case in Ghostbusters.

I'd love to be a wise-cracking zombie exterminator. Dave could be my sidekick. No. Scratch that. I'd be Dave's sidekick, as a respectful nod to his seniority and experience. Instead of proton-packs, we'd be armed with a shit-load of guns. Instead of sliding traps, we'd have body-bags. Instead of the Ectomobile, we'd drive in the ZomBMW to the entrance of an infested hotel or library. We'd have to recruit a Dan Akroyd lookalike and a black guy to round out the quartet. (I am now accepting applications.)

For our logo, we'd replace the spirit with a zombie and slash through it with a diagonal line drawn in northwest to southeast fashion rather than northeast to southwest to avoid a lawsuit. We'd get rich, save lives, become heroes, and annihilate the brains of the nefarious undead.

The name of our crew would be Zombiebeheaders.

When I woke up, I rolled out of bed and grabbed a pencil and notebook. It's my belief that it is a cosmic disservice to let dreams go to waste.*

Counter-point: “Dreams are what we wake up from.”--Raymond Carver, from the short story “The Bridle”


*Especially the ones about zombies.