Dreams

I'm always amazed at the ability of dreams to surprise me. Surprise anybody, really.

Since dreams are forged somewhere down in the depths of whatever it is that makes you you, you would think that everything that happened in them would seem fundamentally right. No matter how weird they got, or how sad they got, or how scary they got, they should never quite seem wrong.

I mean yeah, you could be "surprised," but it should be in a Bruce Willis-Sixth-Sense kind of way, a surprise that seems absolutely right the whole time--not a complete blindsided surprise that seems like things shouldn't be like that. Sort of like the difference between being "pretend scared" and "real scared" when you were a kid. You should be able to be wink-wink surprised in dreams, and you can go through the motions of being surprised by something that, deep down, you expect would be the sort of thing that would surprise you.

But it just seems to me that if dreams are coming from the same part of you that's forging your core, your beliefs about how the world works, then things shouldn't happen that are fundamentally contradictory to that.

That's the observation. Now you must want to hear the dream.

I almost didn't blog about it, just because dreams are one of those things that are inherently boring to other people. Just about any dream is pointless if you didn't experience it yourself.

But making this post without saying what dream inspired it would have made you curious and made the dream seem more important than it was. The dream wasn't nearly as important as the observation. And just to prove that, here it is:

My wife and I had parked the car and were walking to a restaurant to meet my folks for dinner. We passed by what looked like a fairly decent hotel that had a sign about some services it offered, including Internet access.

My wife ducked inside through a back door, and I followed her. As we started exploring, though, we realized it wasn't a hotel, but a really nice restaurant, the kind that I could never go to in real life. It had a nostalgic Meet Me in St. Louis feel to it, with lots of wood and textured wallpaper.

A couple people smiled at us conspiratorially and called us cheaters when they realized how we got in.

We nosed around the place for a while, spending quite a bit of time at the magic shop looking at different types of force decks, but then I had to go to the bathroom and so I told Marci I'd be back.

The bathroom was as awesome as the rest of the place, and I spent a while exploring it, too.

By the time I got out, two women were walking holding my crying wife between them.

When I asked her what was wrong, she said something like, "I had to go the bathroom, I just couldn't wait any longer, and I didn't know where to find you . . ."

Not my wife. Not my wife at all. Not the crying because she couldn't find me, and not the confiding in two strangers about anything.

The absolute bizarreness of my wife acting like that woke me up.

See? I told you the observation was more interesting than the dream.