Surfing the Subconscious
I have weird dreams. Not twisted, sick or perverted dreams – no matter how much I’d probably enjoy them – just weird ones. I’m sure I’m not alone.
The strangest thing about dreams is that things happen to you in them, things that - if they happened to you in real life - would have you screaming for help, browsing for psychiatrists or booking a recuperative stay in the Latex Suite at the local Giggle Academy of your choice. But in the dreams, they make perfect sense.
Ever dream you were riding down a country road on your bike, and then suddenly it turned into a surfboard? Now, if such a thing actually happened to you, it might be reason enough to call in the white coats, or the television networks. But in dreams, it is like, OK, now I’m on a surfboard. No big deal. And the road suddenly being covered with snakes? Not a problem, as long as stay on the surfboard, which has now turned into a throw rug with a manual 5-speed. And you are not surprised.
When I am overseas and away from my beloved little patch of land in Appomattox County, I have dreams that mix the different locales together. My stateroom on the ship may be located in my house, which is in the ocean, and I have to take a launch ashore to feed the horses. And then I am back in the house without having to take a launch back to it.
Or I’ll go into downtown Garrapan, Saipan – located in Northern Marianas in the western Pacific - and find myself looking in the window of Baines’ to see if they are displaying a copy of my book, and instead I see a Chinese buffet. With surfboards. In the middle of the Old Town Square in Tallinn, Estonia. That’s in Europe.
But hey, I get around. Perfectly reasonable.
Last night I dreamed that we (we being me and my wife, at least, I think it was my wife, and if it wasn’t, I may have just written myself into a world of major hurt) had to hurry home from Las Vegas – a place where neither of us have never been nor desire to go to - because our dog was in danger and giving it CPR remotely over my laptop didn’t work. After making an emergency stop for instructions at a veterinary stand in the food court of a mall – all of this making perfect sense, by the way – we sped for home to save the unfortunate beast.
Did I mention that the mall was in England? Torbay, probably, or maybe it was Weymouth. The only other possibility is Heathrow Airport, as those are the only places in England I have been. I don’t count Scotland, but neither – for the most part – does England.
The dog had a broken leg, which, as you might know, would benefit little from CPR, even over a laptop. The thing is, the dog was a Yorkshire Terrier, which we don’t have. We have an American Water Spaniel and a Great Pyrenees. No Yorkies. I don’t even LIKE Yorkies. They all look like Gabby Hayes, who was Roy Rogers’ sidekick, and I don’t like Roy Rogers. There is logic here, if only in dreams.
I guess one of the good things about traveling a lot and having so many different kinds of experiences with so many various cultures – besides the obvious educational benefits – is that it provides lots of interesting fodder to be chopped up, ground and all mixed together in the Southern States mill of my mind, then scooped and fed to my herd of salivating brain cells, which then digest it in the form of dreams…like the one I’m having now.
I’m back in Appomattox. When did we get palm trees?
Not that I am surprised. Makes perfect sense. Now where is that surfboard?
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