I had a dream today

Jones sets a bad precedent by brain-dumping his sleep images on my blog:

I had a dream last night that Osama bin Laden died and since he was dead those hiding him decided he no longer had to be hidden so they gave up his whereabouts and said that he died...well, where ever it was. I remember the country started with a "S" but didn't have a real name when I looked on the map. Regardless, the next part of the dream was the U.s. government attacking the country with a massive air strike and turning it into rubble as revenge for hiding him. I remember thinking it was a totally pointless move. Now that I'm awake, I wonder what it all means.

I didn't dream very much myself until I started hitting the recumbent bike a lot harder in the evenings, and now my nights seem to be full of things that confuse me*. But last night, Rogue and I took a big ride while watching a show on how to make fabulous cocktails**, and I slept downstairs because she had to work today and I wanted to sleep in - being a hard-working government employee I have the day off. [insert snarky or ironic comment here]

So right after she left I crawled into our bed and it was awesome... it was warm and smelled like her and I made a huge nest out of the 10 pillows that she sleeps with right in the middle of the bed (I usually just get one and about a foot on one side). And then I had two of the psychoest psycho dreams ever.

The first one was that I was back at the Prairie Village Pippin's***, a now-defunct restaurant where I worked in college and for a while afterwards. I was still my current age, but everyone there (and it was all the same people who worked there 20 years ago) were all the same age as they were then.

Lots of little stuff was weird, like we had three grills instead of two. No big deal. But then Donna the Manager comes back to the kitchen with a vegetable steamer - it was a huge plate of (get this) steamed vegetables - in her hand and says the customer wants a new one, but this time to sub 18 pieces of pizza for all the veggies. I woke up a bit confused, but I managed to shake it off and go back to sleep.

In the next one we tried out a new church, and it was really pretty nice - a public library in Johnson County****, but not the Johnson County Public Library (I didn't say this had to make sense). It had a black preacher, a really big fat guy, and he was yelling and hooting and running around. And I remember thinking that was pretty cool, since we have black foster kids and they would enjoy a multi-racial church. But every once in a while, everyone in a whole section (like a dozen people) would pop up and run across the church to a different section and sit down. Then a minute later, some other group would do the same. and they would either run in a perfectly straight line together, or as a square. It was really coordinated.

So the preacher is walking around and he comes up to Rogue and I (we had no kids with us for some reason) and he gets right up in her face, and he asks, "Are you feeling good today?" Now when our daughter Rebel Nun was a little kid, she used to to stand there and refuse to answer a question. It was incredibly annoying. And that's what Rogue was doing. And he's like, "I said are you feeling GOOD today?" And he starts kissing all over her face. And she wouldn't answer the question until he left, and then she pipes up and asks if she could have his microphone. Then I realized my sunglasses (which for some inexplicable reason I was wearing indoors) were really 3D glasses from the movie Magician's Nephew - I could tell because when I looked at them, they said that all over the rim.

Then I woke up confused again, and only an hour had passed. So I figured I'd better make some breakfast before something really confusing happened.

* Rather than just my days, as had been the case prior.

** During which I learned one very cool thing. My favorite drink, a rum and Coke, is also called a Cuba Libre (Free Cuba). So now when I have one I can, in good liberal fashion, imagine that I am doing something to help those oppressed by a left-wing dicta...oh, wait, left-wing dictators never oppress anyone. That's only right-wing ones. My bad.

*** It's been a long time since I had Pippin's dreams. The last one I remember was something of a nightmare. You see, we used to get our orders via a hanging aluminum wheel with springs on it. The waitress would attach the order to the wheel via a spring which would make a snapping noise. Then she'd spin the wheel and the order would come into the kitchen. A lot of snaps meant a lot of orders, and since when you worked the grill you were facing away from the window, the snapping noise was how you knew you had more orders. I said all that to say this: I dreamt that I was working the grill, which was actually 2 grills (one for meats, one for sandwiches) and the grills went as far to the left and right as I could see. And they were both covered with orders, more orders than I could possibly manage. And behind me I'm hearing "snap, snap, snapsnapsnap," a million orders coming in. And I'm all panicked. And as I look down, I see that I have no hands, but that the ends of my arms turn straight into spatulas, like Ted Nugent's guitars on the cover of "Scream Dream." And I let out a scream and I wake up amazed that I didn't pee myself. This dream was not as bad as that one.

**** Which itself was pretty weird, since most of my dreams take place in Duluth, Minnesota.