Opinion

What dreams may come? Ah, if you only knew ...

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Well, as far as I know, no one slipped anything into my iced tea. No funny mushrooms got mixed in with my pizza toppings and I haven't been anywhere nearly tropical enough to warrant any kind of contact high.

Yet after a recent dream snapped me awake at 4 a.m. the other day, I felt as though I'd been hallucinating like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve.

Crazy thing is, never do I remember much of anything from my dreams, sweet as they may be. I'll awake from some random dream and think how I need to remember those images to share with the gang at the office, and by the time my feet hit the bedroom floor, I've forgotten it all.

Not so the other night. Granted, I've been working a lot lately (maybe not Grant Wieman-like hours, but too many to count nonetheless) so there has been more on my mind than usual.

The variety has been interesting: Airport Appreciation Days, Barbecue Contest, Zombie Run, Sammy Terry appearance, Bret Baier lecture, Myers' Market opening, Taste of Putnam County, Dine on the Square, Ivy Gallery opening ... plus a multitude of city meetings to sit through and digest.

So there's little wonder that when I lay my head upon the pillow each night (if 1:30 or 2 a.m. still counts as night), it is generally spinning. My mind seems to routinely run through some cerebral checklist of what I've done and what I need to do.

Some people count sheep as they try to sleep, I count notepads, Bic pen tops and photo ops.

It's like I always say, yep, newspaper editors all have issues.

But in a total rarity the other night, I awakened to recall vividly the details of what I had just seen in my dreams.

Thinking back, some of it was undoubtedly rooted in reality. The people in this melodrama of my mind were freshly etched in my consciousness from Dine on the Square to Open Mic at The Swizzle Stick to the opening day of lunch at the Ivy Gallery.

Yep, food always seems to be involved, which undoubtedly helped create the tasty undercurrent to this nocturnal vision.

This strange dream seemed to be set aboard a large airplane, I'm not positive but it could have easily been Air Force I (didn't see Harrison Ford aboard though).

I remember seeing myself walking down the aisle and people were everywhere, like a party scene. Legendary DePauw football coach Nick Mourouzis was chatting with local bluesman Tad Robinson. Mayor Sue Murray waved to me as I kept making my way forward where several unidentifiable folks were gathered around Jeff McCall, who was sharing Bret Baier stories.

People came from miles around, everyone was there. Yoko brought her walrus, there was magic in the air.

I wanted to stop and chat but my feet kept moving. "C'mon feet, don't fail me now" leaped into my head. I believe my mother used to call that the heebie-jeebies.

I cruised on into the forward cabin, only to find both Gail Smith and Mary Anne Birt, renowned local bakers that they are, dressed in flight suits, about to zip up and flip down the visors on their jet pilot helmets.

They were preparing to parachute into the darkness toward the jungle below. It was a strange mission.

"It's the only way to get tiger milk," I remember Gail explaining.

And somehow I seemed to understand that.

Tiger milk, geez, didn't that help whack out poor, old Charlie Sheen? No, wait, that was tiger blood. Whatever.

Besides, I didn't even know you could milk a tiger. But imparting Ben Stiller's logic from "Meet the Parents," I suppose it's possible.

Of course, this bizarre dream sequence never divulges how Gail and Mary Anne (hmm, awfully close to Ginger and Mary Anne) were going to get out of that jungle and back into that plane with said tiger milk. Perhaps they would bump into D.B. Cooper or Amelia Earhart, I don't know.

Obviously dreams can be quite strange. Psychiatrists will tell you, however, that there's generally some factual basis to the zaniness running through your head while you're sawing those logs. But who knows?

I'm thinking maybe the whole thing materialized thanks to what I ate.

Perhaps, it was those chicken planks at LJS (Long John Silver ... way too close for comfort to LSD), combined with the Wendy's chili I had for dinner and that french silk pie Dairy Queen Blizzard that topped it all off after work.

I know all of that turned my stomach into a flip-flopping nightmare, so it's only logical that my head and my heart might follow.

Now, if someone could just explain to me why Jerry Hecko was flying that plane ...