One Hour of My Dream Life

This morning, three hours after the morning I went to sleep on/in the comfortable chair at the Hatten hacienda, Mario shook me awake with a laser-guided stream of words: "Mark, wake up!" Since the phrase contained my favorite syllable in any language, I shot up like a bolt, only to hear "Do you want to go back home to sleep?"

Being a pushover, a genuinely nice person, and not wanting to walk the twenty miles back, I acquiesced to his request. So Mario drove us home, and I crashed immediately upon entry. I wasn't in any condition to do push-ups or pull-ups after the Thanksgiving feast, so I took advantage of the well-placed floor in the louge. For the next hour, I went through dreams at an unprecedented pace.

The first dream was a series, with a two-out-of-three victory for happy endings:

I dreamed I bit something, and suddenly felt a tooth go to pieces. A tiny metal ball came out, as well as another metal part, leaving me a useless crater/thimble. I would need to add toothpicks to my already overlong brush-floss-mouthwash-pray-to-God-of-Teeth routine. But then I realized with great the joy of waking that this was just a dream, and fell back asleep full of gratitude to this practical joke for being just that. This time I dreamed that I bit something and my tooth pretty much vaporized, if such a term is applicable to teeth. It is definitely applicable to dream teeth. I once again fell into misery and self-pity, and woke myself up with my funeral dirges dedicated to my tooth. I may have woken the neighbors as well. Anyway, happy again, I rushed to tell Mario about the experience. I told him about both dreams, and then, just before he could reward my story with a quote worthy of posting here, I woke up again.

That wasn't the end for me though. This was an hour long nap after all - three twenty-minute Uberman REM cycles. As soon as my head hit the floor, I was hanging out with Natasha in NY. Now, Natasha is a pretty impulsive person, even in reality, but don't worry, this was a PG dream. If you are imagining otherwise, that is your poetic reading license, and good for you (and write to me about it). My version was unequivocally clean.

So Natasha decides she needs to pee, and I don't question her. She gets on her back, tucks her legs in and assumes the Dreamed Natasha Peeing Position (to be featured in the next six Stephen Chow movies). Being a gentleman of outstanding wisdom, I say "I'll cover you," and sit on her knees with my back to her.

A second later, I feel warm jet washing my back. "Not cool," I think, followed by "where is your sense of professionalism?" But my thoughts do nothing to ward away the warm jet. It continues to polish the already smooth surface of my latissimus dorsi. I get up, because I have no wish to be more than the already 89% soaked with urine. I start running around like a boy playing pterodactyl, but with more practical reasons. To my astonishment, the warm jet pursues me. Knowing for a fact, or at least a damn good theory, that Natasha is not a guy and can't possibly possess such proficiency in the sniping arts, AND being too much a gentleman of outstanding wisdom to look her way and find out, I suddenly find a light bulb in my head and turn it on. And I realize that it's the two open water bottles I have in my jacket, upside down, left over from a previous dream. I dare anyone to say now that dreams are useless to remember! If I had remembered those water bottles, I would have kept Natasha safe from the everpresent NY spectators, instead of sacrificing her privacy to my undying love for dinosaurs.

Believe it or not, there were another two dreams during that hour. The first:

I dreamed that I was at Barnes and Noble's, but in some faraway land called dreamland. Some guy walks up to me and asks me if I'm the author of The Time Traveler's Wife. Stupidly, I say "haha no," though I undoubtedly had praise coming had I said "why yes, I'm Audrey Niffenegger." I don't remember the details of the rest of this encounter, just the vague feeling of being insulted with one of the more strange American children's-section-unprintables (CSU's).

And the second, otherwise known as the last dream, is unfortunately a CSU to its very dreamsoul. Or at the very least, the intent to commit a CSU. It never got past intent because Mario stepped in at that right/wrong moment, shook me awake with a cattle prod from the year 2312, and demanded whether I wanted a pillow. Are we sensing a trend? Count on Mario to ruin something that can only happen in a dream. And that leaves nothing to tell that wouldn't end on a cliffhanger, so I will spare you the unresolvable suspense.