All's fair in love, war and movies

I dreamt that I was a male soldier in a war.  I was advancing up a stairwell under fire.  A head poked out over the top banister.  I fired.  The body tumbled down the stairs, landing at my feet, face up.  I saw it was a dear friend.  I had shot him through the left eye.

I picked up the body and cradled it, flooded with shame and remorse.  When I put my head to his chest to see if he still lived, I heard a ticking.  Not a heartbeat, more like a clock.  I ripped open his shirt and saw the enemy had cut out his heart, replacing it with a bomb.

Just in time I tossed the body down the stairs behind me.  It exploded before it even hit the ground.  The concussive wave knocked me over.  Debris rained down.

I pushed down my awareness of the nature of the explosive confetti that covered me, the walls, the floor.  I kept moving.  Up the stairs.  Toward the objective.

At the top of the stairs was a cobblestone street.  I was girl, about 13, in a nightgown.  The director called, "Action!" so I pushed open the door of the Italian restaurant and took a seat next to my step-mother in a cheerful yellow booth at the back, next to the bathroom.

The shot was two and a half hours of me pretending to read the menu and order pasta and red sauce in slow motion while the special effects crew wrangled the flying equipment that was supposed to bring other actors floating gently in from stage left.

Instead they crashed and dropped, hovered and slid.  Finally the director called it a day, completely exasperated.  Arnold Swarzenegger patted my shoulder as he walked past.  "Good job," he said.  "A total pro."  He'd been on the other end of the steel cables and harness for the last couple of hours, attempting to Peter Pan into the scene without success.

I rose, now grown, invited him to have a drink with me.  We settled into a couch in the far corner and a friend brought two shots - one blue and one red.  As Arnold downed the red, my friend whispered, "a total send-up of the Matrix."  The liqueur turned his eyes bloodshot.  

I had loud, vigorous sex on the couch with Arnold Swarzenegger, while extras and crew wandered past tidying up the set.

Wedding cake prostitution

OK so first of all, NO MORE VODKA BEFORE BED.

It is 440 am and I can honestly say I've never had the pleasure before now of waking up in a cold sweat and realizing oh thank GOD I wasn't in charge of those two wedding cakes on the way to my prostitution court date.

So here is the dealio.

I rode a bus downtown with a friend who was going to teach me how to turn tricks.  But when I arrived she said I was wearing the wrong boots.  I needed thigh highs with a $50 price tag. 

So I called in a favor with a friend who was also the father of one of my labmates.  He pulled up to the side of the road in his blinged out SUV and when I explained why I needed the money, he hesitated, not wanting to get into legal trouble - since he was a lawyer and could be disbarred.

Eventually I promised I'd use my earnings to pay for his daughter's wedding cake.  She was to be married on Tuesday - New Year's eve - and here it was Saturday and he had no ideas. 

I had needed the money from hooking in the first place to pay for another special event cake - a friend was graduating - so I told him I'd just get an extra cake from the same place.

Relieved, he handed me the fifty, we embraced, he drove away, and a very pretty female police officer arrested me for intent to engage in prostitution.

I told her, tearfully, that I never got out much, just worked long hours, certainly had not spent much time downtown, that I didn't understand what was happening and so probably needed a lawyer.  She nodded, smiled.  It was a very genial arrest.

After I'd been booked, given a hearing date, and released, I began textbook grieving my arrest.

Bargaining - or as I like to call it, scheming: What could I say to explain my actions that would be plausible and obscure my true intention to sell sex for money?

Denial and anger: What had actually happened?  I got money from a friend.  Is what I had done actually illegal?  Can you be arrested for INTENDING to do anything you have not actually done?  I probably would have chickened out anyway.  How could the police possibly predict the future?

I also cried a lot - sadness - and of course, never got to acceptance.

Meanwhile there was the small matter of the cakes.  Now in this bizarre juxtaposition of two unprecedented anxieties dream you might think the problem was that between my time-consuming arrest and the chilling effect it had presumably had on my new revenue stream there was no cash or time to buy the cakes.

Not so, dear logical reader, for this is my brain on a greyhound (the drink AND the bus I traveled home from Christmas on - ha! a twofer!). 

Both cakes sat chilling in my fridge when I arrived home.  The problem was that they had not aged well.  The events - wedding and graduation - were to take place in two days' time and already, after only 24 hours storage, the one with strawberry mousse and wafer towers was starting to ridify and the one with fresh flowers was beginning to wilt.

Looking at them now, these cakes that had seemed such perfect solutions to the tasks I had signed on for, such fitting tributes to the solemn events, now looked cheap and old.

How could I possibly find replacements that were better over a holiday with such short notice?

I woke - Never so relieved to be hungover and dehydrated. 

Dream memory loss

I just spent hours doing...  I was in... We were trying to ...

I have no idea.  All I remember is that it felt really, really important.

Big brother is watching - and so is everyone else, apparently

Last night I dreamt that my mother - who was actually Lea Thompson, the actress who plays Kathryn Kennish on "Switched at Birth" - had begun to suspect that our city was the site of a reality TV show.

To test her theory my mother rented a glider and began taking off  from the shore of the lake behind our house, each time landing further and further out, in an effort to find the border, that false horizon.

Once you had that thought, the signs were everywhere.  I went exploring under bridges, to see how the waterways connected.  I found a young Asian lesbian couple living under the Hawthorne street bridge, nested up atop the power lines that run underneath from bank to bank.  They were very hungry and cold.  I gave them a shortbread cookie and $42 which was all the money in my wallet.

They told me a balding red-haired man had tricked them into a threesome and when they wanted out he ruined their credit.  They couldn't hold down jobs or get an apartment.  Their description reminded me of a friend I'd made just the day before - an older, wealthy man who I'd met at some supermarket and who I had invited over for dinner to discuss a business proposition.  Both girls said they'd rather live on the street than by his rules.

When I looked over the edge of the bridge strut, I could see the river was partitioned by high fences midway between every bridge.  It would be impossible to ride a boat or swim through the water. 

Three hundred yards to the right, I spotted a classmate from grad school and his two young boys standing on the bank of the river underneath another bridge.  They were skipping stones, hitting the fences.  The stacatto "thunk" "thunk" as the stones reached their mark made me feel light-headed and claustrophobic.

I re-traced my steps, getting lost several time along the way.  When I got home I could barely recognize it.  Before it had been a 70s era split level home, and now it was a bungalow with a big yard and rose bushes.

A bouquet of daisies lay discarded in the front yard, and the cellophane wrapper was crawling with spiders and ants.  I picked it up gingerly by one end and carried the package of insects and flowers to the trash.

The businessman's car was parked in the driveway.  I could hear scuffling from inside the partly open front door.  Someone had probably let my indoor cat out.  I nudged the door open with my foot and began inching inside.  From no identifiable source, soft bars of suspenseful music swelled. 

Sunset triptych

Three times last night I drove a vehicle - first, a personal car, then a jeep and finally a school bus full of students - out on a coastal road to see the sunset.  And all three times the road was washed out at the last minute.

I came around the same corner, nearing the same break in the trees, through which we could see the same glorious pink and orange sky breaking over the ocean horizon and each time it was a beautiful surprise.  And each time, right before we achieved the perfect viewpoint, I was suddenly up to my axles in water.

All around me, cars floundered in the rapidly rising water.  Each time the anxiety was palpable; we held our communal breath till everyone had managed to turn and retreat back down the road.

The worst and best was the bus, because it commanded such a good view.  The tall tires gave us more protection from the water, so I wasn't worried we would stall out.  But I and all the passengers in the bus could see other cars in precisely that predicament and so we worried collectively that we might not all make it.

Also the bus had such a huge turning radius, the reorientation was agonizingly slow.  It was like trying to steer an elephant in quicksand.  I knew I would make it and yet I was rigid with tension as we maneuvered the bus through the water and around other cars, and so relieved when we all finally began heading back the way we had come.