Being J Lo

I was J Lo in my dream last night.  As I was leaving the stage, a man staggered up to me and tried to say something in my ear.  He was tackled but struggled hard and managed to get away.  One of my bodyguards received a minor cut from a switchblade.  The would-be attacker ran out the main doors, all of us in hot pursuit.  From the top of the stairs, we watched him escape into the sewer system.

Police cars skidded up, men in bullet proof vests piled out.  Badges, walkies, and dogs were in plentiful supply; a full scale manhunt was assembled.  Suddenly I realized I had to pee and there was no time to go back to my dressing room.  A sign led downstairs to the rest room.  There was a long after-the-show line.  Apart from the occasional double take fading to uncertainty no one recognized me.  I finally got to use the end stall.  It had no door, but was guarded by Kiko, a muscular Puerto Rican dressed in white satin vest and leather pants.

"I'll make sure no one takes any cell phone pictures, Ms. Lopez," he assured me.

To get to the toilet you had to climb a flight of stairs.  As I sat on the literal throne, panties around my ankles, the wall on the far side dissolved.  Members of a royal dress ball milled into the room, chatting discretely, and sipping champagne from the delicate flutes held in  gloved white hands.  Three people sat at the bottom of my stairs as I deployed the last square of toilet paper. 

For some reason I had taken off my stockings.  While I leaned against the toilet for balance to put them on, a white-haired woman in a russet satin ball gown and small half crown took a seat, as if the toilet were a convenient chair.

The woman introduced herself as Edith, the duchess of somewhere-or-other vaguely german-sounding, and related a soft-spoken anecdote about her ex-husband that included historical references to Vatican edicts on marriage from the 1600s-1900s.  She spoke in perfect precise syllables - the Queen's english.  And she had questions for me - not about my singing career but about my relationships.

"How does one survive a terrible divorce?" "Is it possible to ever trust again after discovering your loved one with the maid?" "What do you do to cope with loneliness?"  I was keenly aware of the Puerto Rican traces lingering in my answers.

I took her hand and kissed it before taking my leave, an awkward moment as I realized I had yet to wash my own hands; she didn't appear to notice or care.  At the bottom of the stairs a young royal apprehended me and demanded to know why I was impersonating a celebrity.  He refused to believe who I was, and left abruptly, after delivering a promise that he would return with the police.

I made my way through the banquet tables, feeling completely out of my element.  I tripped on a chair leg and almost bumped into the real J Lo.  She was a few inches taller, and thinner but wore a nearly identical outfit; I allowed a moment of pride - surely hers had taken hours to construct whereas mine had been hastily assembled during the 90-minute show - including time to pose and dress figurine dolls of her backup dancers - all from the vantage point of the lighting technician's balcony.

I flushed and stammered, "I love your work so much."  She gave an uncomfortable smile and turned away, just as a police officer took my arm.

To get to the interrogation room we had to pass a long corridor where my father, a rabbi, was giving a reading from the Torah.  His back was to me, so he didn't see me being dragged past, hand-cuffed and in tears.
The lead detective demanded to know the details of the conspiracy between me and the escaped man.  I honestly said I didn't know; I just liked to make costumes and act out doll scenes of various artists' shows that passed through the concert venue.  Clearly he felt I knew more than I was telling.  He slammed the table.  I woke up.

Prison camp for women

I spent the vast majority of my dream locked in a prison camp for "disobedient women".  The buildings were made of rough unfinished wooden boards.  There was no heat, electricity or running water.  Time passed strangely; it might have been days or years.

It was unclear who was holding us or why.  I had brief, secret affairs with two of the other inmates.  It was frantic and intensely erotic as we believed that discovery would result in some terrible, unknowable retribution.

We made endless attempts to escape, each thwarted and derided as unoriginal, the prison guards' scolding accompanied by a soul-crushing litany of the number of times that exact strategy had been unsuccessfully deployed by a former inmate.

Finally, two of us managed to escape through holes we'd made in the outer chicken-wire fence, only to observe an extraction team descend on the camp minutes later and arrest our captors.  The world we were released into was bleaker than we remembered, our victory over imprisonment entirely anti-climactic.

Later I was working in my lab.  My printer broke down so I went down the hall to ask another lab group if they had any suggestions for how to fix it.  A woman on the couch in the break room said I could use her lab printer instead.

On my way back to my lab, I was stopped by the head of a different lab, our direct neighbour. 

She was flushed, her words clipped.  "You have your fingers in everything, don't you?  You walk around this department using up whatever you like even if it doesn't belong to you." 

I stood there stunned, unable to think of an appropriate reply.

She moved closer, put her hand on the center of my chest, and pushed me back several times for emphasis. "This.  Has got. To stop."

When I got home, my roommate had let her new Burmese kitten out on the balcony.  Rather than play or explore, the kitten sat on the railing of the balcony staring at us with palpable disdain.

A dark shape in my peripheral vision.  I looked up and saw my upstairs neighbour's pet, a human-sized flying demon, perched on the balcony above us.  Suddenly it leaped into the air, and began a dive headed straight toward us.  I barely had time to scoop the kitten out of harms' way.  The demon's claws grazed my knuckles, a hot sulfuric wind burned my eyes.  It emitted a frustrated shriek and slow-flap-flapped its enormous leathery wings to climb back up to its own balcony.

I woke with dry mouth and a headache.  I need to drink more water.

Eggs, bacon and DUI

I went to see Ira Glass and Dan Savage in a DJ-off at the Showbox last night.  Dan was chill in jeans, t-shirt.  Ira wore a Beetles-era suit and danced around like a five year old on steroids, utterly winning the crowd over with his energy and innocence.  He pulled the mainly female audience onstage to dance,  tango'd with Dan Savage, conducted the mosh pit and crowd surfed.  Twice.

I may not have been 100% sober on the drive home which, as I'm a child of the MADD era, always engenders guilt, even if I'd have most definitely passed the sobriety test.

In my dream, I drove a converted city party bus through the snowy streets of Philadelphia.  I had twelve fairly intoxicated and animated passengers.  Going uphill through a residential neighborhood at about 60 mph, I hit two pedestrians.  It took forever to stop the bus and then it rolled back to the bottom of the hill where the cops were waiting.  I opened the doors.  An officer motioned me outside and handed me a plastic tube I assumed was a breathalyzer.

"I have never taken one of these," I said.  "What do I do?"

The officer told me to bite the top and leave my saliva on the strip.  It was a DNA test.

"May I ask how things are going up the road?"

"Not good," the officer responded.

My eyes welled up with tears and my voice was unsteady, "Are they...?"

"Both alive," he said, "one is conscious, just bruised, but the other is on his way to hospital in critical condition."

A crowd had gathered; it fanned out from where I and the police were standing at the door to the bus.  I've never had so much evidence that large numbers of humans actually live in suburbia.  It was like an impromptu bus stop at rush hour, with me as the first passenger, forever about to get on; behind me collected the rubber-neckers, playing weary commuters, sweating patiently in suits and briefcases.

I only had two drinks last night, over four hours, but I completely forgot to drink water.  I'm going to go cook up a greasy breakfast and engage in some gratitude.  First and foremost, that I've yet to run anybody over with my car.

Who needs friends when you've got vampires

Yesterday as I was stepping onto the bus, someone called my name.  I turned around and discovered two classmates from grad school who I have not seen in  a decade; they were accessorized with children who, as they are under ten, I have not met at all.  They now live in Maine, making chance encounters statistically unlikely.  Sadly the father of one friend passed away recently; they are in town this week for the funeral.

That was the beginning of a day so hectic that I fell asleep at my desk from 7:31 to 7:39, still not finished the tasks on my list.  Happily I got the second wind I needed to attend my favourite DJ's salsa dance and was invited to the after party at Fonda La Catrina, a delicious Mexican restaurant in Georgetown that last night hosted a fabulous local Cuban band.  (The musicians are local; the music is Cuban).

I landed in my bed at around midnight and had nine glorious hours of uninterrupted sleep.  All dream night long I ran into real and not-so-real people from my past.

***

I was in New York city visiting my real life best friend from high school.  Her apartment was in a new maze of tunnels under the subway system - all the highrises had been built up as far as they could go so now the city was building down. The advantage to the underground apartments was that they were cheap and very convenient to subway stops; the disadvantage was the rats.

My friend took me into her parlor, a sloping dirt-packed tunnel decorated with a single naked bulb in the shape of a "W".  The ceiling was so low that I couldn't stand and look her in the face but had to crouch and stare in her direction, while burning the letter "W" deeply into my retinas.  I began to have difficulty breathing and she pulled me out into the main hall where the landlord happened to be standing.  "Panic attack?" he asked, his tone matter-of-fact.  My friend nodded.  "Some people just can't handle the claustrophobia." He sighed and shrugged his shoulders, a gesture I decided to interpret as empathy rather than apathy.

I was a surveyor for a company that was building entire cities in undeveloped, supposedly unpopulated, areas all along the eastern seaboard.  I left New York by train, then took a powerboat and finally a canoe to reach the back swamps of Virginia where I was raised*.

The plans I'd seen the night before at my project meeting would have a catastrophic impact on my family's traditional way of life, on their whole community.  I arrived at dusk, and was eyed suspiciously by people peeking out from behind wooden shack doors.  The only woman willing to make eye contact was from an extended family of deaf-mutes.  She recognized me; I signed to ask where my family was now living and was directed to a trap door inside a barn.

When I reached the bottom of the ladder, my mother greeted me with a crushing hug, and began scolding me, "Where have you been?  Why didn't you write us to say you were coming?  You go off to school and then never return to visit..." then abruptly pulled back, her brow furrowed.

"People are coming to map and drain your swamps," I said, the words piling out in a rush.  I felt suddenly nervous.  "You need to call a town meeting."

She pulled me into the kitchen.  "Why do you smell different?"  She sniffed the air and pulled back again,  her pupils hugely dilated.  I tried to control my heartbeat, slow down the surge of adrenaline.  "You smell human," she whispered.  

My mouth had gone dry.  "I work for Eastern Regency," I said, "and they are planning to build shopping malls and playgrounds on undeveloped land all over the eastern states."  Behind my mother, ina huge living room lit by hundreds of candles milled about twenty of my extended family.  A few cousins had trickled into the kitchen to listen.  I recognized only one of them; I wondered where my father and brothers were.

My mother tried to shoo them out and simultaneously pin me in the corner of the kitchen.  I outmanoevered her and walked out into the living room, raising my voice, "I came here to warn you - to warn all of you.  A construction company is coming.  They are planning to build right here, on this land.  You will need to re-locate.  You only have a few months before it isn't safe here for you anymore."

Few appeared to be listening to my words.  Many were smelling the air.  A groundswell of murmuring.  I felt so stupid for not anticipating that I would have to address this first.

"I am one of you," I said.  "I grew up here; this is my mother -"  I pointed to where she stood, in the archway between the kitchen and this huge living room.  "I went away for night school and three years ago... I woke up and I had become human."

The murmuring turned into a roar of sound.  The circle of relatives closed around me.  I saw fangs.  Dark pools of eyes.  In the cacaphony I distinctly heard one of them say, "How did this happen?" and another, "When do we eat her?"

"Listen to me," I yelled, as loud as I could.  The crowd backed up just a little.  "I came back to warn you.  You are in great danger."

My mother was at my side now, using her broom to shove my relatives to the sides of the room.  "We are calling a meeting.  Go and get the elders.   NOW." The crowd scattered, each going to fetch their parents, grandparents.  I breathed a sigh of relief.  My mother was senior.  My family would not disobey her no matter how hungry they were.

She turned to me, her eyes black, fangs out.  "I'm sorry," she said, but her half-smile, the flick of her tongue to her teeth, sent a chill up my spine.  My heart sank.  I knew she was not apologizing for the family but for what was about to happen.  I would not get the chance to tell my story, as a honored guest.  Of course not.  As a child I remembered they only called meetings when strangers showed up.  The agenda was how to divide up the body.  Why hadn't I thought about this?  Blinded by loyalty?  Maybe becoming human had made me soft, forget my roots.

"Please mom," I said, my voice breaking. "I came here to help you.  That has to count for something."

She shook her head.  "You turned.  I don't know how.  But I can't change the ancient laws.  You are not one of us anymore."

My body filled with a hot sense of injustice, so familiar from childhood, but mixed now with  terror.  My knees threatened to give in.  I fought hard to push my feelings down.  I took a breath.  I had been at the top of my class in engineering.  This was just another in a line of difficult hypothetical problems requiring a creative solution.  "There are others with me," I bluffed. 

I prayed that my family's ability to smell a lie would be compromised by surprise and bloodlust.  It seemed to work.  "Others?" 

"Yes.  They aren't far behind me but we got separated.  I need to find them.  Otherwise it will cause chaos.  Fighting."

My mother nodded.  My lie was flimsy, utterly illogical, but thankfully instinct was her strong suit and for once I had the upper hand.  I knew how she thought, but she couldn't - never had - understood me.  She was hungry and bound by convention, and the thought of some of our community getting more than their share - more than HER share - was unbearable.

Somehow I convinced her that she had to stay and ensure the meeting was organized properly while I rounded up my supposed colleagues.  I slipped out of the main room, back through the kitchen, and climbed the stairs.  My whole body shook with adrenaline.  Outside it was full dark and crawling with vampires on their way to a meeting where they would decide who got which parts of my body.  It was a long shot.  I had no idea how to get out of this alive. I only knew I had to run.

*I did not grow up in Virginia and none of my relatives possess a drop of vampire blood.  

Evil rainbow clouds

In my dream, my wife and I were walking through our suburb on a day far too sunny for Seattle.  The lighting was perfect, the colors as vivid as a movie, post-edit.  Lush lime green lawns.  Robin's egg blue sky.

Clouds formed, discrete and pillowy, none blocking the sun.  They weren't the usual white; inside the colors roiled, an artificial shimmering shifting to red or black, like the rainbow refractions from a gasoline spill.  My wife said there was so much pollution that the clouds now were made almost entirely of rayon.

We strolled along the sidewalk, passing house after manicured house.  One of my cats rubbed her head on my leg and I saw that my wife had brought both of them along.  About three yards ahead a streaming puff of smoke scudded between the houses.  In its wake, three people ran, screaming.  A few seconds later, another smoke bomb.  More running.  More screaming.  The sound was muted, as far away as television, an unlikely drama unfolding right in front of us.  The peace shadow of front lawns was punctuated at every gap between houses by smoke and screaming.  One cat cowered behind my leg, the other sought refuge in my wife's arms.

Eventually the sky turned yellow.  The sidewalk ended at a sulfur refinery.  Without suburban houses to shield us, the world was choked with smoke and chaotic with panicked people.  We crouched a little to get into one of the giant concrete effluent pipes that exited the facility.  It was fairly clean and dry.  We walked along it for about fifty yards and emerged into a huge hangar.  Dozers and cats parked like toys in the cavernous space.

I felt sad, witnessing the world ending.  I wished we had left the cats at home; I worried they would get badly hurt.  I wondered what to do, where to go now.

Fabulous and fiery, cut and colour

The first half of my dream was spent in search of a bathroom.  After waking briefly to use a real bathroom, I found myself back in my hometown writing a poem.  All I remember now is that I had constructed a beautiful metaphor comparing my city to a diamond.

My dream town and the actual city where I was raised have only the most superficial commonalities - the existence of a sewage system, roads, and electricity.  The city of Edmonton harbors just shy of a million inhabitants; my dream hometown was a bona fide town, complete with quaint, columned town hall, a working ice cream parlor, and the kind of Main street which boasted the only traffic light for miles around.

"Charming" is a term that will never be leveled at the suburb I grew up in - an advancing cancer of row houses unchecked by the vast stretches of midwestern Canadian prairie available ever southward.  And in the diamond metaphor, Millwoods aka South Edmonton would more likely be imagined as the eons of crushing pressure which, rather than transform coal into gems, was merely escaped as soon as one acquired a drivers license and/or admission to a far away school.

Don't get me wrong; I harbor no nostalgia for the alternate universe in which my family relocated to some adorable hamlet in the southern Ontario landscape.  I have never lived anywhere with fewer than 100,000 people (and that is already a little sparsely populated).  I was once offered a job in small town Michigan, population 11,000, and had a full-blown panic attack on the freeway driving home from the airport after my interview.  All that closeness, the limits of social and geographical terrain.  I felt I couldn't breathe.

Life has a way of making you eat your words, so it's always possible I'll spend my golden years in a place where everyone knows your name.  For right now I'm dreaming of an assisted living facility in the middle of some elephantine city where the bus can take you downtown.

The Archbishop is a sandwhich

My dream took me to a small town in southern Washington to visit family.  The little cafe I chose to get breakfast had rows of peanut butter and jelly jars  in the pastry case  to the right of the cashier, accompanied by a hand-lettered sign listing eight exotic-sounding breads.  The deli case on the left had more promising options including the "Archbishop", a poached egg and bacon on an english muffin.

The cashier who rang me up joined me at a table to make my Archbishop.  She narrated the ingredients and procedure tour guide style in an unending stream that I could only half-hear, randomly employing italian for simple english words.  A firm clear gelatin puck she referred to as indivisi (for "uncut", she explained) was placed on the plate.  She unwrapped a lettuce leaf to reveal the fancy version of Egg McMuffin and laid that on top.  Next to that, at an angle, she placed a deep fried chicken leg inside a hoagie roll, and then wrapped the entire construction inside a tortilla.

Perhaps I should not go to bed hungry.