Behind the Wall of Sleep; or, Technical Difficulties at the Dream Theater

Tea: Blueberry

Music: Fulton Lights, "Breathe In, Breathe Out"

Time: Night.

(First off, I want to say to the rubber duck abandoned to spend a lonely winter in a drained city swimming pool ... I really would have scaled the fence to save you if the cop hadn't been watching. I'm still having a hard time looking my own ducks in their beady little black eyes tonight.)

Sometimes I wonder if there's a correlation between creativity in the waking world and an utterly whacked-out dream life. The duck episode was real, but wow, you should have been in my head last night.

No, no tornado dreams -- not lately, at least. (In case I haven't mentioned this before, I have recurring dreams of tornadoes. I've never seen one in real life, which my dream self knows. So I dream that I've seen one, and I'm all excited -- until I wake up and realize it was only a dream, at which point I get cranky.)

But why in the world would my subconscious have made up a YouTube music video of Asia in which John Wetton (playing a 12-string bass and wearing a shiny gold suit) delivers an incoherent rant at the start of "Only Time Will Tell" -- and what was up with Steve Howe's ginormous gold-tone plastic double-necked guitar?

I don't know how I managed the segue, but all of a sudden I was driving a car up a street that was either Southwest Boulevard here in KC or Second Street in my hometown. People I know kept stepping out into traffic, so I swerved to avoid them, and a policeman decided I should pull over. (I know ... the snoozy injustice of it all.)

So I started to pull over, and then I realized:

"Wait. I'm dreaming."

And I woke up.

Now, my dreams are sometimes vivid enough that I wake up wondering if they really happened. How, then, do I realize -- always in moments of distress and/or duress -- that none of it is real, and I'm free to go? (If no one's taken the word "dreamnesty" yet, I'm calling dibs.)

And why, once I have figured out that I am dreaming, don't I stick around and have some real fun -- a high-speed chase, a shootout with rocket launchers, a daring leap across the Grand Canyon in my steaming pile of Honda?

Mysteries all. Maybe I'll dream up a solution tonight. Or maybe it'll be that weird one about the 2000-foot black tsunamis again. I hope not. I'm too tired to dodge sharks.

Maybe I'll get John Wetton to do it for me.

Tonight's scary story: Robert W. Chambers, "In the Court of the Dragon"