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"

Now I Lay Me Down to Tivo

Tea: White Grapefruit

Music: Metallica, "Enter Sandman"

Time: Night

Sometimes, I wish I could record my dreams. It'd be interesting to see them in their entirety, not in the half-remembered snatches that often are the only things left to me within minutes of waking.

I often dream of tornadoes -- I'd say "even though I've never seen one in real life," but it's probably more accurate to say "because I've never seen one in real life." What's funny (in whichever sense you choose) is that my dreamself knows that I've never seen one in real life.

It happened again the other night. The dreamself was in Sublette, Kansas, about a half-hour north of my hometown, watching a small line of tornadoes move from east to west (yes, I know that's the wrong way). They broke up just as they were about to tear into some grain bins.

My dreamself thought, as it always does, "Cool. Now I've seen tornadoes." And then, of course, I woke up and I hadn't.

Someday I will see one in real life. I wonder if the dreams will end after that. Only one way to find out, I suppose.