Lately my dreams have been entire surreal novels. I wake up and forget most of them, but know I have just lived through something awesome, which has almost all been forgotten, except for the last scene or two of the adventure. Night before last I was in Morocco, eating a picnic lunch outside of a bookstore. A man set up a gambling game to play. I won and he gave me hot tea and bread and an amazing fruit jam as a prize. I realized as I was eating it that he had allowed me to win the gambling game so that he could give me the prize. He knew that I might not take it if he had just offered it as a gift. It was extreme kindness to a stranger. The setting was so exotic, the Islamic North African vibe.
Even though I forgot most of the dream, just that snapshot of the kindness of the stranger in that outdoor picnic setting was a treasure to wake up with.
Later that evening, in real life, I was playing songs at Flynndig, and I realized it wasn't so different from my dreams. It was dream-like and surreal too. And just like the dreams, the night will largely go forgotten as life moves on, like a series of clouds going by.
In this morning's dream, I had to travel to the south for a trial, to clear my daughter of defamation. Someone had written an article and in the article had arranged the prose to make it look like she said something damning to someone else, but it was clear that the woman that wrote the article was using Sofia as a pawn and that she had never actually said any of these things. At one point the defense lawyer had set me up with a large 7 foot tall native American man who was going to help us with the case, because he knew something about it. This guy was lived-in and an amazing character.
I met him at a bar and as he was explaining to me what was going to happen he held me in one arm and massaged my ear. It was weird, but also felt good, very paternalistic.
We left the bar and went to get our "room." The room ended up being a parking lot space for two cars, which we had to rent for the night. We put the car in one spot and put up a tent in the other. The Native man curled up on a mattress while I put up a tent in the rain.
I was entertained by everything, digging the adventure.
The next day we were in an elevator going up to a room to meet the lawyers. In the elevator were three skinny boys without shirts on, maybe brothers. They were like something out of the movie Gummo, or Diane Arbus photo. They were wrestling each other, standing up, entertaining us. At one point one of them brandished a gun, but for some reason it didn't alarm me. The kids were laughing, it was part of the show. Another of the kids took off one of his own fingers. He had lost a finger, but had figured out how to jam it back into the socket so he could remove it whenever he wanted. It was all so bizarre that I decided to take a picture to text to my buddy Quinn, in order to share the experience with someone who would appreciate it. In the picture you couldn't really see the finger very well, and the gun was all blurry because the kid was waving it around.
We got to the room, a well appointed hotel room. We got there early so no one was there yet. The Native man left to get something. I was alone in the room. I noticed that there was an artwork on the wall, a large video projection of a stylized crayon drawing of a woman, hipster-Disney style. If you stood in front of it, then it moved with you, as if it was a mirror projection. I began to dance to make it dance. The crayon woman made my own dancing look good.
Then the alarm went off. Time to get up.
