July 16, 2002: Screwed Up Dreams, Volume One

Before I begin his tale, let me assure you that this is an actual dream I had last night (well, last night when I started typing... God knows when it'll actually be on the page) and for some reason, many of the details stood out quite clearly. It's a bizarre combination of all the crap I saw on TV and the internet the previous day, so as always, it's chock full of the wrestling references. I'm not nuts; I swear.

I don't remember the beginnings of the dream, but the parts I remember pick up at the Ole Miss cafeteria, although in screwed-up dream reality, it has become identical to the Cleveland High cafeteria. Just work with me here. The scene is dark, with all kinds of crazy lights and loud music everywhere. There's some big party / social gathering kinda thing going on, and I have no idea why that would go on in a cafeteria, but nothing ever makes sense in dreams so screw it. Anyway, me and this guy Don that I went to school with walk through the crowd, and eventually, we come up to a crowd of people that includes my brother and a bunch of people who I don't recognize. After some general hanging out, they all start some drinking contest, where everyone starts drinking at once, and they just get bored and stop after one shot. I don't understand it either, but once again - It's a fucking dream. From here, I decide to go home and go to bed, and after a part of the dream I don't remember, I wake up, where there's a big sleeping bag / kid's sleepover type scene going on. Except this one is a little unusual. I'm in a room with two other people, one looking an awful lot like a young Frank Sinatra, but introducing himself as Death Valley Driver Video Review webmaster Dean Rassmussen; and the other person is Bette Midler. I shit you not - Bette freakin' Midler. And it gets weirder. Here I am in a room, sitting on sleeping bags with the Divine Miss M and Frank Dean Sinatra Rassmussen... And we're discussing a huge pile of pornography in the middle of the room. And not a normal porn discussion. (whatever that is...) We're discussing it like a bunch of nerds, with stuff like "so-and-so revolutionized the industry in the early eighties with the introduction of new camera angles and bla bla bla." After a while of stimulating, yet non-dirty porn discussion, I decide to go take a shower. The one detail I remember about the shower was that the shower was underground, and you could peek outside through a little window at the bottom of the house; which faced another house on the property which bore an uncanny resemblance to the house I lived in from 1990 to 1995. I say goodbye to Bette and Frankendean, and head over to that house (which I apparently live in), and another part of the dream I don't remember happens. Then, the weird shit starts. I head back across the driveway to the house I was just at, but all of a sudden, it's been changed into this huge, luxurious house, and Sinatradean and Bette Midler no longer live there. Now, it's apparently the home of WWF wrestler Diamond Dallas page, and I'm apparently here to discuss business with him and fellow WWF superstar Booker T. Booker seems fairly normal, with standard, "hey, what's up" kinda stuff, but Diamond Dallas Page isn't too friendly. He's all asking who am I and what the hell I'm doing there, as I desperately try to explain my situation, which is apparently that I'm actually Raven, (another WWF guy) and that I'm just in my non-TV outfit right now, and I had been wearing a wig on TV for a while, after having a lot of my hair burnt in some sort of accident. After a while, I convince DDP that I'm actually him, and he starts telling us how someone (who never gets named) has been doing a lot of bragging on winning the US Title, and how it's really disrespectful, and we need to go have a word with him. At this point, I start talking like Kurt Angle (ANOTHER WWF guy) and actually say something the lines of "he has a lot of nerve running his mouth like that. I mean, he may have the United States title, but there's one thing he'll never have - Olympic gold medals! Oh, it's true!" And Booker says something (which comes out in Mr. T's voice instead of his own) about bustin' the fool's head and teaching him some respect. The cool thing is that Booker is all of a sudden toting around the WWF title belt, which he's never held in real life. Then, we hop into our cars, and speed off, my car being my real-life smashed-up gold Datsun 280Z, and Booker driving some sort of Gremlin / Pinto type car. Now, this is where another one of those big, unannounced complete changes in the dream happens, and instead of chasing down someone disrespecting a meaningless WCW title belt, we're now headed to the funeral of James Byrd, (the guy those rednecks chained to a truck and dragged to death) and to make things even more screwed up and completely offensive, I've got his casket in the back of my Datsun, (don't ask how it fits - It's a dream) and Booker and I have to deliver the body on time, or we're in serious trouble. So I speed off toward town, and I look in my rearview mirror to see Booker's Pinto put-putting along, while passing a hitchhiker who just happens to be Japanese wrestling star Toshiaki Kawada in full wrestling gear. I make my way through the streets of Cleveland, Mississippi, and as I approach Cleveland High, I see traffic is completely backed up. Why? Because of a bunch of hippies doing some peaceful protest for nothing in particular. So I creep through the street slowly, at one point having to swerve to avoid a guy squatting in the middle of the road, with all these smiling, friendly 60's-style hippies and veggie burgers everywhere. (seriously - There were little off-colored hamburgers laying in the street.) After a while, I make it toward the east end of town, and right past Wendy's is the Cleveland Crematorium, which doesn't exist in real life, but in my dream is a gigantic concrete building that looks an awful lot like an incredibly huge copy of the Atlanta bus terminal. Suddenly, I start getting some flashback of this place being destroyed in some recent terrorist attack, and all of a sudden, all I see is a vision of the whole place collapsed in a mess of rubble and flames. I initially freak out, and after a bit of talking to myself, saying things like "get a hold of yourself... This isn't real... You're just having a flashback" and drive straight into the flaming rubble. Sure enough, I blink, and the vision of Armageddon is replaced with the same gigantic Atlanta bus terminal-looking place. I pull up to the point where the casket is supposed to be dropped off, which is like some big concrete chute. The guys working there tell me to just slide it down the chute, since they aren't finished rebuilding after the terrorist attack, and the rails it's supposed to slide on aren't installed yet. So with that, I send James Byrd's casket sliding down the concrete chute, and my job (whatever that is) is safe. At this point, Booker T drives up and parks in the Wendy's parking lot, having to walk across a small stretch of tall grass and bushes to get to where I am, and yelling "shit!" as he steps in a mud puddle with his $200 shoes. Here's where yet another complete dream reality shift occurs. We head into the building of what used to be a giant crematorium and has now, all of a sudden, become a huge CASINO that looks like the Atlanta bus terminal. After a while, Booker and I enter the restaurant, where we meet up with my mother and my brother, and everyone is all happy and hugging and shit like that. Then, back in real life, my alarm went off and I woke up.

That was one fucked up dream.

2006 Reflections: Someday, I need to transcribe the account of that dream where Superstar Billy Graham tries to sell me some exercise equpment, and it somehow leads to my old boss's house being leveled by a tornado made of bats.