Matthew Wayne Selznick

Man, sometimes the subconscious just throws it all in one. I had a dream between my wife’s leaving for work and my own alarm clock going off that really stuffed it in there, symbolically speaking.

I wish I could talk about everyone that was in it, but that would reveal just a bit too much. I wouldn’t have any problem detailing all the details in my life… except that my life includes other people, too, and they deserve their privacy.

So let’s talk generalities, some. The dream was about a reunion with a number of folks I haven’t seen in a while, and additionally, one person with whom I have a complicated history and haven’t had much contact with in a while. The overall tone of the dream was unease, longing, and melancholy.

Is there a word for a bad dream that isn’t a nightmare? Know what I mean?

In the dream, I was invited by a faceless friend to come to a rehearsal / recording studio in a small building located in a rustic mountain town that might as well have been Kirby Lake / Big Bear. In this place were ten or so of my extended family of friends. Everyone was surprised to see me, but welcoming. The complicated-history person and I saw each other, were restrained and polite and uncertain, and kept to opposite sides of the room.

No fun. Very sad.

Then, in the cinematic scene-transition manner of dreams, I was in a window booth in a restaurant with comp-hist person. I automatically understood that we had been thrown together to meet another person — an old drummer from our band. The drummer’s identity kept shifting between two different former drummers of mine.

Dream inconsistency: comp-hist person and I have never been in a band together, at least not in the musical sense.

Body language was evident here. I sat on the outside edge of my side of the booth, facing the window and comp-hist person, who sat in the opposite side as close to the window as possible. They faced the window, their back mostly to me. Distance and separation, and comp-hist making an effort to keep it that way.

Perhaps interesting: there was absolutely nothing on the table between us. No place settings, no silverware, napkins, water, coffee, condiments… nothing.

We made small talk. Have you ever walked through very clear water and tried as hard as you could to not stir the mud with your feet as you went, so as to maintain the purity of the water and not literally muck it up? That was what this conversation was like. At the same time, I felt a desperate urge to just shove my hands in the mud and dig deep. Didn’t.

The chimeric drummer showed up. I wanted to give him a hug, he reached out to shake my hand, and an awkward combination of both was the result. He gave comp-history person a hug.

End of dream.

I laid in bed and wallowed in the emotional backwash for another forty five minutes or so.

And now it’s daytime and everyone’s awake and life goes on. I’m trying to process the dream, trying not to put so much illogical significance on it that I treat it like “a sign” to act upon or any such caveman crap… and I’m saddened by the whole engine of behavior and choice and circumstance that drove the dream in the first place.

There’s that.

Well, this one was particularly bizarre and vivid.

It started with my old friend Roger and I showing up at a house apparently shared by greenplaid and a young Demi Moore. For whatever reason, we were there the night before a trip to Disneyland. Roger and I were supposed to sleep in the kitchen, which of course, being a dream, did not seem all that unusual.

When the Disney portion of the dream came around, Roger was replaced by jane_grey and an unidentified friend of greenplaid. But this was not really Disneyland, this was like, UrbanBlightLand — if Main Street USA was replaced by, say, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in downtown Long Beach (was it Chris Rock who pointed out that Martin Luther King Jr. street in any major city was guaranteed to be in the ghetto?)

We were quickly engaged in a staged but very convincing and realistic morality play involving a black man, a young, poor Korean man, and some upscale occupants of a limousine who seemed to be instruments of some dark force. The black guy and the Korean guy made all the right choices, with some help from us, and even avoided a conflict with each other.

Leaving this tableau, the four of us then encountered an all-girl street gang, but these ladies were done up a la the Pat Benatar “Love Is A Battlefield” video. They started shakin’ their stuff in that West Side Story, Flashdancey style of gang display… so I responded by shouting, “We are young…!” The funny thing was, by this time the four of us were just being goofy — we were a little shaken by the realism and potential danger of the last “show,” and we were determined not to be threatened by these painted hoodlums.

The four of us each sang a verse of the song, one after the other, tongues firmly in cheeks. The video vixens could not prevail.

For some reason, halfway through “Love Is A Battlefield,” it became the Styx song “Blue Collar Man.” I can only attribute this to having recently heard a sad, pitiful, revival house version of Styx performing live on the radio a few nights back. In any event, we found our way out of the park through some service exit, laughing, and that was the end of the dream.