Somewhere in the hazy back corner of this particular dream room was a sequence about curling. I remember nothing about the game in the dream, only that as I jotted notes of remembered dream-things, I suddenly recalled something about curling and the curling had come before all the rest of it and it was as vague as that.
It was a sunny outdoors day and I was driving. It felt like I was repeating some steps from previously in the dream. I was going to get a ticket for an NHL game, just like before, at some place I’d already been, but the second time, this time, it didn’t seem quite the same as it had the first time. And it left me feeling vaguely puzzled, a common emotion in my dreams.
But first I had something to buy. It was very clear and specific in the dream but after waking up I couldn’t quite remember what it was. It fit in my hand, well, slightly bigger than my hand. A tablet? Some sort of electronics? I paid $80 for it. Four twenty dollar bills.
The moment I left the store I realized, hey wait a minute, I don’t really need this. I went back inside to return it. The guy behind the counter was stoic and cooperative and returned to my hand four twenty dollar bills. I can use this to buy the hockey ticket, I realized. There was a game and it was likely to be mostly sold out, but I only needed one ticket, just for me, so I figured the odds were good that there would be a single seat somewhere. I left the store and was driving in the car.
A sunny day. I remember this. It was very clear and sunny. It felt like I was in the United States somewhere, sunny and warm and unfamiliar. In front of me the road was blocked off. In my notes after I woke up I wrote "road construction" and maybe there was some of that but mostly I remember the road being blocked off because of people in the street. A Flea Market, or a street festival. I had to detour around them to the left. They looked like they were having fun. I ended up heading toward a highway or interstate that I didn’t want or need to get on so I turned right onto the grass, eventually up a gravel driveway and parking near a sports field where a group of young men were playing … was it soccer? I was careful as I parked not to run over any of them. Ian was in the passenger seat, making his only appearance in the dream. I told him this is where I went to college and even though the geography was all wrong and the views were completely unfamiliar (a sports field beneath large shady trees of brilliant green, single level office buildings to the left and behind it), I told him this was Royal Roads.
I got out of the car and went alone into the building on the left to get my ticket. This was the repeated part of the dream but the office was a little different and there was a tent card sitting on the counter advertising the tickets with inked letters. I thought the tent card looked like it had been moved from where it was supposed to be, that is, where I had seen it last time. At the far left of the counter was a basket with 8 ½ by 11 envelopes stacked on their sides. They had names of the upcoming games written on the front. I leafed through the envelopes looking for "Montreal versus New York Rangers", but I couldn’t find it. Was it sold out? Really? Not one ticket? I saw "Montreal versus Ottawa", but that wasn't the game I wanted.
I realized that the reason I couldn’t find it was because it was a Rangers/Toronto game ... being played in Montreal. Ah. That’s probably why. I asked the people in the office if I could use their computer to do a search and make sure I had the facts right.
This was the weirdest part of the dream, the part that came next.
I spent the rest of the dream trying to Google the information. I got to the Google homepage which had a small, strangely warped, squished and elongated “Google” graphic. The computer wasn't anything I would have recognized outside of the dream. I fumbled around trying to operate it. There was a white button that had to be pushed in; it reminded me of the Choke on an outboard engine, but it was more of a protruding, plastic rectangle, about the size of my thumb. I pushed it a few times (the button, not my thumb). There was also a board with a set of geometric shapes or crystals that glowed with their inner light when you touched them. By either trial and error or intuition, I touched a brown sideways diamond and the computer went to the page I wanted. The monitor was some kind of 4x4 inch screen in a mirror set on a cantilevered arm. It looked a bit like the top mechanism on an overhead projector. I struggled to peer into its mirrored screen while I tried to figure out the keyboard: a white rectangularish box, pearl white, curved on the top with raised keys, about 6x4 inches and looked like a fat Palm Pilot. Eventually (with relief) I noticed the Qwerty keyboard within a greater collection of keys whose symbols I could not understand. All of the keys were a luminescent white and slightly larger than the ones on my BlackBerry.
I had an inspiration to adjust my seat higher. It seemed like a smart idea but only resulted in me having to hunch down to peer into the monitor. From this new angle, the image reflected badly in the mirror. I struggled and struggled to type something into the search box. I was successful in entering “NHL” but the rest of what I tried only resulted in frustration and gibberish that eventually faded into wakefulness.
No comments:
Post a Comment