Pancake City

I didn’t realize this memory was from an early-morning dream until it popped in my head a few minutes ago and I realized how loony it was. Elvis was at a press conference in Washington D.C. to speak against anti-immigration legislation. I was wondering what Elvis’ connection to immigrants is when the NPR announcer conveniently mentioned that Elvis was born in Mexico. I remember thinking, “That can’t be right. Elvis is dead. It must have been an Elvis impersonator.”

Case solved. I won’t be hard on myself for not asking what an Elvis impersonator was doing at a news conference, or why NPR was reporting on it, as I was still technically asleep.

I rarely remember my dreams unless I have them after I wake up and go back to sleep. Sometimes I wish I could remember more of them, and other times I’m glad I’m not because the parts I do remember are weird.

One fragment from today: I’m outside with some people I don’t know in a grassy landscape with tress and hills around. Everything has a blue tint to it, some parts more than others. The tree leafs are a midnight blue and the trunk is cloaked in shadow. The grass is cyan, and it looks like it is night time with a strong moon out. I complain, “They got it wrong. There’s too much blue in here.” I was irritated because I felt someone didn’t know what they were doing in Photoshop. Then the sun comes out, and the yellow light mixes with the blue to turn everything that should be green to green. I said something like, “Oh, now I get it. That’s cool.”

I read that men dream about strangers more often than women. It is at least true for me.

I’m calling in my dream chip today, the once-a-season chip I give myself for a self-indulgent post about my dreams, an infinitely interesting subject to myself, and a likely infinitely uninteresting subject to everyone else.

Have you ever waken up form a dream, and then after something freaky happened realized you were still in a dream? That happened to me five times in succession this morning. It was like entering parallel Universes of my life where the main events were the same but the details varied. The programs on my computer were different. A telemarketer called in two of the dreams and offered me a job (different job in each dream). In the second dream, he asked, “Did I talk to you before?” And, among other themes, I kept on waking up late for an appointment I had that day, albeit at different times in each dream.

Each time I “woke up”, I caught on quicker that I was still dreaming, at which point I would try to get out of it. Nothing I did worked. In the last dream, I was almost hysterical. I pleaded with my sister Michele to help me get out. She said, “Don’t worry, just listen to this record.” “What is the record supposed to do?” “Don’t worry. Just listen to it.” She put on a record by Belle and Sebastian. After a few seconds, I got drowsy and closed my eyes. When I tried to open my eyes again, I had to force them open, and when I did, I was finally awake.

Occasionally after I wake up in the morning and go back to sleep, I’ll have an extremely vivid dream where I’m aware that I’m dreaming. Today, I watched several dozen people eat in a cafeteria. Every face was a new person: horn-rimmed glasses, a thin, brown mustache, a chin that curved outward like the moon. Every face was a stranger.

How does the mind conjure these faces? Do we secretly have near-photographic memories that absorb every new face in the mall, flag the details as trivial, and then dump them into a trashbin only accessible when we’re dreaming and our mind needs to generate a crowd in a flash? Or can we generate faces at will, picking and choosing features from people we do know and assembling them into a new composite? Like if you want to generate a vaguely menacing old man, you’ll pick the wrinkled brow from your grandpa, the narrow eyebrows of your physics teacher, and the jowl of Captain Kangaroo when he zones out and has a flashback to his days at Vietnam?

“Captain! I can’t move! I can’t make it over the minefield!”
“I won’t leave you behind, soldier. Grab on. We’ll jump over the mines together.”