Story 6

Story 6: Dream Residue

Thank God I sleep well. I feel so sorry for people who lie in bed awake at night unable to drift into the endorphin cloud of sleep. But it is not perfect. Like many seniors, I wake up several times each night for reasons I need not explain. And unlike most people I have very vivid and intense dreams. They are not nightmares. They are just intense dreams. I have asked many people and only a few seem to have similar experiences.

I turn off the TV and lights. I get comfortable and put my head on the pillow. It rarely takes me more than a few minutes to fall asleep. And even for those few minutes there are sign posts along the way. I am thinking about the events of the day and suddenly realize that I forgot to come home from Germany (even though I am not in Germany). I am talking to somebody on the phone who wants me to pay my rent back home and I am getting upset about it. I drift back up from the endorphin cloud ready to pay my rent and get a ticket back home when I realize that I had slid into dreamland but not all the way.

They actually have a name for that. It is called hypnagogia. It is the transition between being awake and being asleep. You may have experienced it yourself. I know I had slid into it because bizarre things happen when I do. Now I know that I am awake again because I realize that I am not in Germany, and my rent was just paid through automatic withdrawal.  I am at home in my own bed. So, I fluff up my pillow a bit and put my head back down. I drift back into hypnagogia, and then into sleep. The waking world is orderly and under control. The dreaming world does not seem to have any rules.

I am at work at a place that I used to work. The dream office doesn’t look anything like the real office I used to work in. There is a guy there who I saw in a YouTube video and my boss is the wife of a guy I used to know. She was a secretary at the time, but dreams don’t have the same rules for promotions as the real world does. They are having a meeting in hushed tones in her office and the voices drop even further as I walk by. I ask the YouTube guy if he knows anything about the meeting.

“Somebody doesn’t like you,” he says. “They say you think you are better than everybody else.”

“But I am,” I protest.

“Yeah, everyone knows that, but here we punish people for that. By the way, don’t you have a conference to go to?”

This is a common theme in my dreams. I have a flight to catch and don’t know when it is. Further, I can’t find the ticket. I realize that I need to find my plane ticket, so I go back to my office. I quickly realize that I must have left it in my other office. I have never had more than one office in my life. So, this should be a red flag. But once you slip from hypnagogia into real dream land, nothing is required to make sense.

I bolt out of my office only to realize that the floor plan of the building has changed, and I don’t know how to get to my other office. I find an elevator hoping that another floor will have the same floor plan as before only to find out that the floors in the building are not in numerical order. At this point, I wake up and realize that I have been dreaming.

Thankfully, it only takes a few seconds to realize this but the emotional residue for the dream lingers a bit longer. I have a routine, almost a ritual, I perform when I wake up from a dream. I go to the kitchen and get a swallow of juice, then go to the bathroom to get rid of my last swallow of juice. Somehow, the structure and repetitiveness of this ritual brings me back into the world of the living more quickly.

I dive back into bed and soon I am back in my office building stuck between floors in an elevator. Eventually, I get out and go back to my office. The YouTube guy is gone. But now I am sharing my office with The Beatles.  

My airline ticket is sitting on my desk.

“Thank, God!” I said. “I have a conference to go to.”

“You can’t go now,” says John, “we have a show starting in 30 minutes.”

Paul nods smiling as though this is all the most normal thing in the world.

“But I can’t play anything,” I protest.”

“Well, you just have to fake it,” says John.

Paul nods again. George and Ringo are just sitting there barely paying attention. To look at them you would think this happens every day.

Apparently, the meeting had broken up because my friend’s wife came to my door and said, “I need to talk with you for a few minutes.”

She sticks her head in the door, looks around and says, “I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t share your office with the Beatles anymore.”

I follow her back to her office where she says, “People don’t like you. They say that you think that you are better than everyone else.”

“But I don’t think that,” I protest. Might as well lie. Nothing else seems to be working.

“Well, they think you do,” she reiterates. “What are you going to do about it?”

“What can I do about it?”

“Try acting normal.”

I am not sure what that means, but I agree. “I’ll do my best.”

“And get those Beatles out of your office.”

I was going to point out that we had a show in a half an hour. But it didn’t feel like the right response for the moment.

As I am heading back to my office, I hear a siren. “Oh God,” I thought. “What now?”

I slowly drift back to the world of the living and realize that the siren is outside my bedroom window. I look at the clock and I don’t have to get up for a couple more hours. So, I do my routine with the juice and the pit stop. Then I get back in bed and bunch the pillow up under my head.

When I get back the Beatles are gone from my office. My airline ticket is still on my desk, so I pick it up and put it safely in my courier bag. A pretty young girl comes to my office door and says that it is her fault that they had the meeting.  She told the boss that she didn’t like me because I didn’t pay her enough attention. I am pretty sure that I have never seen her before but asking her if we’ve ever met doesn’t seem to be the right move. So instead, I told her that I would love to talk more but I have a plane to catch.

“Oh,” she said, “are you going to the Much Ado About Nothing Conference?”

“Yes,” I said, “and I am presenting a paper.”

“What is your paper about?”

“Nothing really. But it’s very much on topic for the conference.”

“I wish I could go to a conference,” she said pouting slightly.

“I’ll talk to somebody when I get back,” I promised with my sincerest look. As they say, you should always be sincere even if you don’t mean it.

With that, I slipped past her and stepped onto an elevator. Apparently, they had fixed them since the previous dream.

I could not remember where I left my car. In fact, I couldn’t even remember what kind of car I had. I was just hoping I would recognize something. As it turns out, I did. I got in the car and headed for the exit ramp from the garage. Some genius had changed the exit ramps into a mobius strip, and you needed special knowledge of it to get out. I must have gotten off on a restricted floor because I heard a beeping noise. But it was just my alarm clock.

Every morning when I wake up it is like going from the world of chaos to the world of order. It doesn’t take me long to figure out it was just a dream. But the emotional residue hangs on a lot longer. Still, I promise myself to quit playing with the Beatles, act with more humility, and pay that poor girl some more attention. You never know when Morpheus might be listening.

This story is a little over 1500 words long. The recording is just about 9 minutes.

Send an email to me at drjohnartz@gmail.com if you have a comment on any of my stories. And please check out my website at DrJohnArtz.com to see other things I have written.