I Had A Dream

All right. Let’s get a moderate tempo going, say, 75 beats per minute.

The drummer should line the interiors of his kit with tinfoil.

Two lazy yet heavy half-note power chord Cs, then some meandering D arpeggios, all played on a Gibson SG doubleneck.

I had a dream

People won’t you listen now

Those C chords again, those arpeggios again.

Crazy dream

Oh, you don’t know what you’re missing now –

Wait – you don’t want to know what you’re missing. At least in my head. You see, I’m having a recurring dream lately. And no, it’s not the blob monster or the old standby where I’m an actor in a movie doing a scene where I’m gonna get shot to death.

I think we all have variations of this particular dream I had last night. I’ve certainly dreamed a bunch of ’em over the years. But the past month or so I’ve had three or four of these babies, and I’d be concerned except for one thing.

I appear to be in control of me in my dream.

What’s the dream? It’s those old high school or college dreams you may also have. Some people say they’re naked in those dreams, but not me. It’s always a variation of … uh oh, final exams, and wait! Didn’t I drop that class? No! I didn’t! How can I possibly study all that calculus or statistics or English Lit or you name it! I’m gonna fail, ’cause I never did any homework or study! And I’m paying for these classes! Ahhh!

The past two times I dreamed this stressful dream, I simply said to myself, “LE, don’t worry. This is just a dream, and you don’t have to take that final exam. Move on.” In my dream I’d simply wander through another segue into a different theatre of subconscious cinema.

Last night there was a twist in the set-up. I was in college, but it was the first day of class, not the last. The teacher, some free-spirit type you might see on teevee or at your local community college, was pairing us up while loudly going through the syllabus. Apparently, by the end of the semester, we all would have to go up on stage, one at a time, and sing a line from some song to our classmates. There would be no exceptions. “Because,” she said, and this was the bizarre part, “if you can’t sing a simple short line from a song in front of all your peers, how can you expect to witness for Jesus to strangers?”

You know what the initials WTF stand for? Well, the neurochemical equivalent rebounded through my brain and bloodstream that moment.

This had all the trappings of a nightmare for me. Not a monster nightmare, or one of those “someone’s in the room with me!” nightmares, but an equally stressful terror, a modern-day-man’s nightmare, one sure to lead to a bad night’s sleep and a grumpy, moody morrow.

For me, this new twist was probably the psychic residue from all those times I said to my wife, “Man, those auditions on American Idol. Brutal. I could never do that!” Plus the fact that my subconscious was guilting me over confessing Jesus in public, well, this has all the makings enlarging that little ball of omnipresent stress that’s causing me to grind the tips off all my molars in my sleep.

But now Dream Me is in charge of his own destiny!

I stood up in this auditorium and confronted this ditz who had all the power over me due to that easy-to-abuse teacher-student relationship, and flat out said that I’m not gonna do it. Shocked, she started cajoling me, then threatening me, then belittling me in front of the class, but I just turned my back on her, waved my had dismissively, and walked out. Into the next segue of my REM excursions. And I didn’t give it another thought, but when I woke up, that was the dream I remembered, and I was pleased with myself.

Am I somehow becoming a lucid dreamer without putting any iota of effort forth?

Any little song that you know
Anything that’s small
Has to grow …