Ephemera

I hate it when people post about their dreams as if they have any significance whatsoever, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do today. I had a particularly vivid and amusing dream this morning just as I was waking up.

It started with hair. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve dreamt about hair not infrequently in the past four years. (For those of you who don’t know that’s how long it’s been since I shaved my head.) As is typical of hair dreams I suddenly find myself with a full head of hair. It seems I’d been away for a long weekend and after five days of not shaving; I had a full head of glossy black hair down to my shoulders. Never mind that I had a growth of hair that would probably take two years rather than five days, it was thick and full in areas that my hair wasn’t thick or full for years before shaving my head, and I never had black hair in the first place. The odd part was it was hanging in my face, so I pulled it back into a ponytail and when I looked in a mirror to check it, it was now blond. (I never had blond hair either.) I experimented by letting it out – black, and pulling it back again – blond. At this point I realized it was a dream.

So I did what made perfect sense in the dream, I went to find the friends that I was on vacation with to show them what I could do in my dream. They were totally unimpressed. Being creatures of dream themselves they were impervious to the illogic of such a thing. It made perfect sense to them for my hair to change color. My obsession with it did concern them, however. They suggested it might be best if we went back to the motel.

Arriving at the motel, I was severely disappointed in myself for dreaming such a ratty little place for us to stay. It was cheap and tiny looking. Our rooms were on the second floor. There was bare a concrete walkway outside with a rusting metal railing and a wall of doors on the other side. No windows, just doors -- door after door with virtually no space between them. The rooms couldn’t be more than six feet wide.

I resignedly entered my room to discover a large, airy, well-furnished living room quite impossibly large for the space apparent from the outside. Sofa, love seat, multiple chairs, bookcases, an entertainment center, and a darkened hallway opposite the door I just came in. I walked to the hallway and turn on a light to discover an equally impressive bedroom.

At that point I was overcome with an immediate need to urinate. This is not unusual in my dreams – my real world bladder will make itself felt in my dream state. Typically, I’ll find myself struggling with ridiculous obstacles to a basic biological function. Most often my dreams will not include an utter lack of appropriate facilities. So, with some trepidation, I opened the door that would logically lead to the bathroom. I expected, at best, a tiny, wholly inadequate motel type bathroom – or more likely, nothing at all. Instead I found once again and large fully functional room like one would expect in a large luxurious home.

That necessity taken care of, I decided to explore a bit more. I’d noticed one other door that I couldn’t figure out what it would be for. I opened it and, at first, thought I’d found a small utility closet. Fumbling for a light switch I discovered yet another impossibly large room. This was like a semi-furnished unfinished basement rec room. I was puzzling over both why such a thing would exist as part of a cheesy motel suite and how they’d managed to cram such a thing in the space available when I became aware that there was someone in the next room.

I headed out to be greeted by a large black man in a uniform standing in the doorway. He started asking me about “the money.” He said it just that way. I could hear the quote marks. This didn’t make sense. There was no “the money” in this dream. Thinking about it, I realized that it was $50,000 and it was from some completely different dream. I started trying to explain that to him, but he was even less capable of comprehending that he was a character in a dream than my friends who’d so utterly failed to grasp the dream-like quality of my color-changing hair. I was about to get frustrated with him when I woke up.