A bad dream

Anyone who’s spent time in these pages knows of my odd experiences in Dreamland. From Richard Nixon and the avocado tree to Harrison Ford and the Moscow Mule to Ron the Uber driver to the Burbank airport…events, people and activities appearing in my head during slumbertime defy explanation. Here is what I’m talking about.

For all this peculiarity, I almost never have bad dreams. Maybe this indicates a state of good psychic health, or maybe nightmares happen and I suppress the memory of them, but either way I haven’t had a bad dream in years. Not, that is, until two nights ago.

The setting was real: Calvin’s and my under-construction shipping-container house in Mississippi. I arrived there from California to discover with shock that an entire 40-foot wall of one container had been removed. The rear of another container was likewise open to the elements, the doors there having been taken off.

I cried out to Calvin, “What happened??? How did this happen??”

He was reserved to the extent I wondered if he were drugged with something. Responding to my question he said quietly, “Some of the neighbors thought that this end of the container would be cooler, so they moved the kitchen.”

I then noticed that the interior framing had been changed to create an altogether different room arrangement from what I’d left after my last trip to Mississippi.

As Calvin described the neighbors’ interference in our project, I observed a dozen or so adults milling about in our front yard.

“Who are these people?? What’s going on???” Calvin did not reply.

After that, neither he nor anyone else seemed to acknowledge my presence, much less answer my desperate cries for information. The only exception was when I asked Calvin why the hell there was a finished bedroom, complete with furniture and white bedding, and where he’d gotten the furniture.

“From the place down the road,” is all he said.

A disturbing idea came to me: Calvin had been subsumed in a cult. Awful as the possibility was, I became surer of it when, after I asked Calvin if he wanted to go to Pizza Hut and he nodded yes, one of the people milling about in our yard — a man in his forties with salt-and-pepper hair — approached and said, “I think I should go with you.”

This is where I woke up.

The dream was highly upsetting, perhaps because it didn’t involve a monster under the bed or some other imaginary source of terror. No, this dream was about real things, real people and my real life. I hesitated to write about it at all because it would mean experiencing the unpleasantness anew, which indeed it has, but I decided — I hope — that picking through things might help to exorcise the bad memory.

Or maybe what I need is a dream about Albanian sit-coms, President Fillmore or guppies to flush the pipes.

(I checked in with Calvin, who stated believably that the shipping containers were intact and that he was not in a cult.)