Last week’s dream involved a testimonial dinner, one taking place not in the ballroom of an elegant hotel, where testimonial dinners have a way of taking place, but rather in a banquet hall such as you might find in the western suburbs of Chicago, the kind of place where you get baked ziti with your food regardless of the main course the bride and groom selected for their reception dinner. Baked ziti, by the way, makes sense with Chicken Vesuvio or Veal Marsala but it does not with broiled whitefish, but that doesn’t matter in the western suburbs of Chicago.

It was not until I was seated at my place at one of the tables extending perpendicular to the dais that I realized that I myself was the honoree at the testimonial dinner. Given my seat halfway down one of the long 40-chair (20 on each side) tables, the situation surprised me. Wouldn’t the honoree, I wondered, have a better seat?

I didn’t have much time to ponder the curious state of things before I discovered that Mr. Telly Savalas, the only person of the two hundred or so in the room bedecked in black tie, was sitting at the next table over, barely 15 feet from me. He noticed me noticing him, and called out, “Hey Clay! Catch!”

With this he picked up, with the fingers of his right hand, the beefsteak from his dinner plate. (Despite the décor and vibe of the banquet room, I cannot report with certainty that baked ziti appeared on or near Mr. Savalas’s plate.) Mr. Savalas then hurled his steak at me, like one might hurl a Frisbee.

In a banquet environment—with or without baked ziti—it would be common to be served a filet mignon, but in the case of my testimonial dinner this was not the case. What Telly Savalas threw at me that night was not a hockey-puck-shaped filet mignon at all. No, it was a flatter cut of beef, such as a ribeye or strip.

Ribeye would be a nontraditional cut for banquet dining, largely because of the fat and gristle the diner must excise. It was therefore likely a strip steak that Telly Savalas threw my way at the dinner where I, it appeared, was the honoree.

Had Mr. Savalas been farther away from me when he whirled his strip steak at me I might have had time to catch, duck or do anything else one might do when the target of an airborne beef attack. But no, I had barely heard the utterance from Mr. Savalas’s mouth when the flying bovine bit landed in my lap. The fact of the lap-landing would indicate that Mr. Savalas lobbed his steak more than dispatched it with a purely horizontal trajectory.

If I were wearing dark clothing there may have been a way to conceal the effects of the assault but alas, I had khaki pants on, and red beef-juice splashed across the space between my belt and the bottom of my zipper.

Concerned about my imminent, presumed trip to the speaker’s platform to accept the tributes ahead, I motioned to the mistress of ceremonies to come over. She did, and I pointed at my lap and whispered to her, “Don’t make me go up there.”

Before I heard her response, I woke up.