The "What-if" Dreams

Hello All,

Last night I had two dreams I can remember now. Both of them either had a beginning that didn't match the end, or an end that didn't match the beginning. Here is the first one:

I was in the car with someone else, and believe it or not we were both dressed like good old boys from Eastern NC (with the baseball caps ever so lightly rested upon our heads). We were unfamiliar with Raleigh and were looking for Hillsborough St. For those of you from other towns, that would be the main street by NCSU. We were driving some rusty looking Chevrolet, with fruit-shaped car-deodorant pendants hanging around the rear-view mirror, and papers and cups wedged on top the dashboard. We stopped at the Phillips 66 gas station for directions and began to take a left at the intersection.

The guy I was with quickly realized it was the wrong way. So, instead of turning around using a side street or a driveway, I just did a U-turn right there in the intersection and took the next possible direction, which of course, was wrong again. My ever-so impatient passenger implored me to make another U-turn in the intersection and go the only other way in the intersection we hadn't tried. After all this spinning around, I began to be worried a police officer would see us and pull us over for reckless driving. Sure enough, I did see a police officer in my rear-view mirror, but oddly enough he completely ignored us.

When we finally got to Hillsborough St. To our surprise everything was blocked by a mass of construction. There were lone concrete towers with metal pipes sticking out, high mounds of red clay, and half-demolished buildings everywhere, all covered in a constant beige wind of dust. It looked like what I would imagine the Valley of the Kings looks like. We had to leave the car and spent a good time climbing over the construction to reach the nearby neighborhoods we were looking for. Oddly enough, once we got to the house, the guy I was with disappeared, and all the construction was gone. It was just me standing at the Ridgewood Philips 66 watching two rednecks get pulled over by the cops for driving loop-de-loops all around the intersection.

My next dream was a little more detailed, so I hope it won't make this post overly long. The second dream began with me arriving in Raleigh, as if I had never moved here, and was coming straight from Connecticut. I walked into an apartment that evidently was my Dad's. I instantly noticed a small dog-eared and loose-leafed Bible in Spanish on a little night-table. I looked around the apartment, there were only his clothes shoved in the drawers and on the furniture. I thought it seemed as if he had never met my mother, and wonder if perhaps they weren't actually my parents, so I left the apartment to go further into Raleigh.

Now, in real life, Raleigh is not pedestrian-friendly at all. You pretty much have to have a car to live here. It's also one of the uglier cities around. Most buildings have a modular home/ strip-mall type look, and there's hardly a hint of any older architecture that might have once been here. Where Raleigh does seem quaint tends to be in areas that are now crack-ridden and dangerous, so imagine my surprise in the dream when I found myself walking into something not unlike grand-central station.

Huge steel beams held-up railway bridges at least 50 feet above my head, and crowds of people were busily making their way through the station. In every little half-hidden spot, I'd notice a homeless person, or runaway child contently sitting in their area as if they lived there forever. Once I got past the station, I came to a large indoor aquarium. It was a beautiful building with a mezzanine and a glass dome, so you could walk around and look at the sea-life as well as look out the windows to see the many large buildings of this imaginary Raleigh (really, it looked like a real city with people crowded on the streets under beautifully constructed buildings). It was then that I noticed a floor-level pool of water surrounded by tropical plants. I noticed dolphins jumping and squeaking all over it. There was a sign by the guard rail surrounding it, telling you to blow into some horn that would make a sound like a baby dolphin, and that they would approach you.

I looked all over the guardrail for the horn, but couldn't find it. The dolphins continued to jump and play right in front of me anyway, and just as I wished, one of them slowed down and made eye-contact with me. That's when my Dad approached me by the dolphin pool, as if we had planned to meet there.

Well, those are the dreams I can remember from last night. It's early in the day (I woke up about two hours ago), and I already feel tired. Today I'll just be working on my resume and on more pictures of the dream I described in my very first post on this blog. It's a shame how I always seem to draw really great detailed pictures on my crappiest sketching paper. I guess I just feel less inhibited when I'm not using my thick, more expensive "final draft" paper, so I attempt deeper detail and trickier perspective. Once I figure out how to use my hand me down camera (no, I'm not a good with technical electronic things), I'll take some pictures of my artwork, along with some pictures of my cat.

Thank you for reading,

Marc