imagine the nightmares

As some of you are aware, The Fast sometimes means going to bed after eating pre-sunrise breakfast. This often means bizarre dreams. The one I woke up from just a while ago featured but was not limited to:

• A huge conference of some kind in a dream version of Paris.
• An attractive, fun young woman everyone was extra nice to now that she had suffered some kind of brain trauma that made her spacial perception go all weird. She had a hard time understanding where she was, but was trying to make the best of it.
• Plans to go out to some trendy lounge on the last night of the conference with this woman who was totally not my type.
• Those plans being dashed at the 11th hour by a bizarre series of events in which a groundhog urinated on me and was quickly chased off by Lev, and then while he was busy fending off the groundhog, I was rushed by a skunk. The skunk got me, but it was some kind of stun spray that didn't smell, but left me immobile for a few seconds. Nonetheless, clothes ruined. My date for the night was understanding, and we talked about how I probably wouldn't have gotten into the club, anyway, as the clothes, even before being ruined, where simply not expensive enough.
• The realization that while post - skunk incident, this young woman was Persian, the dream had changed, and when we originally made the plans to go out she was some kind of Fairy Royalty (the old school kind of Fairy, not the Disney kind), and was far more self possessed and fascinating as a character...*
• A screening of a film I was working on.
• A huge conference hall where I chose to sit with my parents instead of my friends.
• A short, mostly harmless conversation that I've been pondering the meaning of for a few hours now.

When I woke up, the very same Lev happened to call in real life from some kind of technology conference in Boston to tell me about a machine which holds a book, flips pages with its little mechanical arms, and scans each page into digital form with creepy/adorable quickness and precision. A whole bunch of them where running at once. He said it looked like a Bjork video. Briefly checking to see if I was still dreaming, I thanked him for having my back with the Groundhog thing, and told him not to blame himself for letting the skunk get past him. It was for the better, in the end.

[ekundayo]

*Clarification - this is not to imply that Persians are not fascinating, but that this particular dream character was, in the second part of the dream, an average and mild mannered young woman who happened to be Persian, whereas in earlier parts of the dream I recall her as being imbued with concealed supernatural power and a subtly regal bearing which made her magnetic and a bit scary. My dreams make random switches like that all the time, which leads me to believe that my brain's writers are a bit overworked and have nobody checking continuity for them.