Hard Night at the Office

I dreamed I was selling cars again, which was weird, because it's been thirty-five years since I worked at a car dealership.

In the dream the dealership didn't have a showroom, but rather a big open-plan office with low-walled cubicles. I had this young just-married couple looking to buy a car and they very specifically wanted a manual transmission. We test drove something like a mid-Eighties Camry with a four-cylinder and a five speed, and some imaginary dream coupe that looked something like an MX-6 but was made by some imaginary French company that only existed in my dream world.

I got off into some interminable nerdy explanation to them about the synchros, and then about the differences between straight-cut and helical-cut gears, using a couple file folders to mime how the gear teeth meshed.

There were hundreds of cars on the lot but only three had manual transmissions and I was trying to find the third one in the computer, but we hot-desked in these little cubicles and whoever had used this one last had played a browser game that left always-on-top pop-up windows all over the desktop, obscuring our sales software.

I was trying to explain to the dude, who was the one insisting on a manual, that there was no real performance advantage to a manual and it would make for a more tedious commute in traffic, but then I woke up.

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Introvert Nightmares...

I hate those dreams where you get stuck in awkward and uncomfortable situations, like the one where the temp agency mistakenly sent me to be the starting quarterback for an imaginary NFL team... the Smallville Ocelots or Anytown Meerkats or whatever. Then there was the one where I was trapped for an excruciatingly long 20-floor elevator ride with the Obamas, trying to come up with the sort of pleasantly apolitical small talk that one resorts to when one is trapped in a confined space with extroverted strangers.

Last night I dreamed I was in my mid-20s, and I had to go on a road trip to pick up my mom from the hospital and bring her back to my place. And accompanying me on this roadtrip was (also inexplicably young) Tucker Carlson. 

We took Tucker's Karmann Ghia, and I spent hours cooped up in a car with someone whom I was desperate to avoid talking about anything remotely political with. And then of course there's the return leg of the trip with mom crammed in the car with us and now I have to worry about her saying something political too.

I'd rather have spent sixty floors in an elevator with Barry and Michelle. Lordy that was an excruciating nightmare.

Unsafe Dreams

I've participated in a fair amount of force-on-force training of the "sims guns and dull knives and inert pepper spray" variety, but I'm certainly not qualified to conduct any. Not only do I not consider myself an instructor, I have absolutely zero desire to be one.

Yet in my dream last night, I was conducting this force-on-force scenario for a group of people, and it was a fairly complex one. There was a narrow street, lined with shops and cluttered with market stalls and populated with role players, and the participants would navigate their way from one end of the street to the other, with a couple role players who would interact with them in varying levels of annoyance, insistence, and even aggressiveness if sufficiently mishandled.

All fairly normal, except people kept wandering through the middle of the scenario. Various TV reporters and their camera crews would come traipsing in, or people who wanted to watch the class, or whatever.

Now, if you've done this stuff, at least with a reputable instructor, you know that the scenario area is supposed to be completely sterile, with nobody in it who hasn't been patted down and had their pockets emptied of anything even vaguely weapon-y. Yet here I had people just wandering through and I kept having to call the whole thing to a halt and shoo them out and try and restart the scenario.

I woke up feeling maddeningly frustrated and the day hadn't even started.

"Whaddaya mean there's someone behind me?"

To Dream the Implausible Dream

Last night I dreamed I was in a penmanship class that Bobbi was teaching.

My fellow handwriting students included Taylor Swift and my friend Annette Evans, which proved this was a ludicrously implausible dream.

I’ve seen Annette’s handwriting and I seem to recall it’s pretty solid penmanship, so I’ve no idea what she would have been doing in the class.

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Dream me has good taste.

For some reason in my dream last night I was carrying my 4" Model 19-5 in an outside-the-waistband  Milt Sparks holster.

Model 19-5 with Hogue Monogrip. It was on the gun when I bought it from Marko and it's sorta grown on me. It must have, because in the dream last night someone mentioned how good it looked.

I don't know why I was doing it, but my big takeaway was the desire to have a nice OWB K-frame rig, perhaps with a cool exotic hide, like the elephant one from the dream.
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To Sleep, Perchance to Dream...

I was awakened at 3AM by the sound of my elderly cat, Rannie, being violently ill somewhere in the house.

I found multiple sites where she had horked on the floor and cleaned those up and, deciding I was a little parched, had a can of diet ginger ale & lemonade before flopping back into the bed.

I tried to get back to sleep to no avail. Not even reading through the last few chapters of Russian Roulette could help me doze off, and I had barely drifted back to sleep when the alarm went off.

Despite having vowed to not laze about in bed this morning, there was no way I was going to try to function on that short rest, so I set alarms on the iPad for 7AM and 8AM and figured to get another hour or two of sleep.

This let me drift into a vivid and lengthy-seeming dream, one part of which involved staying in a hotel where the rooms were just depressions in the tops of this really tall mesa, connected by winding arroyos that served as hallways.

At one point I was trying to take a shortcut from one room to another by going from the "balcony" to the "balcony", which essentially meant hand-over-handing across a 90-degree inside corner over a yawning drop to the ground below. This is obviously something I would only do in a dream.

Anyhow, I got my foot stuck in a crevice and, as I was pondering how to get it unstuck without plummeting to my death, I woke up. So that was convenient.
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That's odd...

So, the decocker levers and spring for the CZ P07 arrived courtesy of a Facebook friend the other day and, in preparation for swapping them in, I watched the YouTube installation video a couple of times.

As a result, I had such a detailed and involved dream about the task last night (including some weird oopsies, like the hammer inexplicably falling out, which is an impossibility during the procedure) that when I woke up this morning I was disappointed to find out that I hadn't actually done the job yet.
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"Peace? I hate the word..."

Pres. Trump at U.N.: “We will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission” https://t.co/rGswYlXlxJ

— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 19, 2017

I had a dream last night in which Trump sent Dennis Rodman over to act as an envoy to Kim Jong-un.

Kim Jong-un, apparently overestimating Rodman's importance as anything other than an answer in the Jeopardy category "'90s Pop Culture", took Dennis hostage and staked him out on a giant bullseye painted on a mortar range, threatening him with execution by 120mm mortar fire. This was broadcast on live TV, like something a Bond villain would do.
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Odd dream...

I dreamed I was working on a project with Kathy Jackson that required me to fly out and visit her several times.

She'd moved to the far exurbs of some imaginary dream town on the dry side of the Cascades that looked suspiciously like Bend, Oregon and was probably a dream stand-in for Yakima, and so instead of flying in to Portland, I was flying to this high desert airport, hard up against the mountains.

It was a cool little airport. Kind like ABQ if ABQ was all on one level and small like RDM.

Anyhow, this was supposed to be my last trip out there, and as we're coming in on short final, I'm thinking to myself "Huh. I didn't hear the gear drop..."

At which point the pilot turns perpendicular to the runway and bellies it in prettily, right in the dirt. I've never done a gear-up landing, and I have to believe they're more violent than the dream one was.

Nobody seemed hurt and people start shuffling for the exits. My habit of reading the information card in my seatback pocket paid off as I rolled over several rows of seats and popped the right-side front cabin door open, because everybody else in the front of the plane was trying to pile out the left main cabin door.

As I'm passing the cockpit on the way out, I overhear the discussion between the crew and realize the pilot crashed the plane because he was pissed off and quitting the airline. Seemed like an unnecessarily emphatic resignation to me, but whatever.

As I hit the ground among the milling passengers outside the plane, I hear one say "Oh, look! The baggage doors are open!" to which one of the flight attendants says "They were never closed," and I'm thinking that my big Pelican case full of guns had gone D.B. Coopering out of the sky and into someone's back yard.

And then I woke up...
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Dream Park...

So, I dreamed I was working in this little drug store in this tiny town out in the middle of flat-ass nowhere. The town was some houses and trees and a church and a courthouse and a few commercial buildings surrounded by billiard-table-flat farmland in all directions.

The drug store was in a strip center at the end of the three or four block main drag, along with a barber shop, a package store, the post office, and a little bar & grill sort of restaurant. And across the street was a park with some picnic tables and...this is how I knew it was a dream...a 50 yard pistol bay with a covered firing line.

So, like I said, I worked at the little drug store across the street from this park and, this being weird dream small town, the drug store closed at 9PM. I'm locking up, it's high summer so it's just starting to get to twilight, and I see two vehicles I recognize in the parking lot of the park across the street.

So I drive over and park my car (for some reason my car is the red Porsche 924S I had back in Georgia) and pull my ears on and wander over to the firing line on the pistol bay, where Jack Clemons is getting some pistol shooting pointers from Bruce Gray.

I sat and eavesdropped for a bit, but it was getting on toward full dark and, while the firing line was lit and there were a couple mercury-vapor lights in the parking lot, the pistol bay itself was unlit and the steel was starting to get hard to distinguish from the backstop. Plus, an evening fog was starting to rise.

Bruce suggested we all grab a bite at the little bar & grill across the street to give the fog time to lift before heading home..."People get in wrecks in this stuff all the time," he opined...and so I walked back to my car to move it back across the street. As I was unlocking the car, this dented hooptie with different-colored fenders and doors rolled to a stop on the street in front of me.

"Hey..." yelled the guy in the passenger seat.

"Sorry, buddy, can't help you. I gotta go," I blurted as I finished opening the door and started to climb in.

"Hey!" Now he'd opened the passenger door and hopped out and was making a beeline for my car. I looked around the parking lot, but Jack and Bruce had already left and parked at the far corner of the parking lot across the street. I locked my door and debated fastening the seat belt or leaving it unlatched so I could access my gun better.

I started the car and fished for reverse. The dude was almost to my door.

And I woke up.
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Awkward dream...

So I had this dream last night that SHOT Show next year was in Atlanta, for some reason. And I'm in the jostling crowd elbowing my way onto the show floor from the lobby, and there in the press of people in front of me are my parents.

What mom and dad were doing at SHOT is beyond me.

Anyhow, the rest of the dream was as awkward as you could imagine, with my folks following me around the show as I'm trying in my usual half-assed way to get some work done, and they're politely trying to be interested in my work and everything's just a mess. Dad's trying to be helpful, Mom is gamely feigning enthusiasm...it's a classic Comedy of Manners.

As best I can tell, this is some super-advanced-level version of the Have to Give an Oral Book Report Naked in High School Dream, about being unprepared, or maybe it's some manifestation of Impostor Syndrome or something.
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High and Low

Weird dream last night.

Lots of time in airports and airplanes. At one point I was on an empty jet with the chief pilot from my days at the corporate flight department. He was flying the thing and I kept getting up out of the right seat and running back into the empty cabin, running from window to window to gawk at all the other planes in a sky that was inexplicably as crowded as the ceiling in the Udvar-Hazy museum.

When we landed, instead of taxiing we somehow flew along the taxiways at about 35mph and 10' AGL, in violation of all kinds of laws of physics.

At the airport, there was a crafting class going on in a disused meeting room. Jennifer was making these cool beaten-silver bracelets. I tried my luck at pottery and I know it was a dream because my vases were turning out more or less vase-shaped instead of the sad, kiln-fired, glazed turd shapes that have traditionally been the result of me turning my hands to the clay.
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Meta.

My head snapped upright from dozing at my desk. I was sitting in front of my computer in the dining area of the apartment. It was December. Everybody was still in a tizzy from the recent election and had been internetting furiously about it.

I started to turn my chair around to face Marko's desk and say "Dude, I have had the freakiest, most detailed dream about the next sixteen years. You will not believe..."

And then I woke up in my bed here this morning.

That was just some freaky Inception-type stuff right there. I was disoriented for the first fifteen or twenty minutes out of bed, that dream felt so real.
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Side Effects

Cutting down on beer consumption and making a conscious effort to be in bed around 10PM means I'm having dreams again.

For instance, the other night I dreamed I got a job photographing safaris in Africa for a double rifle manufacturer. I woke up from that one with genuine pangs of regret, and spent some time in the morning at my keyboard furtively fingering a .405 Winchester cartridge like a worry rock.
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Weird dream.

I dreamed I was back in Atlanta. I was hanging out with a photographer friend in the area around Lenox Square of a Saturday afternoon, and we were walking from restaurant to pub, taking photos and reminiscing about the good old days and how much the area had changed. (It had changed a great deal, since my brain was fabricating a dream Buckhead/Lenox that was a sort of amalgam of mid-'90s Atlanta and Twenty-Teens Near Northside Indianapolis, cityscape-wise.)

The night dragged on well past midnight and our wandering afoot had wound us up in the parking lot of the Brookhaven MARTA station, from where my friend bid me adieu and headed home.

I am now realizing that I'm in an empty big city parking lot, afoot, at 0430, with a camera bag containing a couple DSLRs and other very pawnable stuff, and I'm mildly inebriated and the better part of a mile away from my car. So I start walking southwest along Peachtree Industrial. As I'm trundling along, I'm taking heart in the fact that we're nearing the end of the crook's working day and it won't be but another thirty or forty-five minutes before joggers and early-rising first-shift types outnumber gang bangers, dope dealers, and last-call-dodging drunks on city streets.

Sure enough, a few blocks along and I pass a couple groups of runners headed in the opposite direction on the sidewalk; two to four dudes out huffing and puffing a few miles before work. As the second group passed me and I turned my head to follow them, I noticed I had a guy following me. He was looking around as though keeping an eye out for witnesses, and gaining on me pretty steadily.

I stepped up my pace but, P'tree Industrial being seven lanes wide at this point and already starting to pick up in traffic volume from its wee-hours doldrums, I couldn't easily just jaywalk across the street to see if the guy followed or if I was just being nervous. I would have had to pause long enough to look both ways and make sure it was safe to cross, which would have given him time to catch up, and that seemed no bueno.

Glancing over my shoulder again, I saw he was closing fast and still scanning around him. I quickened again into the shambolic jog that's the closest thing I have to a run these days. I heard him start to jog behind me.

"Hey, I'm not gonna hurt you. I just need..." he says.

"I don't have anything. Go away!" I yell.

"You stop!" Fingertips brush my right shoulder.

"Don't touch me! Leave me alone!" My right hand goes under my jacket and onto my pistol as I try to run even faster.

Accompanied by a growl, his hand tries to grab my right shoulder again, misses its grasp, and instead gives a forceful, unbalancing shove. I start to stumble forward, half turn, draw the gun and fire twice. He's very close. I hit right where I'm aiming and the dude stops running forward, stands up straight for a second...

But I've already turned and run another half-block. Finding an open doorway, I back into it. I fumble my phone out of my shirt pocket with my left hand. I haven't holstered the gun and I'm trying to work the phone and safely hold on to the pistol at the same time. I can't get my fingers to work my phone's screen right and end up asking Siri to dial 911. (Can Siri do that? Note to self...)

The guy doesn't follow me. I set the gun and the phone down on the pavement, collect my breath, pick the gun up and holster it, then pick up the phone to wait for the po-po. The cops show up. Detectives show up. There's yellow crime scene tape being strung up back down the block. The cops tell me the dude is DRT. For some reason, I feel compelled to defend myself, to relate the entire narrative I've just told you to the police.

I lay out the details of the guy closing on me deliberately, and all the pre-attack cues, everything from his constant scanning combined with direct movement towards me, to actually physically laying on of hands. Kathy Jackson is there for some reason. "Mas would be very disappointed in you," she says, somewhat wryly, after I finished my tale to the responding po-po.
"I didn't want to clam up and ask for a lawyer and look guilty, but I probably said too much and look like a Strange Ranger," I moped.

I had to wait there for a while. I'm relieved of my gun. By the next afternoon, they'd got video from cameras in three or four locations, including one of him trying to shove me to the ground and me shooting. They'd also completely combed over my social media accounts. It turned out that dude had a big knife under his coat and a long prior record. I woke up in the middle of them telling me that I was free to go, for now at least.

That was extremely weird.
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Lions and tigers and badgers...

I dreamed that Bobbi and I had moved to a '70s-vintage contemporary ranch in a subdivision in the Colorado mountains.

I was out in the glassed-in sun porch when I noticed that there was a bear rolling around just on the other side of the low chain-link fence surrounding the back yard, using the fence as a back-scratcher. I checked to make sure the cats were inside and went to go fetch Bobbi, so she could take a picture of it for her Facebook page.

As I headed down the hall to fetch her, I glanced out another window into the back yard and noticed that right outside the window, in the yard, was a leopard eating a freshly-killed pronghorn. The leopard looked up from its meal and right into my eyes, which was pretty creepy.

Yes, I know that leopards aren't exactly endemic to Colorado, and have I mentioned that the bear in question wasn't a black bear or a grizzly, but rather a polar bear? Clearly my dream zoologist was taking the night off.

Anyway, I return to the glassed-in sun porch with Bobbi to find that the polar bear and the leopard are now sitting cheek-by-jowl in front of the sliding glass door, where they have been joined by a badger for some reason I can't possibly fathom. All three are staring intently into the sun porch at the cats therein, and the bear has started idly pawing at the sliding glass door, which is unlocked.

So now I'm holding the door shut and asking Bobbi to please latch the little latch on the handle and hustle the cats into the house. When she does, I let go of the half-latched door and rush to follow her. The problem is that the doors that divide the porch from the rest of the house are flimsy-ass accordion doors like you'd find on a closet, with little siding bolts at the top for privacy locks, but hanging free at the bottom. If a bear hit that, it'd hinge open like a giant cat door.

So Bobbi helped me slide a small bookcase in front of the doors and then while she was on the phone with Animal Control ("Yes, a polar bear and a leopard. No, I'm not kidding. Please don't hang up!") I ran and grabbed my carbine and, because it finally had a purpose in life, my .405 Win T/C Encore...

Then I woke up.
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Overheard in the Hallway...

RX: "I had the strangest dream. I'd won one of every Stanley screwdriver ever made."

Me: *laughing* "That is the Bobbi-est dream ever. You could fix all the things!"

Overheard on I-70 Eastbound...

Driving toward Dayton this afternoon, I gradually hove out of sight of the shoreline of Indianapolis's NPR broadcast island and hadn't gotten within reach of Dayton's. Rather than wade through the assortment of unknown classic rock, country, and He Who Walks Behind The Rows-type religious stations out in eastern Indiana, I tried to power up the Bluetooth speakers I have for listening to podcasts on my phone as an interim solution until I replace the Zed Drei's head unit.

Unfortunately, the battery in the speakers was flatter than the soybean fields I was droning past, and so I just turned the audio off to leave myself listening to the thoughts in my head and the wind noise in the convertible top...

...jerking my head upright from what was certainly only a blink's worth of sleep, my eyes flew open and I shouted "The SMERSH powder is all he had on him!"

I have no idea what it means, either, and it's amazing that I got enough dream detail to yell that in what was not even enough of an eyeblink for the car to wander in its lane.

Needless to say, I was wide awake for the rest of the way to my destination.
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Hmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Bobbi had the a/c off and a box fan running in her bedroom window last night, its low hum providing a pleasant white noise that had me sleeping the sleep of the Just...

...until about 0mygod30 this morning, just before dawn, when she turned it off and suddenly in my dream the red emergency lighting came on in the subterranean asteroid colony as the air-handling system went silent. That had me sitting bolt-upright in bed, let me tell you.
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Weird and disjointed dreams last night...

There was everything from running around shooting bad guys like a champion to walking through this fantastical downtown that was like if Tim Burton was hired to do the plagued streets of NYC in The Division.

Later, I joined Starfleet. Well, a starfleet. There were spaceships.

And then still later we were holed up in this clapped out chipboard sno-cone stand in the middle of post-apocalyptic suburbia, everybody trying to squeeze behind the freezer or the sno-cone machine while some dude on a hilltop across the road took potshots at anything he saw move through the open door.

It sure seemed like longer than seven hours. Dreams are weird.
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