NBF's DJ

I've been asked to audition for a teacher. Somehow this audition is a huge life-changing deal. She has already decided to reject me - that's clear - and the audition is merely a formality. The trouble is that my music isn't played by someone born into a wealthy enough family for her.

I start. She immediately covers the keys so I can't see what I'm doing. Fine, I accept that as a teaching technique with some students, but it's a little weird at an audition. She then starts demonstrating arpeggios, Hanon moves, elaborate sostenuto progressions, the works. I'm out of practice and intimidated. I'm not about to show her the music I've written - she's a hostile force.

This is right after I've been introduced to two unattractive gentlemen and asked to choose between them. "Neither" was not an accepted option, so I am now on the blacklist with this piano woman.

Finally, I've had enough. I start playing Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" - and not perfectly, either, but just because I like playing the song.

She stops the audition and asks me to talk to an adjudicator on my way out.

Before this, I'm on my way to the audition room and I'm walking through a huge house, very clean and spacious. I see lions and antelopes and other huge beasts materializing before my eyes - some of them being ice sculptures, yet alive. At one point I say there are lions, but my sister says, "Lions? There are no lions," and gives me a significant look as if to say, "Don't tell this lion he's a lion!" I pick up on that and say, "Of course there are no lions, because there are no predators. Lions eat people." Then I catch a hurt expression in the lion's face, and I hastily add, "Except the good lions, of course."

Real-life parallels: I've been helping my 20-month-old nephew play the piano. He keeps trying to close the keyboard cover. I showed him how to sweep the keys with his palms and he's fascinated with trying to do that. My sister has repeatedly been correcting things I say in front of the child and ways I deal with the child - in a nice, toddler-friendly voice, of course.

In the part of this dream that I remember, I'm leaving work at a psychiatric ward (which was a former waking-life workplace for way too many miserable years) and I'm driving a Model T type early automobile, in the style of the era when they used to be actually called automobiles, or horseless carriages. Aidan is a patient in the hospital and I stumble across his records; he is from a very wealthy family who is keeping it quiet, and he is under the name Adam MacNeill.

(Triggers from waking life: I've been watching a lot of Road to Avonlea lately as a way of dealing with the stress of being home for Christmas with a real-life 21st-century family. There are a lot of those early cars in that show. Also, I'd noticed that there was a minor character named MacNeill, never seen, but named as the legal owner of Green Gables. I'd recognized that as one of the series' many sly nods to the author's estate: Lucy Maud Montgomery's grandmother, who was her legal guardian and who was by most accounts very strict and harsh with the young Maud, had been named Lucy Woolner MacNeill. I had had a conversation with my mother about my father's early-onset Alzheimer's and the fact that he is starting from an IQ well above normal, so his memory loss is not as easily noticed; I'd commented that in the patients I'd assessed, we had to start with a rough idea of their baseline IQ, and usually the professors or economists or others of that social class who were somehow in the public mental health care system (and very few were, as their families usually made private arrangements) were harder to flag as having memory difficulties needing attention, because their scores on the Wechsler Memory Test were usually at or above normal.)

I'm well aware that I have no business even being aware that Aidan is in need of care (although I kind of know that anyway), let alone that he's an inpatient. There is some kind of paperwork that needs to be completed and left on the supervising psychologist's desk before I drive off in my ahooga-mobile. This paperwork will mean I'll be fired when the supervisor gets around to reading it, but I leave in the car before he finishes his coffee. It's the end of the day anyway on a Friday and it's time I was driving off. (In the real-life job, there was a stretch where every Friday contained some kind of reason to worry all weekend about losing my job.) When I do drive off, I'm stopped at a turnstile on the way out and asked for change. I initially don't have it and will be unable to escape the hospital, but eventually I do find it and get out of there.

Cut to a wealthy neighbourhood. My mother, a young girl in her 20s, is there with her toddler. I am there with a camera to take photos, but she has quarrelled with the family in one of the houses there and wants to get the photos taken as furtively as possible in the nearby park on the swings. My job is to carry the camera.

(Real-life parallel: My 20-month-old nephew is here and, for his time with Grandma, who is ill, it is often my job (and my pleasure, so no problem there) to follow and fetch soothers and the like and to open the baby gate. In other words, I'm there to perform all the low-profile support tasks so Grandma can have her joyful time with her grandson. I figure I can always get my time.)

One of the families across the street in that wealthy neighbourhood is the MacNeill family. It is a huge house, tan-coloured, with quaint rustic white trim hanging down from its roof, like Rose Cottage in the Avonlea series.

Oh, I know too darn well that I need to make myself scarce when anywhere around the MacNeills!!