lucid

In which I watch a silly Kurosawa film with E…

I live in a big house with an entertainment room set up with large, cushy couches and expensive electronic equipment. A giant flat screen TV is on my wall with speakers hanging all around. I’ve rented Rashoman, a movie that I’ve never seen but always wanted to.

(In real life, my house is nothing at all like this and I have seen Rashoman, but anyway this is a dream so let’s roll with it.)

Just as I’ve dimmed the lights and settled down on the couch with a bowl of buttery popcorn, there’s a knock on my door. I get up and open the door: it’s E, H and C. They ask what I’m doing for the evening, and I tell them that I’ve just sat down to watch a movie. H and C say they don’t want to watch it, and they ask if they can just hang out in my backyard. E, on the other hand, seems interested. He asks what movie it is and I tell him it is a Kurosawa flick. He says he’s never heard of Kurosawa, and I ask him if he’s seen Seven Samurai. He says he hasn’t, but he’s heard of it. I tell him that Rashoman is also a samurai film, and he seems excited to see it.

We go back to the fancy, entertainment room, and I tell E that Rashoman is a samurai adaptation of children’s TV shows from the 60s and 70s. He thinks this is really strange but I point out that Kurosawa made a few adaptations like that. I mention that Yojimbo was a samurai adaptation of Fistful of Dollars because I know that he really likes Clint Eastwood. He said he once saw a samurai adaptation of Macbeth and I said, “Yeah that was Kurosawa too!” We can’t remember what that movie was called though, and we think about it for a long time before remembering that it was Ronin. We talk about how much we love the scene in the end in which the archers all shoot arrows at Robert DeNiro.

So we sit down to watch Rashoman, but the first problem is that the subtitles are not in English. We can’t read what the people are saying, but that turns out to not be such a big problem as the plot is abstract anyway. First we see cartoon samurais singing the Ladybug Picnic song from Sesame Street. Then we see samurais in squares like at the beginning of The Brady Bunch. Then a bunch of samurais in miniskirts start dancing like on Laugh-In. Finally, a group of samurai sitting are around on beanbags drinking mate. Toshiro Mifune is one of them and he is wearing a fedora.

E tells me that this is ridiculous and that he doesn’t want to watch anymore. I’m embarrassed because I was only recently singing praises about Kurosawa. I tried to construct some argument about how he was making an ironic statement, but eventually I had to admit that the film was stupid. E went outside with H and C, and they all three called for me to join them. But I told them that I was going to finish the film since I’d already sat through half of it. E responded that I was just hot for Toshiro Mifune. Maybe so, I thought. He was a good looking man in his youth, I said, but I sure wish he’d hurry up and start killing people.

The phone rings and I get up to answer it. I'm not sure what happened then, but the next dream started with a phone call (though in a different setting) so I think they were back-to-back.

In which R is in the hospital…

A continuation of the dream above, I think.

I'm in line at the bank and I get a phone call from my mother and rush to the hospital because R has been in a car wreck. My grandmother and brother are there too. My mom explains that he has broken his neck and one of his vertebrae is lodged into a part of his brain. She says that he is in surgery to have it removed. This is expected to be successful and he should have a total recovery.

After his surgery is finished, we are admitted into his hospital room. His face and head is swollen and there is a large contraption, like an Xray machine, attached to his head. His limbs are being held down with belts and there are tubes coming out of his arms and chest. His eyes are open and he is looking around the room. I walk over to him and touch his face and tell him that he’s been in a car wreck but that he is OK now. He just looks around the room and doesn’t respond. I ask him if he is comfortable or if he has any pain. He still just looks around and doesn’t respond.

My mom is with me. She’s a nurse, and I can tell that his silence makes her nervous. I say, “maybe he can’t talk with all these tubes coming out of his chest.” She nods, cautiously. Then I lean over, close to his face and say, “R, can you hear me? If you can hear me, blink your eyes.”

He still just looks around the room randomly and I start to think that he doesn’t even see me or know that I’m there. This is terrifying, and I grab his head between my hands and shout at him, “Blink your eyes! Blink your eyes!” but he does nothing at all.

I start to cry and my mom pulls me away from him. R moves his arms around and gurgles. I look at him and realize that he is an empty shell. He is not conscious of being a person or that there are other people around him. He is simply an organism responding to external stimuli- whatever made him a person is gone.

I go out into the hall with my mother. My grandmother is waiting there with me. The doctor comes by and explains that the surgery was successful in that R can breathe on his own. But he has lost most of his brain functioning and now has the cognitive abilities of an earthworm. He says that it is a miracle that R survived, and that I should look at this as a gift from above to learn about compassion.

This makes me hysterical. I start screaming at the doctor that his practice is a modern day torture chamber. There is nothing miraculous about this- it’s a horror. R is dead and only his body is left over, kept alive by their interference. If there is no hope that he will ever recover then there is no miracle at all. It’s a miserable situation and I don’t want to hear any b.s. about miracles and gifts of compassion. My grandmother tries to comfort me.

I’m alone now thinking about everything I took for granted- all the days that R and I had together in which I didn’t tell him how wonderful he was and how happy I was to be with him. It was really a horrible feeling. I was also overwhelmed thinking about what to do next. He could live out another 40 years in this condition. He had not made a living will, so the hospital would probably keep his body alive even though he was dead. It seemed like a prison sentence to me that I would have to spend the rest of my life taking care of this hollow shell. Then I thought of the expense and how I’d never be able to work again, and I started to wonder if I could make him a ward of the state. When I asked a nurse about this, she told me that I was being selfish. But I told her that she was being foolish. If there was any hope that he could recover or that he could be aware of anything going on around him, then I would do anything I could to help him. This situation is hopeless though. He will never have any more consciousness than a slug. It’s cruel that he is being kept alive and also cruel that I should have to spend the rest of my life in poverty to take care of him.

Then I realized I needed to tell his family what had happened. R’s cell phone was destroyed in the wreck, so I didn’t have anyone’s phone numbers at the hospital. I didn’t want to go home because I didn’t want to leave him for that long before I figured out what to do and before I talked to his brother. So I decided to go to the hospital Internet café and send a FB message to his brother telling him to call me at the hospital. My brother was there, and he came with me to show me how to use the new computers. These computers looked like leaves with very long vines at the end that had to be connected to a large living stalk. I told him that I wished that technology would stop changing so fast. He connected me to the Internet and then left me alone.

I thought that R’s brother doesn’t check his Facebook page that often, so I decided to send a message to many people- V, A, S, R, and G. Once I’d compiled the list, I struggled with the words. If I just wrote “Tell V to call me- urgent” then I might put a lot of people into the horrible situation of not knowing what had happened. They would imagine all sorts of things and think that R might be dead. Normally when people need to talk about something like this, they say “Everything’s OK” or “R is doing fine” but in this case, it wasn’t true. He was not dead, but he was not doing fine. The news I had to share was so horrible that I couldn’t figure out what to do. I didn’t want to put any of them through the horror of wondering what was wrong while they made their way to a phone to call me. Sometimes the unknown can be worse than reality. But at the same time, I didn’t want to come out and tell them what had happened because it was so horrible that I wanted to do it over the phone- not on Facebook. Then I thought of R’s poor mother and how devastated she was going to be about all this. Really, this was all so upsetting that I couldn’t do anything so I closed the leaf computer and just put my head on the table and cried, wondering what to do. I couldn’t fly all the way to Delhi to tell them because I couldn’t leave R for that long. So finally I decided to go home and get my address book with all my phone numbers.

I asked my brother to take me home. We went down to the parking garage of the hospital and walked to his truck. It was smashed in the front, but the engine was still running just fine. My brother explained that this was the truck R was in when he got in the wreck. I looked at the truck in amazement. It hardly had any damage. How could he have injured himself so badly in a vehicle like that? My brother explained that the truck had rolled over several times so R had hit his head on the ceiling. But I looked at the roof of the truck and could see no indication that it had rolled.

“This doesn’t make sense,” I told my brother. He lit a cigarette and stood outside the truck. We were parked on the side of the road in front of the hospital. There was traffic all around us.

“I thought we went down to the parking garage?” I asked my brother. He turned around and looked at the hospital and the garage behind us. I realized that he didn’t really look like my brother.

“This is a dream,” I told him. But I felt buried down deep in it. I wanted out of the dream, but it seemed so heavy. I can’t really explain this feeling- it doesn’t make sense- but I felt like I was covered by the dream.

I started swimming in the sky up out of the dream. I could see the hospital and the road behind me. I swam up and up until I could feel myself inside my body in my bed. I was stuck in sleep paralysis. I tried really hard to wake up because I knew that I had to hurry up and find R’s brother’s phone number. I tried to swim up some more and finally woke up. It was 6 AM on Martin Luther King Day. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to discover that this was a dream. It took a good hour to shake off the horrible feeling.

In which I fail to stay lucid...

I'm cleaing out my closet and I come across a box of books. I open the first book I see and try to read a page. The words are all real words and they follow a basic sense of English grammar, but they don't make any sense. It said something very similar (maybe not exactly) to this:

The numerous trawling sofas affix zealots in the blind.

I leaned back, touched by the poetry of the words. How pretty "affix zealots in the blind" sounds! Then I started to wonder at the meaning and realized that I didn't actually understand the line. I looked at it again, but this time it said (again, close but not exactly):

Battered and flourescent utilities of ionic compounds lull banners.

I thought that maybe they were talking about the properties of ionic compounds and the banners of zealots. It didn't seem as pretty this time, and I was aware that the words had changed. Some of the phrases kept repeating over and over again in my mind, especially the "affix zealots in the blind" part and the "utilities of ionic compounds" part. I kept hearing them, loud, and finally realized that it wasn't my poor reading skills- these words simply did not make sense.

I realized I was dreaming. I got very excited and stood up to do a reality check. Instead of pinching my nose or rubbing my hands (which is really what I'm supposed to do), I walked over to my window and opened the blinds. I could see my bird feeders and bird bath, but the image was frozen. All the birds were still frolicking and eating, but they were frozen as if in a picture. There was a hawk frozen in mid-flight.

I'm dreaming! I thought excitedly. Then I woke up.

First off, I'm really sorry that this is SO long. It took me half an hour just to type it all up- and I type fast! But it was really one of the strangest dream experiences that I've had. This is the first time I've ever played around with any of the dream techniques that I've read on this site, so I'm excited about it. The first part of the dream, I was non-lucid and it's really long. Then I became lucid for a while. Then I woke up briefly and attempted a WILD.

In which a chance encounter with Julian Assange causes me to get mixed up in his trial…

I’m riding in the back of a chauffeured car with my husband. We see Julian Assange hitchhiking on the side of the road. He is wearing a black suit with black shades and he has a Blue Tooth in his ear. He looks like a Secret Serviceman.

We pull over and offer him a ride. He climbs in the front of the car and asks us to take him to the Austin capitol. He says that he expects there to be a huge crowd of curious people lined up along the way to see him, and that we will probably have to fight our way past people at the capitol too. Then he spends the remainder of the ride alternately texting on his Blackberry and talking on his Blue Tooth. Meanwhile, my husband and I roll up the divider between the front and back seats and we have sex.

We arrive at the capitol. There are no members of the general public waiting at all, but the place is swarming with media. The capitol building is also a courthouse, and Julian Assange presents himself to the judge. My husband also drops me off at the capitol as my workplace and my school are just a few blocks away, and he takes the car and continues on to his own job. I’m walking with my backpack when a crowd of reporters surround me and usher me into the rotunda. They are all asking me questions about having sex with Julian Assange. Apparently someone snapped a blurry picture of me having sex with my husband in the car, then they saw Julian Assange and me get out and assumed I’d been with him. I try to clear up the confusion, but everyone is shouting at once and I can’t get a word in.

One of the reporters puts a television camera in my face and a microphone. Everyone else goes silent because this guy is with the BBC. He asks me very loudly, “Did you have consensual sex with Julian Assange?” I know this is live television and I’m flustered and embarrassed. I look into the camera and say, “No.” The crowd of reporters erupt into gasps and howls. I’d meant “no- I didn’t have sex with him” but they interpreted it to mean “no- it wasn’t consensual”. I heard them screaming accusations at Julian Assange and they were asking me if I planned to press rape charges. I tried to leave the crowd, but they blocked my way.

Finally I become disgusted with the whole thing, and I want to put an end to it as quickly and easily as possible. I announce in a loud, clear voice that we had consensual sex, that he did not rape me and that there was no story to be had here. Just two adults having consensual sex! I ask them to leave me alone. They lose interest and allow me to leave.

Off in one of the side wings of the rotunda is a short, plump friendly looking lady dressed in gypsy clothes. She is leading a mule by its reins. A young gypsy girl stands next to her, dressed in a colorful shirt and a black lace shawl. The woman calls me over to her. She explains that Julian Assange is the father of the young girl but that he refuses to pay child support and she asks me for help. I tell her that I hope things work out for her but that I have no connection to either Wikileaks or Assange’s sexual assault case. We shake hands and I turn around to leave.

I exit the rotunda and the grounds outside are covered in sand. The area is completely empty, but as I start to walk to the street, I see my brother sit down in the sand with a plastic shovel and some pails.

“Are you really going to build sand castles?” I ask him in disbelief. My brother is in his 30s so this seemed very strange to me. He looks embarrassed at first, then adamantly maintains that there is nothing wrong with an adult building sand castles. We laugh about it. I ask him why he is here.

“I heard that Julian Assange was going to appear in court today and I figured there’d be a big crowd here to see him so I came to witness the public circus. But when I got here, there was no one here but reporters,” he explains.

“Yeah, I was surprised too. Last year, when the pope came to visit, there was a huge crowd,” I answer.

“Well that makes sense,” my brother says, “since the pope is really famous. But I saw an even bigger crowd here a few years back when ABBA came.”

Then for a little while we discuss ABBA and how they have some really great songs despite their reputation of being a cheesy disco group. Then I tell my brother that I have to rush home to call my mother-in-law as she was sure to watch BBC and get upset when she hears me saying that I had consensual sex with Julian Assange. I need to go home and call her to explain. We say goodbye and I walk home.

In which I fly around the mountains and become lucid…

This is a continuation of the long dream above.

My house is a one-room cabin with large windows. I look out the windows and see beautiful and imposing mountains lining the landscape. I think for a second that it is odd to see such majestic mountains in Austin and I wonder if I’m back in the Himalayas. I stare at the mountains carefully though and realize that the peaks are too low and smooth to be Himalayan peaks. They appear to be snow-capped, but when I look more closely I realize that the snow is actually the color of caramel and it is spread along each softly rounded peak like icing on a cinnamon bun. This is such a beautiful sight that I lean far out the window so that I can look up and see the top of the mountains.

From this vantage point, I’m able to see that actually there are three ranges of mountains with valleys between them. The second is taller than the first and the third’s jagged and steep peaks reach high up into the clouds. Mountains this tall don’t exist outside the Himalayas, I think to myself.

For a moment, I consider how I went so quickly from Austin to Nepal, but then I’m too rapt with the sight to wonder about this. I step out the window and start to fly to the mountains. I am daunted by the steep face of the third range. I realize I don’t have the skills to climb it and that if I tried, I’d fail embarrassingly, but I’m pretty sure I could conquer the second. Looking for a good path, I fly along the ridge that connects the first low range to the second. It seems like an easy hike up the first and then it is just a matter of walking along the ridge until I get to the final climb up the peak of the second. I fly around this peak looking for the best climbing path. I decide that it might be easier to see it all if I go up higher than the third peak, and I soar up above the clouds and look down. Suddenly I see an amazing sight.

There is a ridge connecting the tallest of the first, second and third ranges, and on each peak is a hexagonal landing pad of some sort. They look like helicopter landing pads only they are much larger. Each pad is connected with a runway. This is impossible to see from the ground. You must be up in the sky above the mountains to see it. I marvel at this for a little while and keep flying higher and higher.

Then from behind the third range, I see a gigantic house towering over all the tallest peak. At first, the house is beautiful. It is made of brightly colored panes of glass. But when I glance away from it for a second, it changes. Now it is made of pieces of scrap metal, old tin roofs and garbage. It looks like millions of shanties from the Dharvi slum stacked on top of each other up into the clouds.

I stare at it for a while and ponder all of it. It is absolutely impossible, I realize, for any of this to be happening. At that moment, I become lucid.

I fly down into the valley in front of the tower and see all sorts of huge mobile statues made of scrap metal. Most of them are beautiful, and they all move in the wind. Most of them contain spinning flowers and pinwheels. They are fun, colorful and creative. I’m absolutely delighted to be dreaming these things. I fly back over the lowest mountain range, the one with the soft, rounded peaks covered in icing. They are gorgeous. Even though I know I’m dreaming, I really feel how beautiful nature is and I’m very happy.

Then I see another mobile statue. This one is metal pole on which many shelves have been welded. The shelves are connected to the pole with gears that look like clockworks and they all spin around. At the end of the shelves are giant but dainty multi-colored tea cups. I fly up and down this mobile statue and realize that I’ve dreamt about this before. I try really hard to remember when I’ve seen it before, but thinking about this causes the dream to disintegrate and I wake up in my bed.

In which I attempt to WILD and possibly succeed…

I have just woken up from the dream above. I have an atomic clock in my bedroom that projects the time on my ceiling. It is almost 5AM. I’m laying on my back, and I can see the window by my bed and feel my husband’s body next to me. I think about what a cool dream that was and also how my body still feels heavy with sleep. I have not moved at all. I know the alarm clock will go off in a few minutes since we have it set for 5. I close my eyes again and think about what I read on this website about WILD. I’ve never tried WILD before, but since I’m so relaxed and heavy with sleep, I figure this would be a good time to try.

I let my body relax some more but I keep thinking to myself “I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming”. This goes on for a little while and then my body feels like it is jerking awake- the way you feel when you fall in a dream and it jerks you awake. Then for a little while the room feels like it’s quaking and I hear a really loud sound. It is similar to what is sounds like when as a child I used to stand underneath the trestles and watching a train pass by above me. This went on for a very short period of time and then it stopped. I could feel myself still in my bed with my eyes closed. I wasn’t sure if I was asleep or not.

I opened my eyes and I was still in my bed beside my window, but I was in a different room. Strangely enough, I was very calm at first. I just lay there and looked around. Then I got up. From then on, I had this strange compulsion in my body- I could not slow down or be still. I felt like my body was in a constant state of movement and all I could do was steer its direction. It was like I was hovering above the ground.

I went over to the door and decided to see if I could pass through it without opening it. I did, and it was easy. Then I was standing on a banister of a spiraling staircase in a three story house. I went down the first flight of stairs and heard someone moving around below. I shouted “hello” to whoever it was, but no one answered. My voice sounded really loud and it echoed. I could feel my vocal chords vibrating in my throat, and I wondered if I really said hello in my real body laying in bed. It took a lot of energy to shout and I was afraid that I’d wake myself up if I did it again so I decided not to talk anymore.

I was still standing on the second floor and I looked out the window. I decided to try to fly, and I leapt from the banister out the window and flew out of the house. Then I was standing in the yard. It was dark, the stars were bright and there was a pine tree beside me. I looked up at the sky and decided to fly towards the stars. They were big and beautiful and shining. I flew and flew as high as I could, but after a while I got tired. They were just too far away so I started to sink back down.

It was lovely falling slowly through the sky back towards the earth. I passed a satellite along the way and it had a microphone on it. I leaned over and shouted “hello!” again. It sounded strange again and it took a lot of energy.

At this point, I became a little giddy and silly. I don’t know what happened, but I started to feel like I was losing control. Part of the problem was this constant state of compulsion that my body felt. I had to keep moving and I didn’t know how to slow it down so that I could think. My mind started racing and I got really crazy. I started doing loops in the air and just laughing hysterically.

I was falling in standing position with my feet towards the ground. When I was eye level with the roof of the house where I started, I saw a giant purple and pink plush rabbit sitting on the roof. It had to be 15 feet tall. It was an Easter Bunny stuffed animal but it had a menacing face. It was wearing a top hat. I hovered in the air around it for a while and wondered where it came from. I was pretty sure I did not dream up this rabbit- but here it was, as real and detailed as can be. I was also surprised that it did not scare me. I knew I was dreaming so I wasn’t afraid of it despite its menacing face.

I flew back down to the ground and entered the house through the backdoor on the first floor. There was someone in the shower and I decided to go see who it was. I ran in a crazy way towards the shower, pulled the curtains back and shouted “Boo!” but before I could see who it was, the alarm clock went off and I woke up.

This whole dream took just a few minutes though it felt like an hour. After I woke up, I started to question the whole thing. To be honest, I don’t know if I really had a WILD experience or if I just dreamed that I did.

In which I'm working at my old job...

I'm back at the job that I quit in September. I'm sitting behind a computer in E's classroom reading a non-work related blog. The students are coming in, and E says that I need to walk around and assist them with their work. I feel a little guilty that I had to be redirected. I know better than to waste time at work like that. But when I get up to help the kids, I remember the conflict I had with them and I'm embarrassed to be around them. I start to think about how much I hate the job, and I remember that I've already quit. I ask E why I'm there, and she tells me that I'm dreaming. I become lucid and decide that if I'm dreaming, I can just leave and go somewhere else. But when I walk out the door of the classroom, the dream ends.

In which my uncle and I carve up a dead cow...

I'm at my grandmother's house and my uncle and I are in the kitchen carving up a dead cow for dinner. It's really messy and we are wearing butcher's clothes, including the long, heavy black plastic apron.

In which there is a ghost in my great-grandmother's house...

I'm at my great-grandmother's house, though in the dream she is already dead. I'm in her living room sleeping on the couch, and my uncle is in the armchair nearby, reading. (I think this dream is a continuation of the previous one about the cow carcass though we are at my great-grandmother's house and not my grandma's.) My brother comes into the living room and wakes me up. He tells us that there is a ghost in the back of the house.

We go to the back bedroom which used to be my great-grandmother's bedroom. My brother and uncle ask me if I remember a ghost ever haunting the house before. They want my opinion on the matter because when I was a child, they tell me, I was a spirit-medium and frequently communicated with ghosts. (This is not true in real life, by the way, but in the dream I accepted it as true.) I told them that I did sense a presence of a hostile male ghost.

The bed is pushed up against the middle of the wall of the square room. The wall containing the door to the hall is on the left of the bed. The wall containing two windows facing the street is on the right. The wall containing the closet door is directly in front of the bed, and my great-grandfather's hospital bed is in front of it. On the closet door are stickers of drumming soldiers, partially faded with time. The way the room is set up is accurate to real life, but the stickers are actually in the guest room in real life- not in my great- grandmother's bedroom. I point them out to my uncle and brother.

"Those stickers shouldn't be here," I tell them. "They belong in the front bedroom." We go into the front bedroom to see if the stickers are where they should be, but they are not. I explain that I have only recently found out that our elder uncle B did not put the stickers there. They were there when our great-grandmother bought the house and belonged to the boy who lived here before. I told them that I think that boy's ghost is haunting the house.

They ask me if I think it could be the ghost of either of our great-grandparents, both of whom died in that house. I tell them that this is not possible because they are at peace, not wandering the earth like ghosts. I tell them that I remember feeling the ghost's presence before. That boy is now an angry young man. I explain that this is why my great-grandmother's secret bathroom has been locked up for years. He killed himself in there.

My uncle and my brother seem surprised that I know about a secret bathroom. They ask where it is, and I show them a panel on the wall which can be removed to reveal a door. We open the door and find a tiny little bathroom, so small that a large person could not fit inside. It's a scary place, and we immediately close the door and replace the panel.

Afterwards, I walk over to the two windows and turn the blinds up so that people outside cannot see in. I explain that this will prevent the ghost from entering the house again. Then I notice that there are American flags hung up on the wall between the windows. The flags are mirror image to the way they should be.

"I guess Grandmother couldn't tell that they were backwards," my uncle explains.

In which my husband and my fear of time paradox interrupt my date with Tom Waits...

I’m standing on a street corner, well dressed for the fall in knee-high leather boots, a woolen skirt and a sweater with my hair curled pin-up style. I’m waiting for my date to pick me up.

A maroon 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass with a cream colored canvass retractable roof pulls up beside me. I open the passenger door and look down the long vinyl front seat to the driver who is crouched over the steering wheel like a vulture. He’s wearing black jeans and is turning to look at me from beneath a bowler hat. It’s a young Tom Waits.

“Are you C--?” he asks.

“That’s me,” and I slide in, shutting the door behind me. He’s excited as he drives and says we’re going to a restaurant he knows that is unique. I’m a little star-struck but also confused.

“Don’t you have a wife, Tom?” I ask, thinking of his famously successful marriage to Kathleen Brennan.

“Not yet,” he answers. “It’s only 1978.” Ah, of course. I’ve time-traveled again. This must mean that I’m dreaming. I gain lucidity for a moment, but then I get lost in the implications of time-paradoxes. I start to worry that if I alter the course of historical events so that Tom and Kathleen don’t marry, then I could wake up to a world without Swordfishtrombones and Mule Variations. Dinner with Tom Waits isn’t worth that risk.

Just as I’m about to protest, he parks the car and we get out to walk around a field of giant tulips. Butterflies fly around above our heads and then swoop down to circle us. The tulips are easily eight feet tall, and Tom Waits explains that the flowers grow so high here because the sun is closer to the earth at this spot. I look up in the sky and see that the sun is a massively huge yellow and orange swirl. Its spiraling rays seem to touch the ground. We start walking along a path towards a tower in the distance that is a mosaic of pieces of colorful glass bottles, marbles and bicycle rims. Its windows are stained glass like a cathedral.

“That’s the restaurant,” Tom tells me. He starts to tell me the history of the tulip park, how it was discovered and how the restaurant owners grow all their own food here. He’s very excited about all this and keeps stopping along the path to point at something or wave his arms around, caught up in his narrative. I’m delighted.

But then my husband suddenly appears. He is surprised to see me here. I introduce him to Tom Waits. Both men are polite to one another but obviously it is awkward. My husband looks at me, puzzled and a little hurt. I feel guilty, but my immediate concern is how to save face. After some platitudes, my husband says he’ll be on his way. Tom politely asks if he’d like to join us for dinner, and my husband accepts.

We continue our stroll towards the restaurant as a trio, but it is obvious that Tom Waits is feeling awkward and confused. The moment is ruined. I feel deeply embarrassed. I ask Tom to excuse us for a minute and I step aside with my husband. I consider the problem. I want to complete the date, but I also want to protect my happy marriage. Trying to think of a solution, I realize again that I’m dreaming. Armed with this lucidity, I tell me husband to leave. He looks sad, but I explain that I will not feel guilty about it because it is only a dream. My husband turns around to walk down the path away from us. I continue on with Tom Waits, but I’m not having fun anymore and the lucidity is lost once again.

Tom and I walk in awkward silence for a little while, and I realize that he is only being polite now. He no longer has any real interest in taking me to the restaurant. Also, I’m worried that I’ve damaged my marriage. So I tell Tom that it was not meant to be- too many time paradoxes and spouses to carry on. He agrees, relieved that he doesn’t have to go through the charade of taking me to the restaurant. And I run down the path after my husband.