Which one is she

Last night I was up late playing Nintendogs (I taught Mouse how to do a handstand, a back flip, and a twitchy dance), so I got out of bed at around 2:30 this afternoon. Wintertime makes me sleep. Mornings make me dream. Like crazy.

Here are two pieces of my dream:

I was in an enormous mega store, like Ikea but less well-lit, wandering through a maze of walkways and staircases that made up the unreasonably grand entrance. I was the only person there. Eventually I reached a food court. There were robotic wax dummies seated at various tables, presumably to make the place look more popular. Each dummy robot was based on a celebrity, dead or alive, and each was programmed to go through the motions of eating the food court fare. I sat down at a table next to a Jack Nicholson robot. There was a plastic reproduction of Chinese food on the tray in front of him. He slowly turned his head from side to side while a speaker hidden inside of him played lines from Nicholson movies, seemingly at random. I took pictures of him with my digital camera.

My mother and I were staying in a cheap Mexican hotel. It was so cheap that the hotel Jacuzzi, its only real selling point, was out in middle of the street and surrounded by passing cars and foot traffic. That didn't keep us from using it, but on the opposite side of the street from the hotel was a meeting place for Mexican street gangsters. They wanted the Jacuzzi for themselves. My mother wanted to leave and head for the coast, so we hailed a cab, but it only got partway down the block before the gangsters blocked it and manhandled the cabbie towards their hangout, insisting that he owed them money. The cabbie made a sign to us with his hands that meant "Five minutes". Fifteen minutes later we got out and hailed another cab. The gangsters saw us go and followed us, eventually running us down at an intersection and demanding we pay our first cabbie what we owed him. A compromise was reached when we agreed to return to the hotel. Back in the hotel lobby, I asked the porter how the Jacuzzi war was going, and if we could still use it. "You can use it", he told me. "It's legally ours. But the men across the street have now circled it with their benches and chairs, so that they can put their feet up on its edge".

When I finally got up I was soaked in sweat and freezing cold. I always sweat when I dream. I ate some weird bean curd treats for breakfast. My brother's old roommate, Sean, brought them back from Korea. Then I took Happy for a walk in the rain to Quilchena park. There was a guy in his fifties on the playing field, trying to throw a Frisbee for his blue heeler cross to catch, but the dog was scared of the Frisbee. I felt like I was playing Nintendogs. The guy told me his dog was "As pensive as heck one minute, and real gregarious the next". He had a great way of talking. Happy liked the dog and they played for a long time.

On the walk back to the house, I got really shaky and exhausted all at once. I don't know if I was dehydrated from sweating so much or just really out of shape, but I was seeing spots by the time we got home. Now I know what spots look like, when you see them. I thought I was going to pass out so I put my head between my legs. I felt better after about five minutes, but my paranoia about incurable diseases has a brand new talking point.