Don’t worry dentophobes, this is a dream that does not include dental work of any sort.  Unless you count paperwork.  Which is painful.

I mentioned to a few people over the weekend that I need to go see a dentist because I think I may have a cavity.  This would be my first.  The horrors!  So, of course, I have a dream about going to the dentist.  It starts with me needing to choose a dentist.  I do so by the very scientific method of walking down the street from dentist to dentist and choosing one.  The one that I finally decide upon is run by a Hispanic looking man with a bushy black mustache.  I chose it because I liked the waiting room which consisted of a long, narrow hallway with dark wood paneling.  On one side of the hallway were cheap plastic chairs and on the other side was one long counter like you would see in front of a receptionist’s window.  There was no receptionist’s window.

The dentist proclaims that I must fill out the paperwork before I can see him.  He then proceeds to pull out all of these clipboards and starts lining them up along the counter, gives me a pen, and then disappears.  I begin to fill out all of the paperwork, but there are a bunch of pages that make absolutely no sense so i leave them blank.  The dentist eventually comes back and asks me if I have any questions and I respond “No”, even though I clearly do.  He starts looking over the paperwork and, noticing some blank pages, asks why I haven’t filled them out and I respond that the questions don’t make any sense.  He retorts that it couldn’t be made any clearer what “You agree to pay a $2000 fine in the event you are ever accused of theft” means.  Yes, i agree, it is clear what it means, but why should I pay my dentist money if I’m accused of theft?  He responds that we can’t trust the police to do the job so we should all come together to develop a series of fines and self-police. I concur that the police have their problems, but this doesn’t seem to be an enforceable answer.  He then goes on this rant about how his hard earned money is being stolen from him by the government and his system will create a more perfect union and blah blah blah.  “Oh great, my dentist is a Libertarian”, I lament.

And then I wake up.

Ok, see, ok, last night I had a dream where I was in an episode of Scrubs and JD was in the bathroom of a macaroni and cheese restaurant and he was going to write a message on a strip of paper and leave half of it in a bowl of mac and cheese on the sink and put the other half of it in his mouth and then he would wait to see who got to it and ate it first, me or Turk, and then reveal to us what the other side of the message was.  Ok, bye.

Normally, when I remember dreams they are wisps of memory floating away from my newly awakened body that I must reach up and grab before they escape me.  This morning, I had absolutely no recollection of my dream from last night and it was only later as I was reading “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” on the train that the wisps came floating back to me and coalesced back into memory.  (Great book, by the way.  Neil Gaiman.)  That my dream was water based and one of the main themes of the book is water may be a coincidence, but it’s a striking one nonetheless.  On to the dream.

I was in a bathroom washing my hands.  The bathroom was all white.  In the process of washing my hands, I discovered that the sink was leaking from somewhere and water was pooling on the floor.  There was a compartment of some sort located just under the sink.  To open it, you just pulled off the door.  Kind of like it was only held on just by magnets only not.  I pull the door off and water comes out, only not like you would normally expect water to behave.  It came out in a cube formed to fit the dimensions of the compartment.  After it had fully escaped the compartment, it behaved exactly like normal water and fell to the floor.

I decide to take this opportunity to teach everyone else in the house about fluid dynamics.  I gather everyone around and put the door back on and let the compartment fill with water.  I position a garbage can under the compartment to catch the water and then I pull off the door.  The water comes oozing out as before.  As this is happening, I explain to everyone assembled that the water holds its form because the water molecules bond with each other when in an enclosed space and the resulting surface tension is strong enough to hold the water’s shape until it clears the container.  I reposition the garbage can slightly and the water clears the compartment, starts behaving like normal water once again and every drop gets caught by the garbage can.

The end.

No matter how many weird dreams I have, I continue to be amazed at how weird dreams can be.  The one I had last night may be the strangest.

I was my adult self and I was playing kids games with all of my adult friends outside what I am pretty sure was my childhood home.  At some point during all of our frivolity, a large something falls down and hits me on my right upper arm.  The impact of this hit forces almost my entire humerus bone to be forced out of my elbow in some macabre Wolverine-like claw.

“Someone should probably take me to the hospital”, I state matter of factly as I pull the rest of the bone from the orifice.

What ensues is a giant argument among my friends as to who will take me to the hospital.  At one point they decide that they’ll all take me and pile into a sub-compact car leaving no room for me to fit in the car.  At another point, I somehow lose my erstwhile attached humerus and a great hunt commenced.  “Guys, if someone hid my humerus, this isn’t funny”, I said proving that even in my dreams I crack crappy puns.

I also remember being really weirded out by the motions I was able to still perform with my hand and that despite my missing bone, I was able to put pressure on my arm.  There was no pain and no blood to speak of.

I woke up before we ever figured out how to get me to the hospital.  Worst friends evar.

So, yeah, more weird dreams.  This time, I was a pitcher in Major League Baseball.  I’m not sure what team I was on.  Oh, and the rules for pitching were slightly different from your normal MLB game.  I was required to pitch from the top of a flight of stairs.  Also, I’m not sure if it was required, but I was pitching underhand.  The batter stood at the landing on the flight of stairs and the catcher was down the next flight of stairs at a 90 degree angle from myself and the batter.  The object was to pitch the ball into the strike zone but also somehow make it turn that 90 degrees and reach the catcher.  I was not bothered by this impossibility at all.  What got me frustrated was that I kept bouncing the ball off the stairs well in front of the batter.  This went on for some indeterminate amount of time before I woke up.

For reasons that I will probably never know, I remember dreams in bursts.  Meaning I will go weeks without remembering my dreams and then many days in a row I will remember them.  I wonder why this is…

In last nights dream, I was over at an ex-girlfriend’s house for some reason.  I think maybe to babysit.  She lived in this large boarding house with her husband and two kids and they rented out the rooms to people though the house was empty besides us.  I go into the living room and say hello to her and her kids and we start talking.  I ask where her husband is and she says he’s at work.  She then moves in to kiss me and I stop her and ask her what she’s doing.  She responds, “What we always do.” and then kisses me.  Yadda-yadda.  Better than the lobster bisque.

But then the dream continues which is very strange.  We take the kids out to keep them entertained.  I don’t recall where.  All I remember is her having a chauffeur and us drinking red wine the entire time.  We eventually get back to the house and we are walking up the path leading to the house, wine glasses in hand, and I notice that my clothes are all stained from the wine.  I look back and the entire path has splotches of spilled wine on it.

Then some time had passed and she realizes her eldest kid is not present and she starts to panic and begins searching the house in a frenzy while I watch the younger one.  She eventually finds her wayward child in one of the rooms that they rent.  The kid had done a bit of redecorating apparently because she came back with a bunch of tools and the child in tow and exclaims, “Now we won’t be able to rent out that room for a while!”  Then I wake up.

I had a dream where I was chosen to join an elite crew that went on dangerous missions throughout the world.  The training consisted mostly of riding bikes places and being able to assemble and disassemble them.  We went out on our first mock mission and I was assigned a tandem bike and we rode to what looked like downtown Evanston.  When we got there, the drill sergeant told me to give him my pliers.  I didn’t have any pliers.  He proceeds to ream me for not having pliers and not being prepared and how was I supposed to fix a bike if I didn’t have pliers.  I argue with him that no one told me that I needed to bring pliers and besides he had a pair of pliers in his hand already.  He responded that he isn’t always going to be there to supply me with a pair of pliers and what would I do then?  He then shows me this large chart of tools that he expects me to have at all times and that if I want to stay in this unit I need to shape up.  Then I woke up.

Every once in a while, I will fall asleep and start dreaming almost immediately.  These dreams are inevitably very short nightmares that wake me up with a start.  I do not generally remember these nightmares the next morning but I have the vague sense that they are all generally similar in nature.  Yesterday’s was anything but.  I think I remember it because I was soon thereafter awakened by a phone call which helped cement it into my memory.

The dream featured Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  She walks in through the back door of the home I grew up in and announces that she’s pregnant and about to give birth.  Despite this claim, she didn’t look at all pregnant.  Others were there with us, but I don’t remember who.  We do what any sane person would do in that situation and lay her down on top of the stove.  Because where else would you want to give birth to the antichrist?  Her stomach starts doing that creepy horror movie cliché something moving underneath the skin thing and someone exclaims, “Well, that can’t be good.”  I’m just going to go ahead and say that it was Zander because it sounds like a Zander thing to say.  Then Buffy’s face changes to that of an old lady who looks incredibly good for her age.  This causes all of us to step back from the stove startled.  Then, old woman Buffy walks off of the stove without getting up.  By this, I mean her feet are on the ground, but her legs are still bent at 90 degrees and the rest of her body is still horizontal.  Her walking around like that freaks me out so much that I wake up.

This may explain why my brain was trying to come up with serial killer words of wisdom later on in the night.

So, last night I had a dream.  In it, some friends and I were trying to get somewhere.  The ticket agent at the airport said that she can get us on a flight that would take us there and, if we would just have a seat, she’ll get us on it momentarily.

We all sit down and the ticket agent proceeds to help other people.  No matter what destination these people want to reach, she tells them that they should get on our airplane.  “Hi, I’m trying to get to Chicago.”  “Oh, well, this plane doesn’t go there but it’ll get you closer, let me get you a ticket.”  “Hi, I’m trying to get to Antarctica.”  “You should get on this plane, it’s going in your general direction.”  And they all would get on.

My subconscious is apparently trying to tell me that sometimes you need to take steps to reach your goal instead of trying to reach your goal right away.  Of course, I have no idea to what goal my subconscious is referring.  Stupid subconscious.

Then again, I was actually able to reach my goal in one hop in the dream.  So maybe my subconscious was just mocking all those people who get sidetracked when trying to reach their goal.  In which case, my subconscious is kind of an ass.

More to the point, I dreamt about him.  I really need to get new dreams.

I think I was interviewing to take his place at Berkshire Hathaway.  His secretary brings me into his office.  This wasn’t his normal secretary, but the stereotypical conservatively dressed hot secretary.  Warren Buffett is sitting in a plush lounge chair watching television.  He invites me to sit in another plush lounge chair and I sit down.

He says to me, “I think we can do coffee or tea later, don’t you think?”  And I respond, “That would be fine.”  And then we just…sit there.  The secretary is just standing there looking sexy and waiting for instructions.

An indeterminate, but not insignificant amount of time passes and then Warren asks me, “Would you come with me?  I want to show you something.”  I follow along silently.

He then takes me to his house in Rome, Italy.  This, of course, somehow happens instantly.  He takes me up to the roof of his house which is obviously a heli-pad but disguised nicely by the modern Roman architecture of the building.  The rails along the roof are quite low as a result and Warren shrinks to the size of the rails as he walks along them.

I comment about the wonderful architecture of the few bridges that I see off to one side of the building.  The bridges are quite obviously not Roman bridges.  They were very modern.  Warren then starts asking me about my travels in Rome and I tell him.  Sometime during that telling, I woke up.

I haven’t heard if I got the job yet.