dream

This Weird-Ass Ridiculous-Ass Crazy-Ass Dream I Had This One Time

This was the summer of 2014, the time that I was fortunate enough to take part in the Kakehashi program, a study-slash-exchange trip to Japan. It was only ten days, which wasn’t long enough for my sleep patterns to essentially time-travel twelve hours, so there was lots of sleeping at – gasp! – normal bedtimes – and lots of waking up at four in the morning. Maybe that’s why all the endorphins or whatever the hell neuroscience came together to generate this dream I had one night.
You know in Mario Party minigames, sometimes there’s these types of games where you control the character’s hand, and you see the little Mario glove with a P1 next to it? That’s the kind of thing I was doing. It was some kinda game with a little box, where we took turns hanging stretchy hair ties off hooks embedded in the walls. I don’t know the rules to Hang Stretchy Hair Ties Off Hooks Game, but somehow I think I was winning. Maybe I got a Numberwang. Who knows.
The game somehow expanded to include the entire room, which conveniently had clothes hooks attached to the walls all over, and then we were stretching them around and making a room-sized version of one of those Native American dreamcatchers. And I’d run up to one of the hooks and hang a hair tie and bing one point Zeal.
And then I ran out of hooks, so I had to improvise, but the last thing remaining in the room was the fire alarm. I couldn’t hang a hair tie from the fire alarm, right? Otherwise I’d set it off.
So we decided to go downstairs and ask the front desk to turn off the fire alarm system so we could hang a hair tie off the fire alarm.
I’m very responsible, I promise.
I ran down the flights of stairs down to the receptionists’ desk, and behind the desk was sitting my friend Austin. Austin’s a guy I met in my freshman computer science class. I found out the summer after that he’d been taking Japanese as well, just like me, and I was too dumb to realize. He was another guy who got to take the free trip to Japan with me. He’s a quiet, reserved guy, but he’s cool.
Dream Austin was sitting in a swivel chair, and he did a beautiful 180-degree spin in his swivel chair and saw me standing there. I don’t think I ever got to ask him to turn the fire alarms off. He just sort of blinked at me, and I blinked back. It was like the times when you walk into the kitchen and forgot what you wanted to eat, except I forgot that I wanted to endanger the lives of everyone in the building by turning off the fire alarms.
I remember very distinctly that he was wearing a green tie with a plaid pattern that looked like the Scotch tape logo. Every time I’ve seen Austin wearing a tie, it’s been the green Scotch tape tie, so obviously it’s the only one he owns.
Then suddenly it was time to go home, so Austin left his swivel chair behind the front desk, hopped on a bike, and started biking down a busy Japanese city street home. And I decided that I’d run after him. Now, I’m not an athletic guy, but somehow I was running alongside him at equal speed, and Austin was riding his bike pretty quickly, too, so the stores and office buildings of Osaka were whooshing by and Austin gave me a look on his bike that said something like, “don’t follow me home, that’s weird, and also how the hell are you running that fast.”
I decided to try to scare Austin. In hindsight, this was kind of a dick move, but hey, watching people scream is hilarious. Also in hindsight, I should’ve foreseen that I was gonna horribly fail, because whenever I try to sneak up on someone, all my giggling gives me away. But somehow I was determined this was gonna be the time I would get Austin, scare him for real this time, hopefully trigger some sort of fight-or-flight-or-piss-your-pants scenario.
So I know Austin will bike down a straight main street, and the city’s arranged in nice neat little square blocks, so I figured I’d take a C-shaped path around a block, run to the next intersection, and jump out at him there and scare him.
	The route required three turns. First turn off the main street went well. Second turn? Perfectly executed. By the third term I’m giddy with anticipating Austin falling off his bike like a little punk.
	But when I get to where the intersection is supposed to be, there’s a dead end. And the entrance to a parking garage. Somehow I ran so hard I altered the layout of the city, apparently.
	I entered the parking garage, and suddenly I was in a 90’s R&B music video. There were guys with the boomboxes bumping 1, 2 Step by Ciara and the one guy pulling off a sweet breakdance solo and other people just standing around nodding to the beat and then girls grinding on cars and I didn’t get to scare Austin. Drat!
	So maybe there’d be a chance that I’d get to scare Austin at the next intersection. I left the parking garage, and somehow, even though I left the same entrance, instead of exiting out onto the same Osaka street I entered from, I was on a moving train.
	I leaned against a wall on the train. I made eye contact with a man standing across from me, and he looked at me and then jumped from the train in a beautiful swan dive. And I was shocked, because he probably died jumping from that train, but I wasn’t shocked for long, because then the train crashed into a mountain and everything caught on fire.
And then I woke up. It was completely dark and my futon was soaked with sweat and it was four in the morning. And in that moment, I felt nothing but pure, unadulterated rage towards Austin, because he killed me. Then I went back to sleep.
The next day, I was eating lunch with Austin and some other friends. I had a plate of karaage, Japanese-style fried chicken that puts KFC to shame, and Austin was eating a boring bowl of udon because he’s boring like that. I told Austin the story of my crazy-ass ridiculous-ass weird-ass dream, and my two other friends were absolutely bewildered, but Austin just listened and nodded pensively. Like he was carefully pondering the story.
Like he was there.
Hmmm.
After I finished my story, I told Austin how mad I was at him for killing me. And he said, “Now, hang on. Everything you did in that story was on your own volition. How am I responsible for your death?”
Austin, that’s a really good point.
But I still haven’t forgiven you.
Because you killed me.