I dreamed that I was hanging out with Dan Fielding, the District Attorney from the TV show "Night Court" (1984-1992). Not with John Larroquette, who played Fielding, but with Dan Fielding himself. Similarly, early on in the dream, while I was in the courtroom waiting for Dan's shift to end, I saw Judge Harry Stone and Public Defender Christine Sullivan. They looked exactly like Harry Anderson and Marky Post, the actors who portrayed them, but they were Judge Stone and Ms Sullivan.
Like Dan, I was wearing a very nice 3-piece suit and a nice coat over it. In order to make Dan feel less self-conscious about his hair, I had shaved away a lot of my hair to make me look balding. (In the dream, Dan's hairline was receding. In real life, Larroquette has a remarkably full head of hair, even now, two decades after "Night Court" ended.)
Dan and I set out into the night to Cruise Chicks, which Dan did relentlessly on the show, although I cannot recall his ever having had a Wing Man. Actually, we ended up just riding the subway all over the city. It was a very old version of the NYC subway. For example, the seats were made of wood. Dan and I were still on the train went we met a pair of women. Very soon one of the women was cuddling with Dan and the other with me. Dan and his date vanished without saying goodbye.
I had sincere and respectful feelings for this woman I had just met, although I wasn't sure I convinced her of this. She took the initiative physically. We stayed on the subway for a while, hugging and kissing. But her emotions were very hard for me to read. I pointed out that I was not really bald, that I had shaved part of my head for the sake of Dan's feelings and that soon I would once again have a full head of hair. Her reaction to this news was hard to read.
We said goodbye for now. But I had to see her again. I went to the house where she lived with several generations of her family. Dozens of them were just sitting down to dinner in a huge dining room with rustic stone walls. The room had something of the bustling and cheerful atmosphere of a beer hall. Her family members apparently had heard of me -- the guy from the subway -- and seemed very glad to see me, physically pulling me into the house and down into a seat in the dining room. I took this reception as a very good sign about those feelings of hers which I had had trouble reading. But then she came into the dining room, and as soon as she saw me she turned her back and left the room again, and again I wasn't sure how to take this: was it shyness, or something significantly worse? Had I seriously offended her by coming uninvited to her home?
This bafflement and concern continued for a while, and then suddenly I was dreaming about something else entirely: a young woman, a different woman, who was doing something or other which was brave and noble for some reason, and involved her being driven around in a car for a half dozen miles or so at a stretch while she recorded something. I did not know this second woman personally. I was following her story on the Internet. One website was providing detailed coverage, with a line or two of the significant data from each 4- or 5- or 6-mile car ride. She was very pretty, like a 20-year-old Jennifer Garner. I tried to convince myself that I was following the website's coverage of her research, complete with many photos and some videos as well, for the sake of science and not because she was so pretty. But I knew that both reasons were involved.
The woman had a dispute with her driver, who refused to continue providing the 4-to-6 mile rides, and so she hailed a cab. The cabbie recognized her and refused to accept any cab fare for the ride.
Then I had a medium-sized grey housecat laying on my lap and purring, and I suddenly realized that cats are benevolent aliens from outer space, here doing research and sending the findings back to their home planet. I realized that the purring was both an expression of pleasure and the sound the cats made when they transmitted to the mothership.
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