Dream Log: Reporter in Philadelphia

I dreamed I was a newspaper reporter who lived and worked in downtown Philadelphia. I had some sort of unexplained gift of making myself almost completely unnoticeable, so that I could get up close to people and listen in on conversations they thought were private. Some of my colleagues in journalism referred to me as "the Ghost."

In the lobby of a huge skyscraper was a white-tablecloth restaurant patronized by people who were very expensively-dressed. The restaurant's dining area was separated from the rest of the lobby only by a waist-high partition, with no wall or windows. Against a wall across the lobby from the restaurant, a homeless man wearing an orange-and-black checkered overcoat sat on the floor. Two expensively-dressed men approached him and spoke with him, and I did my unnoticeable thing and listened in.

"Does the restaurant ever give you food?" one of the expensively-dressed men asked the homeless man. He was tall and broad-shouldered and bore a slight physical resemblance to David Harbour.

The other expensively-dressed man was nondescript.

"No," the homeless man answered. "Some of the customers are very nice. They'll get leftovers in a doggy bag and bring it out and give it to me. Good stuff. The duck is out of this world, but all of the leftovers I've had from this place have been outstanding. But the restaurant itself seems to have an official get-rid-of-me policy. The maître d' especially seems to have a hard-on for me."

"That's too bad."

"I can see his point of view," the homeless man said. "Some restaurants will give you food, but I can see why they might not want to. They pay God only knows how much for the rent here, and they see me as bad for the ambiance."

The next day, the two expensively-dressed men-- silk suits, both of them -- were at the same place at the wall where the homeless man usually was, but the homeless man wasn't there. They were looking across the lobby into the restaurant and smiling. The homeless man was there, seated at a table in the dining area, scrubbed and brushed and clipped and clean-shaven and wearing a silk suit, looking like three million bucks.

Suddenly, the maître d', holding the overcoat the homeless man had been wearing the day before, charged up to where he was sitting, shouting something which was unintelligible from where we stood across the lobby, threw the overcoat at the homeless man's feet and literally chased him all over the dining area. The two expensively-dressed men ran across the lobby and into the restaurant and got between the maître d' and the homeless man. I stayed back and watched. The two expensively-dressed men and the maître d' were all yelling at the same time. I couldn't make out what anyone was saying. The homeless man wasn't saying anything. He just looked embarrassed.

Finally, the yelling died down a little, and the two expensively-dressed men stood protectively on either side of the homeless man and walked him out of the restaurant, out of the skyscraper's lobby, around the corner and into an only slightly less-fancy restaurant nearby, where they all three sat down together for lunch.