Dream Log: Spy Family

I dreamed that my immediate family were all still alive, and were working as spies together. Not real spies: the silly sort of spies you see in James Bond movies, or in "Alias," starring Jennifer Garner.

(Yep, those were all quite sensible disguises for a spy who needed to blend in and be unmemorable, uh-huh, sure.)

We were all about the ages we were in 1980, but in better shape. My Mom and Dad were in their 40's, and they looked good. Dad was balding and wore black-rimmed glasses, but he looked Patrick-Stewart-circa-1990-level good. He looked like he still ran really fast after balls on the tennis court. Muscles bulged out everywhere from under his tuxedos. Melodie, my older sister, ran communications behind the scenes:

Ty, my younger brother, who in real life is very alert and successful, in this dream was always spacing out. And since we were an absurd movie-style spy family, that meant I always had to watch him and keep him out of harm's way.

As the dream started, Ty and I were following Dad as he ran into a bank in a strip mall in the US, then through a door in the back of the lobby, then down some halls until we got to where the somewhat-unfriendly other spies were. Ty sat down on a sofa and spaced out, and I chased off everybody who tried to mess with him, while Dad talked to the bad guys. Dad was wearing a spiffy checked business suit, and what Ty and I wore -- didn't matter much. There was a lot macho tough talk, and there were a lot of threats made which were meant to be scary.

Then suddenly we were not in the US, but in a luxury hotel in Europe somewhere near the Alps. Mom was wearing a formal dress, Dad and Ty and I all were in tuxes, and Melodie was back at communications ops at HG in a T-shirt and jeans.

It's my feeling that the clothes are much more important in James Bond movies than most people realize. In "Alias," of course, they dropped all pretense and went all-out with the clothes and hair. And it was glorious.

Mom and Dad got into a twin-propeller passenger plane that looked to have a couple dozen seats or so. Unless the seats were extra-large and luxurious. I took off the tux jacket, put on a bomber jacket and goggles, and rode outside, on one of the plane's wings. I know the hotel was near the alps, because soon after take-off we were over the Alps. I was on the wing for a surprise attack, because the bad guys inside the plane thought that only Mom and Dad were there.

I don't know where Ty was at this point. I got inside the plane in time to see Mom kicking some guys expertly with her high heels, and then there was no more fighting to be done. "Save some bad guys for me next time, okay, Mom?" I joked, and then all three of us got into skydiving gear and jumped out of the plane.

A Hummer met us on the mountainside where we landed, and that's where Ty had been: he was driving.

And it turned out that I had been wrong about Ty being spacy; rather, the whole time he had been concentrating on becoming the the world's greatest spy driver, motorcycle rider and pilot of both planes and boats. Now that he could reveal his true identity as world's great driver etc, his entire personality was different. He was sharp as a tack, and made no more effort to conceal it.

I was about to ask him why he had needed to keep any of this secret from us, his family, when we got to the entrance to the bad guys' lair underneath the Alps, and there was no time to talk: all four of us grabbed our submachine guns and ran top-speed to our firing positions.

Then the mountain turned into a monster and the whole dream completely changed from a silly entertaining spy movie into something very scary, and I woke up in a cold sweat. It's the closest I've had to an actual nightmare in a long time.