Last night, I dreamed that my extended family were completely different people than they are in real life, different names, different appearance, different people altogether, and that they were much more rich than my family. How rich? Well, some of them, I suspected they might be the dreaded b-word.
I also dreamed that I didn't particularly like them, which is also different than reality.
Also: in real life I and a few others of my extended family are very, very much interested in show biz, and have been in plays, in bands, on TV etc. But most of them aren't. In the dream, almost everyone in my extended family was very, very interested in show business, except for me and one of my uncles.
Almost the only thing I had in common with any of these dream-relatives was how much this uncle and I both loathed every aspect of show business, and how much we hated constatly being bothered about it by everyone else. It would be an exaggeration to say that this uncle and I bonded, but our hatred of show business brought us closer to bonding than anything else did -- a couple of seconds' worth of shared complaining now and then.
This particular uncle was even richer than the rest of us and was probably a b-word (billionaire). He was the patriarch of our particular neolithic tendency. We would gather several times a year at his huge mansion near Detroit.
In this dream, I was poorer than most of my extended family, but I was much richer than I am in real life. My relatives were always pestering me about why I didn't grub constantly for even more money, as they did (when they weren't doing show-biz stuff). They were appalled when they learned that I paid taxes, and tried to get me use the same crooked attorneys and lawyers they used. They kept trying to get me in on the investments they were cashing in on, in things like coal mines and arms trading.
I felt that I was happier than they were because I was not behaving as horribly as they were. But I knew they would not believe me that I could think I was happier than they were, Because they had more money than I did. This is how crude and capitalistic their mindsets were.
One evening when we were gathered at my uncle's mansion, there was a huge, sudden downpour. We -- several dozens of us -- were in a huge courtyard at the time; we fled to colonnades at its circumference. Everyone else was across the courtyard from me. The heavy rain made the night so dark that I couldn't see any of them. I could only occasionally hear a snatch of one of their voices above the roar of the deluge.
The next morning, we were all at a luxury hotel in downtown Detroit. We had several floors of the hotel all to ourselves. I woke up on the floor of the ballroom. Everyone else was dressed up a bit, but I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts.
We called such events "social occasions," but, it occurred to me as I shook off my sleep and stood up, nobody was here except family and hotel employees, so that it would make much more sense to call them "anti-social occasions." I thought that was fairly funny: "anti-socials occasions." But then I got sad again, as I reflected that probably none of my relatives had a strong enough command of English to understand the joke.
Someone saw how I was dressed, and rushed me off to the hotel staff to get me dressed up. A pleasant, bright young man led me into a room packed with suits and accessories. I told the young man that I was putting myself into his expert hands, that all I needed was to blend in with that crowd out there, and that I'd like him to estimate my size and select a few items for me while I took a shower.
It turned out, unsurprisingly, that there was a bathroom adjoining this room of suits, with a ridiculously large marble shower. This hotel was the sort of place where, if you saw something which looked like it might be marble, or granite -- or gold, for that matter -- there was no need to wonder whether it was genuine, or solid.
I was looking forward to a few minutes of luxurious solitude in that shower when I woke up.
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