Then I was in a hotel suite and I had joined Madonna's entourage, somehow. There were over a dozen of us with Madonna in the suite. It was the present day, and although Madonna is 60 years old in real life, and in the dream she was still the same Madonna with the same decades-long career, in the dream she looked like she did in her early 20's:
I felt very much like the newbie in the entourage, and I was very nervous about getting off to a good start. I was in a hallway just outside of Madonna's bedroom. A jewelry box of Madonna's had been the subject of much attention. I noticed that it was not pristinely clean inside, so I decided to wipe out the lint and dust. When I was done doing this, however, I realized that I had made a big mistake, because the box had been the subject of much careful scrutiny without touching the inside of it, as if it had been a crime scene. Another member of the entourage took the jewelry box from my hands and took it into the bedroom to Madonna. I heard Madonna scream "NO!" and throw the box against a wall. I was mortified.
A little later, Madonna and I and several other members of the entourage had gone from the suite to the hotel's lobby. There was a TV hung high on one wall of the lobby. Madonna was sitting on a couch. She had the remote control in her hand and had changed the channel to a movie.
A man none of us knew, about 30 years old, wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans and shiny black shoes, came and sat down on the couch next to Madonna, took the remote away from her and changed the channel. Several of us in the entourage gasped. Madonna looked surprised and displeased.
I said to the man, "She was watching that movie." He replied, "So what?" I asked: "Madonna, is this guy bothering you?" She regarded him for a long moment, then finally sighed and said, "Yeah."
I went over to him, took ahold of the lapels of his jacket, lifted him up off of the ground by his jacket -- he weighed about half as much as me -- carried him several steps away, set him on his feet on the floor, took the remote from his hand and tossed it to Madonna, put my arm around the man's shoulder, walked him a good distance away, said, "Why don't you go bother someone else now?" and returned to our group. Madonna was beaming at me, and several people actually clapped.
Madonna patted the sofa beside her to tell me to come sit down beside her. When I was sitting she told me, "That was very gallant." I mumbled something like, "Oh. Well." Madonna added, "Forceful, but gentle. I'm glad you didn't hurt anybody or break any hotel property." I responded, "Well, I'm not a maniac." "Clearly," Madonna replied.
We were both silent for a while, and then I said, "I'm sorry about the jewelry box." Madonna said, "Oh Jeez, let it go! I have!" I said, "After I cleaned it out I realized that that was exactly what you didn't want done to it, because you were examining it exactly as it was." Madonna said, "Uh-huh, and did anyone explain that to you?" I said, "No," and Madonna said, "No. So we know that, not only are you not a maniac, you're not a moron either." And she gave me a great big smile, and touched my shoulder.
"Oh," she said, and told me to turn so my back was toward her. She dug her fingers into my shoulders and upper back and said, "Wow, you're really tense." I told her that I had some pain from sciatica and that the pain sometimes made me tense up. She asked me whether the sciatica responded to massage and I told her that it did. She called for her masseur. "We help each other out," she told me. "That's how this works." I wasn't sure whether by "this" she meant the entourage, or life in general, or maybe something else.
When the masseur had me on the table and was working on me, I became sort of like a cyborg with a diagnostic video screen hovering in the air beside me. Every time the pain lessened, an additional red light appeared on this screen.
Then I woke up.
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