Dream Log: Lost on Sunday

I dreamed that I and some friends were in a car together, and we pulled into the parking lot of a Catholic church in an area somewhere on the border between suburban and rural. Mass was about to begin. The others went inside, and I decided to take a walk until Mass was over. 

There was a tall, steep hill near the church, and I climbed it. The hilltop was very broad and flat. Even though I was in church clothes, I felt like running. After I had been jogging along for a while, a man zoomed past me, wearing the Chariots of Fire running outfit: white T-shirt tucked into white shorts, white socks, black shoes. 

I took the difference between his speed and mine as a challenge, and sped up. He soon disappeared around a bend and I never saw him again, but I enjoyed running fast. For a while I was self-conscious because I was running in a dark red shirt under a dark red sweater, dark red corduroy pants, white socks and black shoes, but then I told myself to worry less about what people thought and enjoy myself.

I ran so far that when I stopped I didn't know where I was, and couldn't find my way back to the church where my friends were. The area had become much more urban. 

I walked through a plaza lined with Renaissance-style apartment buildings which, I felt sure, many connoisseurs would disparage as absurdly gaudy and over-the-top. But then I told myself that I didn't have to let some hypothetical snobs stop me from enjoying the view. 

And the dream went on like that for quite a while: I walked through many different architectural styles which I liked although, somehow, I was sure that there were many experts who would laugh at them, and over and over, I was able to overcome my self-consciousness and like what I like. None of it was Sylvester Stallone's sort of thing. I don't like architecture that's THAT gaudy. (And there's no reason that Sylvester Stallone should be upset about that.) One of the buildings was a mall which included a shop whose wares included some of those old books which are as tall and wide as a man, which often appear in my dreams, or, more likely, new replicas of those old books.

Dream Log: Pasta Competition

In a decaying commercial neighborhood in an American city, amid strip malls which were going under, a TV network had bought three glass-walled fast food restaurants and converted them into fancier restaurants for the purpose of a competition where a chef and their staff would move into each of the restaurants and make fancy pasta dishes. I was one of the chefs, Johnny Depp was one of the others, and I don't remember anything at all about the third one. COVID-19 didn't exist in this dream. So in that way, it was sort of like being a Republican.

In the dream I was a renowned chef of Italian cuisine, and I was annoyed that Depp had the nerve to enter this competition against me. In the first round, we had a short period of time in which to prepare several pasta-based entrees. I made several traditional Italian entrees. When I saw the menu which Depp presented to the judges after he was done, at first I wondered whether his kitchen had been out of protein and dairy, and whether he had just used a small amount of lightly-cooked vegetables and a whole bunch of spice in a desperate attempt to compensate for the missing ingredients. 

However, to my astonishment, Depp was awarded first place in this round, and I came in second. Oh well, I thought, those are the perks of being a world-beloved movie star. But then I tasted a couple of his entrees, and was astonished again, because they tasted very, very good. I wondered, Did he have a ringer? A world-class sous-chef, perhaps? I reached out for info to my many contacts in the culinary world, and found out that, in this dream, in addition to being a huge movie star, he was also, in fact, a well-respected chef specializing in varieties of East Asian cuisine which were not well-known in the West.

In the first round the only rule had been to prepare several pasta-based entrees. In the second round we were to prepare several pasta-based entrees in which pork was prominently featured. In the dream, I was known as an Italian chef. Fewer people knew that I also was well-versed in very eclectic global cuisine. Well, a lot more people were going to find out, because this competition was being recorded for a television network, and in the second round, I and my staff worked hard and pulled off several magnificent Chinese-French-Thai creations. And once again, Depp got first place and I came in second. This meant that it was very unlikely that I would be able to overtake Depp in the third and final round to win to the overall competition. 

And I was not taking it well. After the second round, we had a session of on-camera interviews, being shot in a building which looked as if it might be a strip mall which was in the process of being demolished or converted into something else. The front of the building was mostly glass. And if it had once been a strip mall, the walls between the individual stores had been knocked out, so that a long and narrow space remained.

Depp was being very gracious and polite. I was not. He said very complimentary things on-camera about me and the food I made and about my whole life in general. He came over to me and held out his hand for a handshake. I didn't shake his hand. Instead, I told him that he looked as if it had been several years since he had taken a bath, and advised him to stay downwind of any judges sampling his cuisine.

Depp had been perfectly nice until then. Even now he kept smiling, but he retorted right away by saying that I looked as if it had been several years since I had been able to run a hundred yards without stopping to rest partway through. 

"Touchee," I said, and then I ripped off my microphone, stormed out of the building, wearing heavy winter clothes because it was winter and we were somewhere in the northern US, turned up a long, steep hill and began running very fast, into a stiff headwind. Even still I ran uphill for a long longer than a hundred yards, just in case any of the TV cameras were following me.

And, once AGAIN, just as in quite a few other dreams I've had in the past several years, the running felt so real that I thought to myself, "Okay, it's NOT just a dream, I really CAN run pretty darn well!"

But, once again, after yet another fairly glorious, long dream-run, I woke up, and was confused for a little while about the running until I figured out, Okay, that was just another one of those running dreams. Could I run a hundred yards right now? I don't know. 

I ought to try sometime.