Dream Log: Young Doctors in Love

I dreamed that I was an intern in a show somewhat like "Scrubs," and that I fell in love with another doctor.

The hospital where we worked looked as if it might have been built in the 1920's or earlier: a lot of grey bricks on the outside, a lot lacquered wood and Parcheesi-patterned tile on the inside. The building was huge, and we doctors got a fairly good workout running from ward to ward.

I don't actually know anything about medicine, so there's nothing to tell you our actual work.

We got caught up in zany situations.

For example: a large group of doctors, nurses, orderlies and other hospital employees came around a corner in a hallway, and there in a small cafeteria were a bunch of thugs well-known and frightening to us. They were wearing brightly-colored zoot suits. We ran past them to a stairway door, but when we opened the door we saw that someone had reversed the staircase, so that the only way to go through the door was to jump one story down.

For another example: I met a gentleman out in front of the hospital who said that he was looking for my boss, my boss had some explaining to do. I assumed that he meant my immediate superior, and I directed the man toward his office, thinking that this might be amusing to watch. But the more the man talked about the man who had some explaining to do, the less it seemed like my superior. All of a sudden I realized that he was not talking about the supervisor of interns to whom I reported, but the director of the entire hospital, a man I found to be much more frightening and less fun, and so I literally ran away.

That evening, another intern and I were getting increasingly touchy-feelly, and then all of a sudden we were full-on snogging.

snog
/snäɡ/

informal•British
verb
verb: snog; 3rd person present: snogs; past tense: snogged; past participle: snogged; gerund or present participle: snogging

kiss and caress amorously.
"the pair were snogging on the sofa"

noun
noun: snog; plural noun: snogs

an act or spell of amorous kissing and caressing.
"he gave her a proper snog, not just a peck"

At this point we were not certain that anyone had seen us. We said sensible-sounding things about not letting a relationship interfere with our jobs, and how there were good reasons why such relationships were frowned upon and seen as unprofessional, and so forth.

I went home and went to sleep, and had beautiful dreams about her.

That's right: I dreamed that I fell asleep and had dreams. In the dreams she was naked in a rain forest.

The next morning, first thing at work, although I was supposed to be doing other things, I went looking for her. My heart was pounding. I was so afraid that maybe she had meant those things she had said about being "sensible." I had said the same things, but I had been completely insincere. I didn't care about this job or any job, compared to being with her. Being with her was fundamentally more important.

Then I rounded a corner in the hallway and there she was, looking a bit more disheveled than usual, which made her look even more heartbreakingly beautiful than ever. I assumed that there was no possible way that I looked completely normal.

Before I could do anything or say a word she was in my arms with her head resting against my chest. We held each other so gently yet were so closely entwined at the same time. Some lyrics from a Suzanne Vega song ran through my head: "Hold me like a baby that will not fall asleep." She said sweet things, and I heard and felt each word at the same time, felt it vibrate on my chest. I lifted her up and we snogged for a while, then I set her back on her feet and she put her head on my chest again and said that she loved me. I said it back.

The rest of the dream consisted basically of us holding hands, and occasionally snogging, and waiting for someone to officially tell us that we were in trouble. Occasionally we would make an attempt to do our jobs, but we just stared uncomprehending at computer screens, impaired because we were brand-new in love.

And then I woke up.

Dream Log: HER Again

Last night, for the third time in a little over a week, I dreamed about a woman I knew thirty years ago. In the first of these three dreams, she was an actress on Broadway. In the second dream she was a small-town Midwestern civil servant. It last night's dream she was a secret agent like the ones in campy shows like the Jame Bond movies, or "Alias," the TV series starring Jennifer Garner which ran on ABC from 2001 to 2006. She resembled Sidney Bristow, the character played by Garner on the show, in many ways, but not in the many elaborate disguises Bristow wore. Instead she mostly wore black jackets and black pants, a laborer's clothes. Like Sydney Bristow, she was able to beat up just about anybody in the world, if necessary. However, she lacked Bristow's nightmarish background and constant smoldering anger. Unlike Bristow, she rarely came to blows with anyone.

The secret agent and I were in our 20's. At the same time, she and I were both our actual selves, at our actual ages, in our late 50's. And at the same time, she and I were both figures in paintings.

From the inside of my home, I have some close-up views of some large old elm trees. Often, sunlight hits the nearer leaves of these elms in such a way as to give them a silvery appearance -- especially if I'm half-awake, coming out of a nap. The paintings in my dream, pictures of the woman I used to know and myself, had silvery highlights similar to these trees, and similar to some of the paintings of Gustav Klimt:

I had a date with the secret agent. Her house, which she shared with some co-workers, had yellow borders painted on the windows and the front staircase. Yellow delivery vans were driving by on the street nearby.

I had driven there in a Mercedes-Benz. She asked if I wanted to go to the back seat of my car. The car opened up in back and a large carpet rolled out onto the ground. After we had been on the blanket for a while, a large group of her secret-agent co-workers had surrounded us. They followed us silently as we walked to a dock which was otherwise deserted. They stood around watching us expectantly. I wasn't sure exactly why they were there. I told her I would be more comfortable if they left. She shouted, "Danger zone!" and they all vanished.

We stood on the dock and held each other for a little while, and then I woke up.

The World's Greatest Bookstore

Is it possible that it would be worth traveling all the way across the world -- even if you don't like traveling -- just to see a bookstore?

Ah, but this is not just any bookstore, my friend. I'm talking about El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Some guys named it "second most beautiful bookshop in the world." Who named it so? Who cares! What is the number one most beautiful bookshop? I don't know! You don't seem to get my point -- this one is in Buenos Aires! Have I ever been in Buenos Aires? Well, to be completely honest -- no! But I was in Bonn once, and a girl I was seeing and I went all dressed up a movie theatre because we mistakenly thought they were going to show Stop Making Sense and clear out some of the seats to make a dance floor, and we thought that, all dressed up, we might look quite nifty among all the punks. (Who knows, maybe the Bonn scene would've been way ahead ahead of us, and we would've been just one among many quite unsurprising couples playing dress-up.) But we were there on the wrong night, and Apartment Zero was playing, set in Buenos Aires, starring Hart Bochner and Colin Firth, dubbed into German.

I loved the movie. She didn't. We didn't have much in common except physical attraction. That was almost 30 years ago, and physical attraction is still extremely important to me, but that might've been the relationship which finally convinced me that physical attraction, all by itself, is not enough to make a relationship rewarding. I'm heterosexual, and God knows she was gorgeous, but I found myself glancing around the theatre as the heavily homoerotic Apartment Zero played, wondering whether I might spot some guy who was bored with his guy with whom I could escape.

As it turned out, I didn't escape from her until a couple of months later.

So no, I've never ever been to Buenos Aires. And no, I don't know if El Ateneo Grand Splendid is really even all that splendid. The potential splendour of bookstores is not even the point. Well then, you demand, what on Earth IS my point? And I stare at you in horror as you ask me that, because I have never stopped trying to make my point. If you were playing footsie with me under the table right now instead of interrogating me about bookstores then we wouldn't even be having this unpleasant little tiff! Go ahead! Run away! You're so gorgeous and so unhappy and it's not my fault at all!

I don't know what she wanted from me. If she had just come right and told me, as specifically as she possibly could, what she really wanted, maybe I could've given it to her just like that, and maybe then she would've stopped being unhappy, just like that, and maybe even today, almost thirty years later, we'd still be married, and we'd have three stunningly gorgeous kids, maybe even an unbelievably beautiful grandchild or two. If she'd just told me what she wanted. Yes, if she'd been completely honest, maybe I would've turned and run in horror and never looked back. Or maybe I would have had exactly no problem giving it to her. And then suddenly she would've been happy. And that would've been so great. I never saw her happy, but I can easily picture it. I hope, somehow, that she's happy now. I can see her face lighting up with a smile as beautiful as Rachel McAdams'.

Dream Log: Monkey Love In NYC

I dreamed I was living in NYC, where I lived 20 years ago, and seeing a woman I knew 20 years ago. In real life, 20 years ago, she and I fooled around a a couple of times, and I liked her and she seemed to like me okay, but we never really clicked. In the dream, we had been fooling around for a while, and things were beginning to get really good. We were talking about this other guy she saw now and then, a former NFL player and currently a personal trainer, and she told me that she had decided that she didn't want to date him anymore, she just wanted one boyfriend, just me. I had already earlier come to the point of wanting only one girlfriend, her, so now it was official: we were going steady. We were in a restaurant, making out for a moment or so when we thought no-one was looking, when we talked this out. We were a little giddy.

The strange thing is that she and I were both monkeys. In real life I'm a human being, about 6'3", and when I knew her she was a human being, maybe 5'6" or so, but in the dream we were little monkeys, each of us not much bigger than an average cat. My Mom and step-Dad were in the dream, my Mom was still alive, the two of them looked middle-aged, and they were both human beings. Her Dad was in the dream and was a human being. All of the people in the dream were human beings except for my girlfriend and I. We could talk, and all of the other people treated us like people and like there was nothing unusual about us, but we were monkeys and we could climb like monkeys. After we left the restaurant we walked down the sidewalk for a while on our hind feet, holding hands, trying to appear calm but bobbing our heads in happy excitement over being officially a couple now. In my head I felt like I was doing handsprings and singing with the accompaniment of a big flashy orchestra. After a short stretch on the sidewalk we zoomed up the side of a building and raced along some ledges stories above street level. I don't know which borough we were in, but it was an area which hadn't yet been gentrified which contained a lot of tall early-20th-century buildings.

We dropped down into a pizzeria where we were always welcome -- literally dropped down into it, the way we usually came in: unfastened a screen over the skylight, came in, re-fastened the screen behind us and then dropped down from the ceiling.

I don't know whether we were actually related to the people who owned and ran the pizzeria (again: all human beings. All the people in the entire dream except us were human beings, there were no other monkeys in sight), but they treated us like family. (Literally, not in that cheesy fake way you see in Olive Garden commercials, but not, unless I'm gravely mistaken, in Olive Gardens.) Next to the cash register there was some sort of chart in which the status of the people associated with the place was recorded by some sort of shorthand signs. Somehow we were updated in the chart to an exclusive relationship. Somehow they had found out the decision we had made a half-hour ago blocks away. The bald guy behind the counter (my uncle? Her uncle? Or like an uncle to us?) saw us looking at the chart and said, "Don't worry, we know you don't want to tell your parents yet. They won't hear it from us."

How did they know we didn't want to tell our parents yet?

After we had been in the pizzeria for a few minutes her father came in, looked at us and tried not to look disgusted. Tried, but failed. He was a tall wiry guy with thick short salt-and-pepper hair who looked angry every time he saw me. He didn't like me. That was okay with me. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I felt like it was his job, as my girlfriend's father, not to like me until I put in a lot of high-quality work to win him over. It seems to me that to a good father, his daughter is always his little girl, even if she's got 12 grandchildren of her own, and anybody who comes around messing with her is to be harshly discouraged. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, or worse, but this seems to me to be the natural order of things.

He walked over to us. My monkey girlfriend hopped up onto her human father's shoulder and he gave her a kiss on the cheek. Then he looked at me, looked away in disgust and anger, forced himself to look almost in my direction again, and said to me, "Look. Obviously, you two are starting to get serious --" How did everybody know?! " -- and, well. She's a smart kid. If she can stand you, then..." He turned away, and, almost with his back to me, he patted me twice on the back.

This was far and away the most positive reaction I had ever gotten from him and it felt wonderful. My monkey girlfriend was also pleased by her father's reaction. With a hand clamped over her mouth she climbed onto his back so he wouldn't see her reaction to his reaction, with her other fist she pounded the air excitedly.

The next stop was my Mom and step-Dad's apartment. (In real life they never lived in NYC.) As we came into the apartment from the window my Mom called out from the kitchen, "Congratulations on going steady, you two!" I ran with all four feet into the kitchen, jumped up onto the kitchen table where she was seated, and stared up at her. In real life, as a human being, I stood head and shoulders taller than her. In this dream, as a small monkey, she and my step-Dad were sitting on kitchen chairs, I was standing on the kitchen table, and I still had to look up. "Mom," I asked her, "how does everybody know we're going steady?" Mom just said that it was obvious, and didn't explain any more than that.

"Lenny Bruce died for your sins"

-- that's what a friend of mine said to me back in the 1980's. I think it may have been his way of telling me that I had an amazingly dirty mouth. I did. I do. Or maybe, as I thought at the time, he was merely making a remark about freedom of speech in general. I only know Bruce through Bob Fosse's wonderful movie about him,and I suspect the same may have been true of my friend. I don't know how much the Lenny in that movie actually resembled Lenny Bruce, but the guy in the movie was pretty deep on the subject of words, given individual words and their ability to hurt. He pointed out that they hurt and shock more when they're forbidden.

He was quite right about that. But lately I've been thinking that he died for nothing. I'm thinking about the complete contrast between a beautiful scene in the movie, when Dustin Hoffman, playing Lenny Bruce, talks some sense into a crowd who came to see his stand-up comedy act, and a public-service announcement that's currently playing on TV. Both pieces have to do with certain derogatory words -- almost exactly the same list of words in both cases. Hoffman/Bruce's point about these words is: they're just words. He starts off his schtick saying, "Hey, there's some ----s here tonight!" -- using a word I'm not going to type out because, one, I don't need the aggravation, and, two, you can pretty much imagine what I'm talking about anyway, which is just one more thing which shows how silly this all is. Bruce says "----s," and some people gasp. And he goes right on, cheerfully rattling off more offensive words: "Yes, and some ----s, and some ----s, and some ----s, and some ----s! I'm a ----! I think that guy over there is a ----. I know this guy here is a ----." (I'm paraphrasing from memory.) And people in the audience start to relax and laugh. And it's not hateful laughter, it's just pure relief. Bruce ends up that routine pointing out, "Hey, nobody died because of those words, did they? And it doesn't mean that I hate any of those people. They're just words. And they only hurt if we let them." The relief of sweet reason contained in that scene is truly magnificent.

I wonder how much relief this new public-service announcement could possibly be spreading. It consists of head shots of representatives a series of oppressed groups, each one saying in turn: "It's not okay to call me a ----." Identical sentences except for the "----" at the end. Then at the end of the announcement it is solemnly declared that one more word is being added to this list of words that are not okay.

(I am not using the word "oppressed" here in a sarcastic way, not in the slightest. The groups in question most definitely are oppressed. But this chickenshit PC silliness isn't helping them. It's a waste, a waste, a waste.)

The sooner we all figure out that these words are not even the point, that a person can use each and every one of those "bad words" on a regular basis and still approach everyone he meets, representing each and every one of those oppressed groups, with love, and that someone else can scrupulously avoid all of those words, and even industriously hunt for still more words which must be forbidden, and not love anyone at all, the better off we will all be, and the more capable of addressing other problems.

It is telling that it seems to be mostly comedians who understand such things. (I myself am not a comedian, that is a talent I do not possess, as I pointed out in a recent post on this blog.) It reminds me of medieval courts where only the jester had the privilege of speaking the goddam truth! This whole nonsense with our fixation on individual words, the way we give them the power to hurt by insisting that they hurt, is a thoroughly medieval stupidity. I hope I live to see it decline and wither and die.