Killing Me Softly With His Gun

A few nights ago, Tara had a dream about me. She was reluctant to talk about it, for fear that it would scare me or freak me out.

“Did I die in it?” I asked.
She admitted that I had.
“How did I die?”
“You were shot.”

Upon hearing that, I breathed a sigh of relief. The idea of being shot to death is just too surreal for me to comprehend. It’s pretty unlikely to happen. I don’t own guns or hang around people who do, and I don’t live anywhere near Da Hood. Sure, I venture into Northeast Portland occasionally, and though that’s considered the “bad part of town,” I’m still more likely to come across a vegan hipster panhandling for spare change than a gang-banger looking to hijack my ride. Even after dark. So I figure, if I have to die in Tara’s dream, let it be through some ridiculous scenario like a drive-by shooting. If she had dreamed that I’d had a heart attack or been involved in a car accident or was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer or choked to death on a hunk of geoduck, then I’d be a little more worried. These are all things that, while unlikely (hopefully), aren’t out of the realm of possibility.

“Don’t worry,” Tara assured me. “I never have dreams that turn out to be premonitions.”

Whew. Because I do. Or did, once. I dreamed I fell in love with Tara long before I even really knew her. That dream was about 10,000 times better than her dream about me getting shot.

Which, by the way, did start to freak me out a little the more I thought about it. We were running errands the other morning and this other driver did something really stupid and illegal and I talked about chasing after him and flashing my lights and then realized that is exactly the type of scenario that leads to somebody getting shot and killed. Suddenly, I could foresee a scenario in which her dream might actually come true, so I did what any sensible person would have done under those circumstances: I laid low the rest of the weekend, never leaving the house.

OK, that’s not entirely true. But I did err more on the side of caution. Was very careful not to cut anybody off in traffic, very politely declined the Girl Scout cookies I was asked to purchase, and left the Pollock jokes unspoken. One can never be too cautious, after all.

Speaking of dreams, one night last week I had a very vivid lucid dream in which I was walking the streets of New York City, totally aware that I was dreaming. Have any of you ever experienced lucid dreaming? Apparently a small percentage of the population does. It happens to me quite frequently. Lucid dreaming is pretty cool: once you realize you’re dreaming, you can basically sit back and enjoy the ride. Some people are even able to control the events in their dreams. Sadly, I was just a bystander in mine. Otherwise I would have done something cool, like flying through the air while eating a slice of famous New York pizza.

Supposedly you can train yourself to lucid dream, and often they can lead to out of body experiences. All I have to say is…whoa. How cool would that be?

Other than laying low, Tara and I had a pretty nice weekend. Met up with my parents for an Australian-themed dinner at a nearby winery Saturday night, where we polished off a couple of bottles of Riesling and had a really good chocolate parfait. Tara was worried she’d embarrassed me by getting tipsy in front of my parents, but I didn’t notice any difference. Probably because I was pretty damn tipsy myself. The best part of the evening was the drive home. Instead of turning right to head back to the main road, Tara turned left, insisting on a scenic drive through the country. The only problem was, it was after 9 PM and pitch dark and we were in the middle of nowhere in a car with very dark tinted windows to begin with. Our conversation was a riot; I wish cars had black box recorders so we could have automatically recorded and saved it for posterity. I was telling her I couldn’t believe we drank two bottles of wine, and she said no we didn’t, you drank a bottle, and I drank a bottle, and I said right, that means we drank two bottles of wine, and…well, maybe you had to be there (and a little tipsy) to enjoy it, but I thought it was hilarious. And then Sunday  morning we went to our favorite pub downtown for brunch because we’d heard they had a Bloody Mary bar, and they did, and at one point Tara was licking an asparagus spear and didn’t notice when our male server came up to the table and caught her tonguing the stalk and asked if the two of them wanted to be alone and that was funny as hell, tipsy or not.

Like I said, a good weekend.

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for the next already…

Related articles

• Boost Creativity and Enhance Your Sleep with These Lucid Dreaming Techniques (lifehacker.com)
• ‘The dream sailors’: Training people in lucid dreaming opens way for new therapies (news.nationalpost.com)
• The Science Of Lucid Dreaming (illuminutti.com)