I've been home for about five days now, which has been great, but the jet lag has meant that I've been sleeping at very strange hours, and while this may or may not be a result of the jet lag, the dream I've been having have been as weird as the times in which I have been having them. Last night I woke up at 4 AM, wide awake and unable to do much besides lie in bed and count sheep, while around 2 PM in the afternoon I am usually hit with an unassailable wave of exhaustion that requires a bed and a couple hours of necessary, if torturous, mid-afternoon naps. Never been a fan of naps, really, they always leave me feeling as if my world is breaking up like some prehistoric supercontinent, separating out into a vast, uncharted ocean of bizarre dreams.
But that's beside the point. Sometimes those bizarre dreams are like nothing you could ever experience in an unfractured waking reality. Like one I had some time between 4 AM and 12 PM this most recent sleeping period. I stumbled out of bed this morning/afternoon to make lunch for keelie and her friend who is over for the day with the mild sensation that something remarkable had happened last night, something epic spanning continents, epochs, mythologies, and ultimately human existence, but I couldn't summon up any concrete details. As I was cutting the girls' peanut butter and honey sandwiches into little squares, however, a few ragged images surfaced in my mind, and now that the sandwiches are being consumed in the lair of keelie's room amidst the frenetic, tinkly sounds of two dueling Nintendo DS's running some Kart, I will try to put those pieces together into something that suggests a coherent whole.
Of course that's impossible because dreams of their very nature are wildly incoherent, and this one beats many I've ever had, but at any rate let's get down to business. As far as I can remember, it all begins in a tower. The sort of tower where they usually keep Princesses with extraordinarily long hair, or socially dangerous physicists, or some other type of Old World fairy-tale character. However, despite those associations it was clear that though this was a long time ago, it was also in a galaxy far, far away. I was a prisoner of Darth Vader, trapped in the tower of an enchanted castle that looked a lot like it could have been an extension of the Japanese fortress I visited about a week ago. It was also clear that I was Harry Potter, and that if I could just somehow escape this castle and make my way to some unknown destination, I would be able to rid the world of some unspeakable scourge that was probably Darth Vader but later metamorphosed into something larger. I was scheduled to be executed in a very short amount of time, however. I had to escape. The fate of the world, of the galaxy, of Hoguscant, the Death Snitch, Princess Leimione, Ronbacca, counted upon it, but here I was, trapped in a white walled wooden tower with no discernible way out.
Flicker. There's a guard lying unconscious behind me and I'm climbing a really long ladder (turns out I was in a basement instead of a tower?) out of my prison and into... downtown tokyo! That was also New York. After a few close calls, I managed to make it out of my prison, and into the city where I immediately made my way for the closed shinkansen (bullet train) station I could. I knew that by boarding a bullet train I could make my way to my destiny and the liberation of the world from the Voldemortian Empire. Eventually, I made it there, and with some key assists from various Hagridian/Dumbledorian figures, I made it onto the right train, dressed in a purloined Darth Vader suit, for cover, apparently. You'd think this would be the worst possible disguise for someone trying to hide from Darth Vader, I mean, you'd really stick out, and you'd have storm troopers (who in this situation looked a lot like Japanese ticket takers) asking you for directions, and you'd have to make your voice all gravelly and choke people with the force and stuff (which I couldn't use) and you'd probably be found out almost immediately. HOWEVER, turns out the dream dumbledore is just as clever as the one living in JK Rowlings imagination, because this very train happened to be carrying a massive group of people in full costume headed for a DARTH VADER CONVENTION!!! I feel like the real Darth Vader would never allow such a congregation, but thankfully in this bizarre world I was able to slip into the crowd and avoid detection for some time.
Of course, the authorities knew I had gotten on the train, so even if they had to check every Vader look-alike they were determined to find me... I had to think of something, fast. The scene spasms and I find myself in the bathroom, facing my reflection in the mirror and praying for something. I look at the scar on my left hand, the blazing sunshine that was left there when Vader tried to kill me with force ligthing as I young child. I had shielded my head with my little baby hand way back when, and somehow, it had repelled the attack, sending it straight back at an astonshied Vader, effectively shaving his head and etching little bird-feet into this stunned, parchment white scalp. With a fervent prayer directed nowhere in particular, I threw my hands about and accidentally turned on the water faucet splashing water all over myself. Cursing absently, I went to whipe the water off my hands, and lo! the scar that had been so clearly engraved into my skin for 11-16 years or so came off as if it had been inked in wet jello. My eyes going wide, I realized the implications of this, and drawing back my forelock to expose the lightning bolt scar I received in some parallel universe, I went to erase that mark, too. Now, they would never be able to recognize me. I would be home free.
I guess it worked, because the next thing I knew, I on Mount Olympus, crossing some bridge of the gods on my way to meet Zeus in order to activate some ancient prophecy. Perspective had changed a little bit though, because while scarless Harry Potter was still a part of the party, I was no longer occupying his body. Instead, I was some impotent incarnation of Hermes. As I, together with a party of gods, led Harry through the screen of deadly snakes overhanging the bridge like willow branches, I remember pointing my staff at things and trying to say magic words to make something cool happen, I recall being able to summon up nothing more than the sensation of a spark-plug misfiring. Then Keelie woke me up. Which is good, because that dream wasn't going anywhere. I don't think dreams ever finish, I think we just mercifully wake up from their endless metamorphizing.
