Strange and elaborate dream. My big dreams usually involve myself walking through an expansive structure, a series of interconnected buildings with open and covered areas, doors to fully enclosed sections and elevators rising up or down into areas under Interstate highways or unthinkably narrow spaces between tall buildings. The architecture of the compound leans toward a rambling æsthetic, with cornices and skylights high above but long and vacant walls the predominant motif.
Last night’s dream started in my sister’s high school, a classically beautiful old building on Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa. As a grade school kid I wandered that building like I do in my dreams today, free to go into any room and any passageway, always looking busy as if I had somewhere to go. I took piano lessons at that school. It seemed like I had the run of the place. My mother worked late and my father was gone, so it was considered safe for me to wander around this vast building after school.
The piano teacher was and amusingly strict but congenial nun. She was descended from the school of nuns who smacked kids on their knuckles with a ruler as punishment for their sins. That sort of thing might land someone in prison today but stories of angry nuns and priests inflicting that kind of abuse were passed on as inevitable legend in my grade school.
In last night’s dream I found small amounts of money all over the place, mostly U.S. currency but sometimes unrecognizably foreign. Someone from the school noticed that I had stopped to look at a mass of coins under a table. I had already scooped up as much as I could carry. The rest was left for the school to deal with. I said something to a nun, who responded “The bank would charge as much for me to deposit that money as there is money there!” I said she should find a bank like mine, which does not charge for deposits. She scoffed, yeahright.
I exited the building and jogged onto a rugged, open field surrounded by highways and walls. More coins were found across the land. I saw but did not take a plastic bag full of dollar coins, but I grabbed a fully intact ten dollar bill. I saw men with metal detectors working the fields. Word had gotten out that money was littered across this area. It had been scattered about when an armored car on one of the highways above had been hit by a shoulder fired missile. These men were neither the terrorists not were they from the institution responsible for the armored car. They were just there for the money.
Among the field of coins I found a heavy but not too heavy cement plaque. No matter how it was obtained this plaque was a thing bestowed as a token of prestige. It did not matter that I found it abandoned in a field. This was my award. It contained a generic inscription of “Congratulations!” which I would replace with something suited to the dignity of my pursuits searching for coins across the urban tundra.
Carrying the cement plaque I found an escalator inside one of the high walls that surrounded this field. It took me up into a combine type of structure, where floors doubled as elevators, in a vertical conveyor belt form. If you stood on parts of the floor long enough you would be moved up or down a level as the floors moved. I avoided that.
This was there I intruded upon the work of several men sorting tombstones for delivery to a cemetery. It was 4 in the morning. Their work was done during the quiet hours, among cement and steel arches at an illegal dumping ground under the Long Island Expressway.
I attempted to maneuver my way around the confusing combine of floors and elevators. I placed my cement plaque on a floor that I thought was stable, and would not move. Moments later I reached over to pick it up, intending to leave this place where I did not belong.
I descended the escalator which had taken me here, running awkwardly down upward moving steps. I noticed that the cement plaque I carried felt considerably lighter than before. I had picked up one of the tombstone plaques the men upstairs were organizing. I returned to that space and told them what seemed to have happened, and asked if they could they find my plaque among theirs. They were, as they should have been, concerned about getting their tombstones and markers mixed up, potentially wreaking havoc at the cemetery’s burial services later that morning.
I returned their marker to them. They presented several of theirs to me, asking one-by-one if each of them was mine. One enormous and elaborate tombstone had tiny cursive writing and multiple fonts with hundreds of words inscribed. A tombstone handler saw it and said “I can’t fucking read this, is there even any writing? Looks blank to me. Maybe this is yours.” I could see the tiny writing on the tombstone but he could not.
We never found my cement plaque. It became clear from the conversation and from the concern of the men that the plaque I had found and then lost was my tombstone.
“Why,” I asked myself, “did it say ‘Congratulations!’?”
One of the men said he would order a replacement, but that they would have to know with what political party I registered. “Democrat? Right?” they assumed. I said “No, I’m registered Independence.” One of the guys got a good-natured but shit-eating grin, saying “Oh I fucking hate you fucking In-Deeee-Pendants.” I chuckled in response, saying “I don’t vote on dogma.” He had a prepared response for that but he mumbled his words and I could not hear what he said.
It turned out my Independence party affiliation would make it harder to organize my burial arrangements, which I found myself unexpectedly contemplating. There was some a clerical error commonly associated with burying Independence voters.
