Weird dream that I was in an auditorium or a conference room where a disturbed homeless person started pestering me, saying I could make a lot of money or find a lot of happiness if I went with him to some place. I don’t know what the place was but it sounded like a trap. I managed to get rid of him when the room filled with a bunch of people. They were organized like teams at a bar trivia night. In an effort to fully disassociate with the troubled homeless person I aligned with one group that I learned called itself the Hellbenders, which I now know is the name for North America’s largest salamander. I woke up wonder what kind of being thinks they can bend Hell, which led to stream of consciousness memories of my encounters years ago with the person who owned the HELL.com domain name.
It’s weird when words I don’t think I had ever actually heard before surface in my dreams. Maybe I heard of hellbenders somewhere but I think it just came to me as a word-soup kind of mess that sounds good so it must mean something.
I dreamed last week that a certain movie and television star from the 1970s “still reads books.” I wish I could remember his name now because I’d like to backtrack somehow and figure out how the hell his name got into my head, even in the amorphous dream state where anything goes. He was a minor celebrity whose daughter also went on to a career of minor acclaim. I was proud of myself for actually remembering both their names after going back to sleep and waking up an hour later. Usually I forget specifics like that from a dream after going back to sleep.
But then I forgot their names later.
How the names of actors I have not thought about since grade school made it into my head after so long is one of those mysteries of memory and dreamland.
Once I woke up with an oddly specific street intersection lurking in my mind. I think I wrote about it at the .MOBI. I practically leapt from bed and made a beeline to that intersection, thinking there would be something there for me. It was somewhere in East Elmhurst. There was nothing there for me but I loitered there for several minutes, waiting for whatever magic or dismay I thought the dream signaled to me would be there.
Nothing happened at that East Elmhurst location, though I seem to remember calling in some comments from a curbside payphone.
