I think everybody has, once in a blue moon, an extremely vivid dream.
I’ve had a few that have stuck with me for eons. One of them, which goes back darn near 20 years, is when I dreamed that KCOW was sold to the Japanese and turned into some other business. We were all leaving carrying boxes and Mike Glesinger was crying. Now that’s a weird-ass dream.
This should not be confused with the “radio dream”, a nightmare in which you are on the air live and unable to do anything right. I’ve talked to many radio people who’ve had these. They are all terrifying because they all depict a reality in which you are failing at the thing (in my case, the one thing) at which you are skilled. I wonder if doctors have dreams where they ask for the scalpel and the nurse says, “I’m sorry, doctor, they’re all being cleaned. I have a pair of sewing Fiskars or a butter knife.”
One radio dream had enough other stuff happening in it that I’m not sure I can call it a “radio dream.” In this dream Kalin Krohe and I were doing a live broadcast from the airport. (Brief aside: In any of your dreams, do places you’ve been a number of times not look at all like the way you know them to look? Or am I insane? Just wondering.) Anyway, Krohe and I are at the airport and a lady busts through the door and delivers an urgent message to us. Only I can’t understand a word. As Phil Hartman says in my all-time favorite SNL sketch The SInatra Group, “It’s all pops and clicks from here.” Kalin, though, understands this lady clearly, then–because she’s obviously told him something incredibly important–they both bolt out the door. And I, the one who does not drive, am left several miles outside of town with 15 pounds of radio equipment, a folding table and two chairs.
Now, there’s a lot of work done in analyzing dreams. I guess being left alone in the airport could have to do with abandonment issues. But to have abandonment issues, you kinda have to be…you know…abandoned by somebody. Being a lifetime bachelor, this has yet to happen. And what of the lady talking and me not understanding her? Well, maybe I had guest-hosted “Open Mic” the day before I had this particular dream. I understand about 63% of what is said when I fill in on that show. Lousy cellphone quality, my own fading hearing, whatever.
Some dreams are “recurring”. There’s a dream I have had probably 2 or 3 times a year…that for some reason I have moved from Nebraska back home and am attending school. Like…high school. Except I haven’t been going to classes and my grades are terrible and I’m trying to figure out how to keep my parents from finding out. The dream is virtually unchanged every time I have it. There is never a conclusion where my folks unveil my slacker behavior. (Most of my dreams, like most SNL sketches, don’t really have endings.) This dream, I suppose, taps into the horrible student I was for basically my entire academic career…crawling through high school on a bed of Cs and Ds, and barely staying in college by getting As in communications classes and Cs or worse in everything else. It also exposes the fear I have always had to varying degrees of losing my job. As I get older that isn’t such a big deal…partially because I feel like I am good at what I do; and partially because I know every year is closer to retirement.
So here’s my latest vivid dream, and if anybody wants to analyze this go nuts. I got nothin’. In the dream I’m at work when a strange man with a mustache–I can picture him, but he looks like nobody I have ever met–comes up to me and complains about something he heard on the radio. It’s something political, possibly from an ABC Radio newscast. We’ve had those kinds of calls before. Anyway, this guy invades my personal space, hand-on-the-shoulder, extremely threatening vibe, talking about how we need to correct this egregious error. The dream goes on for another few minutes with me going into different rooms and the guy tailing me, with me getting more and more distressed by his behavior. At one point I attempt to go to a room upstairs where my Mom and a couple of other familiar faces are hanging out. (There is no upstairs in the radio station, unless you count the roof. Mom has been in the clouds “upstairs” since 2015.)
And that’s pretty much it. The guy following me and getting in my face and stuff…the only thing I can compare it to is on those rare occasions when I’ve been in a noisy bar and somebody who is extremely drunk tries to have a booze-breath, shout-in-my-ear conversation. But that hasn’t happened in a long while. Not going to bars a lot helps. Though I will say I went to Lincoln’s world-famous Zoo Bar last Friday and had a smashing time. No booze-breath, no shout-in-my-ear. 5 out of 5.
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