And Now For Something Completely Different

Exceptionally weird dreams the last two nights. A sampling; make of it what you will:

Picture a long wooden table on top of a vast, wind-swept plateau, not unlike the one in the movie of “The Two Towers.” Seated around the table are the members of Aerosmith, dressed in heavy, ornate robes and furs. At one head of the table is Moe Syzlak from The Simpsons, but Moe isn’t a cartoon; he looks a lot like one of the lizard guards from “Den” in “Heavy Metal.” Moe’s voice-over says, “And now for another edition of, Ask Aerosmith!”

Moe asks a philosophical question (I can’t remember it exactly) of Brad Whitford, who’s wearing a dark blue fur-trimmed robe. There’s a large, nasty-looking knife embedded in the back of Whitford’s high-backed chair, just to the left of his head. Whitford does not answer to Moe’s satisfaction. Moe picks up an identical thick-bladed knife and hurls it at Whitford with an epithet. It thunks into his chest, and Whitford flips backwards out of his chair and off the edge of the plateau, falling hundreds of feet to the valley floor below. Then Moe turns to Steven Tyler, seated at the far end of the table.

And I wake up.

I am not an Aerosmith fan. Go figure.

Then there’s last night. I’m watching a documentary about a country-bluegrass-mariachi-tinged trio (possibly related to my seeing BR549 and ZZ Top a few hours earlier, in waking life). They’re not bad, either. Not great, but not “ugh, let’s go somewhere else” bad. Mildly entertaining, in a kitchy way. After listening to them play for a bit, the story focuses in on one of the members, a stout, balding Mexican guy who plays some kind of funky accordion. We see him cleaning up a large, dingy, industrial-looking bathroom. Perhaps this is his day job?

But then we see him applying vast amounts of a gooey soap to some kind of dispenser on the wall, meticulously cleaning it out with a dirty rag. His face is twisted in painful concentration. Then we see him standing on a sink, reaching up into an overhead air vent. He begins to pull out wiring, metal ducts, plastic parts, vast amounts of old hardware strapped together in a large, precarious column.

Eventually, we realize that he is an obsessive-compulsive, driven to take apart and clean these fixtures madly. His hands are slashed to ribbons by his efforts, the blood mingling with water and thick liquid soap as he scrubs parts in a filthy sink.

Then the dog had a dream, too, and his whimpering woke me up.