I love afternoon naps, if I can get
away with them. Nothing's better than feeling your eyelids get heavy
and that wave of sleepiness hit you and you realize you can lie down
for a bit. Do this in late spring with the window open with sound of
the birds and breeze wafting the curtains. All that's missing is the
crash of the surf. The feeling of satisfaction is complete.
What I like about them too are the
dreams. I find the dreams are more meaningful vs. the ones I have
late at night. They seem more vivid and I can remember them. The
memories of dreams I have at night, if I should wake up right after
them, dissolve like fog in the sunlight.
An old friend long since passed, Vin,
was a psych professor at RIC and we developed a friendship for years
after I graduated there. We would hang out on occasion and we would rap.
Rapping for those who don't know what it means....
Since Vin was a full blown
psychologist/therapist/voodoo priest, I told him of a dream I had
that once struck me. He surprised me with his caution about reading
too much into them. He said it was borne out that dream therapy, was
kinda total horseshit. The images, scenes and things you encounter in
a dream are highly specified to your life, not
humanity in general. Falling in a dream does not always mean loss of
security, going out of control or whatnot. To you and only you,
falling has it's own definition.
In the dream I related to Vin, I was
living atop a mountain. It was rocky, lacked any vegetation and quite
windy. Also on the summit, was a very cubist looking sculpture of
perfectly angled bars.
Vin thought for a few seconds then
said: “Uh-huh...What wasn't in the dream?”
I sat there perplexed for a minute.
“What wasn't in it?”
He asked again, “Ron, what wasn't in
the dream?”
I thought for a few seconds and said:
“Other people. It was just me up there.”
“That's more important than any
Cubist sculpture you'd encounter in real life on any summit!” he
tells me. This little trick was done to me to further flesh out what I was really thinking about the dream.
**
This afternoon I had a pleasant dream
about being a 51 year old adult riding my old Murray banana seat bike
down by a part of East Providence where Dr's and lawyers live in
homes built during the 1700's. It's a nice area bounded by a lake,
woods and is pure New England in feel.
At times, the lake would have 14 foot
swells crashing on the shoreline, soaking us with seawater. As dreams
do morph, this one then morphed into me riding in a Mercedes
convertible with a rich guy I felt I knew well but was a stranger I
had come across anyway. We rode to and fro, in that neighborhood
which had the feel of one in Martha's Vineyard. I was taking pictures
all along the way and being told about “life” by this said rich
stranger. After a while I was dropped off by that lake again and
told “I'm not in your life like I was, but I keep up with you on
your blog.”
I woke up, sat there wondering, “What
the hell was that all about?” It wasn't an unpleasant dream, just a
weird one that seemed to lack any identifiable anchor within it.
I thought on it...”Who was that guy
in driving the car? I wondered. I started to put one and one
together, the area, the wealth, the time. My dream was just a few
miles off. It was Rehoboth I was dreaming of, not the finer areas of
EP. There was only one person I knew who fit that description who
lives there too, a man nicknamed by us all, Lobo.
Lobo was an ad/exec, writer, and
gadabout who was with the magazine my brother worked at a long time
ago. Lobo had the luck of being born to a Dad who was filthy rich.
Lobo and I eventually became on again/off again friends and he
showed me around the finer/richer/most fucked up party spots in
Providence. It's where I learned the more well heeled people were
just as fucked up, if not more, than any workaday schlep in the
middle class. I wrote about this before in detail before. The jist
of what I wrote? The rich have the time, energy and money to
cultivate some real neuroses. You and I, who work, don't have the
time to raise our particular problems into monster ones.
Lobo was bored with life as I could
tell. When you have access to anything since you were a kid, you tend
to burn out quick on excitement. It needs replacing and the fix
doesn't last as long either.
His home was something to see though as
I remember it. On his coffee table, cut from some mahogany tree, sat
Civil War relics as decorations. There was a ratty looking round of
canister shot, a cannonball, one of those fat bastard 44 caliber
capshot pistols and an old American flag that looked like it would
turn to dust if you touched it.
“That must've cost plenty.” I said,
pointing to the relics.
“They were free...five fingered
discount.” Lobo tells me as he waves his fingers.
“You stole them?”
I ask.
He did. He was in a museum out in
Pennsylvania with girlfriend #64 and for a thrill, for some fun, he
started to drop museum pieces out an opened window that was nearby.
Since the museum was dead empty on a weekday, he figured no one would
see this happen. There were no laser nets, motion detectors or
ancient security guards that would've caught him once he removed the
items. Pretty lax precautions.
He and the girl left the building and
drove around to the side where the relics had landed and scooped them
up and they were on their way.
Another cheap thrill and the memories
lie on that coffee table.
I never met a real, true gang member
before. I did through Lobo once, three of them. The Latin Kings, or
soldiers from them, showed up at his home to watch a football game.
Three black men, all accessorized in red (I guess “colors” do
mean something) sat down around the TV with Lobo and I. Why were
members of the Latin Kings in his home? I come to find out that if
you want buckets of cocaine, you go straight to the source, and Lobo
had one hell of an addiction, so bad he was having seizures from it.
This started ten years ago he told me.
One of the Kings kept looking at me
suspiciously. I guess so, my straight white hair makes me look like a
judge that would send him up the river. The other two were more
amiable and would talk. The game ended, they left and I never met
them again. It was a little disconcerting, as I never ran in those
circles before. I wouldn't by choice either.
A few weeks later, I get a panicky
phone call from Lobo who wouldn't tell me why he needed me to drive
him to some spot in Providence that night. I asked about his car, it
was fine...then why me? I got no answer.
My personal smoke detector started
screaming. I never showed up. I haven't seen him in over 13 years.
As Vin would've asked this time around,
“What wasn't in this dream.” I asked myself that and realized
this, when I was driving around in that Mercedes, I wasn't
comfortable. There was an air of “threat” in that dream as I had
it.
I wonder where Lobo and his inherited
money is now?
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