Only In My Dreams

For reasons unknown to me, I have been experiencing some incredibly detailed, vivid, and downright bizarre dreams as of late. Perhaps even more remarkable is that I have been able to remember these dreams in their entirety. While I have long been able to retain the overall gist of many of my dreams, the details are quickly lost. I have tried to put pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboards) numerous times in the past soon after waking up from my dreams. But this has never proven to be effective for me unfortunately. Naturally I have long been envious of those who can easily recall all of the details of their own dreams.

I did have intentions of turning this dream that I’ll be sharing here into a short story. But given that I was able to capture every last bit of detail from this dream soon after I woke up, I thought it best just to share the content of my dream without further embellishment. My mind gave me plenty as it is. One more thing: I will apologize in advance for all of the profanity that is strewn about this piece. While no one who knows me will ever mistake me for a prude and I don’t mind it when others use “colorful” language in their own writing or speech, I generally try to avoid such things here on my blog. People use f~bombs and the like so often these days that such words have lost their impactfulness to say the least.  In this case I was simply capturing my own reactions to the content of my dream. What can I say other than I do manage to make myself rather uncomfortable at times.

My dream begins with me taking my very first typewriter (an Olympia SM9 with the Senatorial typeface) to this old school typewriter shop that I had been hearing good things about. When I get there the place is huge. Not unlike a bowling alley. It even looks like a bowling alley, straight out of the late 1950s / early 1960s timeframe. After walking inside I step up to the counter which looks like the counter at a bowling alley where you pick up the bowling shoes. While I am observing such details, none of this seems strange or out of place to me. I set my SM9 in its case down on the counter.  In exchange the guy working behind the counter hands me a thick, heavy bathrobe. He then directs me to a waiting room. WTF?  Upon entering the waiting room I notice that it looks more like a large public restroom complete with urinals. I ‘m not even blinking an eye at any of this, as if it is all perfectly normal.

Next I step into one of the changing rooms so that I can get out of my clothes and into the bathrobe. After walking out of the changing room in the goddamn bathrobe I notice that there are also some barber chairs in the room. So I sit down to get a haircut. How I did not notice the barber chairs before is beyond me, but given my actions this was apparently no big deal. The thing is, I’m no longer a balding guy with grey hair but instead my hair is dark and long like when I was a young man. Before I get out of the barber chair, I feel the guy who cut my hair now working in some sort of hair product, slicking back my hair even though I did not ask him to.

Again, I don’t seem to think anything of this, even though I have never used any sort of hair product like this before in my entire life. After the guy finishes with my hair I look at the mirror on the wall and notice that I now look like some sort of mob guy. Not only that, but it suddenly dawns on me that every guy working at this place looks like a mob guy. WTF?

Then I notice another customer there in the “waiting room”. He°s bigger than me and on the chubby side, especially his face. He is getting all freaked out as he has noticed that the typewriter he brought in is now half submerged in its case at the very shallow end of a large pool. As with the barber chairs, I hadn’t even noticed that this room contained a large swimming pool (or more appropriately, a large wading pool) when I first walked in. Now the chubby guy has begun to cry while also raising his voice trying to bring attention to the fact that his typewriter has been tossed in a pool. I try explaining to the guy that this is just a dunk tank of the sort that all of the good typewriter shops used back in the day.  At this point it seems clear that somehow in my mind typewriter shops are the size of  bowling alleys, they are operated like a cross between a bowling alley, a barber shop, and a public pool, and they are run by the mob. Once more, WTF?

But then I start thinking to myself that I was never aware the typewriters were placed in the dunk tanks while still in their cases. Like this is the only weird part of everything that is taking place all around me. But not wanting to upset the mob guys, I play it cool. Besides, I’m actually looking cool with this new haircut. Not long after that a few more guys come waling into the waiting room. They are talking to each other in hushed tones. But it is clear that they too are upset. It is becoming increasingly obvious that I have stepped into a bad situation. Rather than freaking out like my chubby-faced friend, I walk calmly back into the changing room.

After closing the door of the changing room, it dawns on me that it’s not a changing room but a toilet stall. My mind is really screwing with me at this point.  Also, my clothes and shoes are now gone. They have been replaced by what appears to be an expensive suit, a pair of wingtip shoes, some Ray Ban sun- glasses, and a fedora. Now I start freaking out that I am going to drop either the suit, the wingtips, the Ray Bans, or the fedora (or some combination of these things) into the toilet. Why in the hell do they have me changing into these nice clothes in a goddamn toilet stall?  It doesn’t seem to bother me that my own clothes are now gone. But the thought that I might mess up my new duds is really freaking me out.

After I finish getting changed I make my way back out to the main room of the shop along with the chubby-faced guy who was still freaked out about his typewriter going for a swim. Before any of you who know me go thinking “but Bill, you are on the fat side yourself” trust me that I am painfully aware of this. But in my dream I wasn’t overweight at all. It was as if I was back in the body I had in my mid-20s once again, even though I was old like I am now. No one ever said that dreams have to make sense — which should be very obvious to all of you by now.

Now in the main room of the shop I notice that the shelves which were full of typewriters in their eases (hundreds and hundreds of them) when I first came walking into the shop were now empty. A typewriter shop without a typewriter in sight is a strange sight indeed. With all of the shelves empty, I can now see just how large this place really is. Somehow the vast size and layout of this place still is not striking me as weird. Of course the chubby-faced guy notices all of these things as well. But un-like me, at least he knows where his typewriter is at. When it dawns on him once again that his typewriter is half-submerged in a fucking wading pool he starts freaking out all over again. This time I tell him to “shut it”, like a mob guy in the movies would, despite the f ct that he is quite a bit bigger than me.  WTF?

In one corner of the shop where hundreds of typewriters once lined the shelves, there were now shelves full of shoeboxes (boxes full of wingtip gunboats to be exact). Along the back wall there were many racks full of suits. There was also a platform to stand on while a tailor marked up the suits for alterations. I did not go through this process, yet my new suit fit perfectly. I notice that there are no casual clothes to be found, only “real men’s clothes” like suits and ties and real men’s shoes like the old heavy duty wingtips that Florsheim once made. I begin to piece together that soon this entire building will be like one big old school menswear shop. Suddenly it becomes clear to me that the typewriter shop was just a front.

It seems that typewriter enthusiasts like me were traveling from all over to bring our machines to this shop with such a great reputation. Apparently countless others before me brought in their typewriters as I did. I don’t know how many of them were then directed to the waiting room/changing room/barbershop/restroom/wading pool like me and chubby were. But it seemed clear to me that the mob had managed to move and sell enough typewriters to fund the conversion of their “typewriter shop” into some sort of mob recruitment and processing center. Regular shmucks like me had walked in as unsuspecting typewriter enthusiasts, only to walk back out as lackeys for the mob dressed in a really nice suit and tie, with a fedora and a pair of RayBans, not to mention a great pair of heavy duty wingtip shoes. WTF ?

Before me and the chubby-faced guy are allowed to leave, we are told that we are expected to pay for the repairs to our typewriters that are never going to happen. Man, I was really going to miss my SM9 with the Senatorial typeface. But by this point I was focused solely on how in the hell I was going to get out of this place with my life intact. Meanwhile, chubby is now blubbering in his tears begging for mercy. He has begun pulling pictures of his wife and kids out of his wallet to show the mob guys in hopes that they will take pity on him. Only now do I recognize him as one of those people that was talking up this shop to me not that long ago. Though I am tempted to start smacking this guy around myself  (I must be feeling like an entirely new man with my fancy new suit and my slicked back hair) , I recognize that this might be my chance to escape. Suddenly I have no concerns about dicking over the chubby faced guy and am only concerned about my own survival. I ‘m not proud of this mind you, but this is how my dream went down so I might as well own up to it.

Looking through the plate glass doors at the front of the building I can see multiple buses out in the parking lot. These buses are being boarded by guys dressed in nice suits, all wearing wingtips, fedoras, and RayBans. Not a single one of them has a typewriter case in hand. Things are not looking good. If I am going to escape somehow, it is obviously now or never. This is when I finally woke up. You might think that the dream simply became too intense for me.  But the reality of being an old man is that I had to pee. Yet instead of heading for the bathroom, I grabbed my laptop and began to write down as many details from my dream as I could. All of which I have shared with you above.

AFTERTHOUGHTS: Not only have I been enjoying (and remembering) a number of strangely entertaining dreams as of late, but a couple of nights ago after being woken up in the middle of one of my dreams I was actually able to will myself back into that dream once I had fallen back asleep. It was awesome. Again, why any of this is happening is beyond me. No changes to my lifestyle, my medications, or my diet has occurred recently. For now I’m just going with the flow.