an undigested bit of beef....

Did you ever dream you might be taking life too literally?

Last night I dreamed I was at the zoo with a large tour group made up of all my family and friends and you wouldn’t believe who I believed were some of my friends!

I sneaked away from the group with my friend John who used to be a conductor.  He just leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Shall we step outside during the intermission?”  And when I nodded, he added. “And not come back?”

We discovered a trap door and climbed up into a huge attic that had a grand piano sitting right in the middle of it.  He told me to play and I said I couldn’t.  That was par for the course and I played anyway, also par for the course, except that he turned the pages.  It was some kind of sheet music and there were problems.  First of all the piano was so quiet I could barely hear it, but most of all, when he turned the pages the music turned into real sheets that slipped out and covered up the piano and made playing impossible. 

I couldn’t bear it so we stopped just as the tour group passed close by.  I joined it and we started seeing cages full of baby bears, all wearing tracking collars.  I wondered why bears in a zoo needed those when one of them scrunched down like a mouse and squeezed out from under the glass front of his cage!  Now I realized there were bears loose all over the place!  I was terrified, but no one else seemed to notice.

One of the bears kept coming towards me and he cut me off from the rest of the group.  I realized this was because he was a tracking bear and I scooted down a ramp in what now appeared to a huge building full of different levels, moving escalators and staircases, kind of like an industrial mall, or Alcatraz instead of a zoo.

Lest you think this dream went on forever I found myself in a small room with lots of other parents and Whoopi Goldberg, another one of my “friends!”  She told us she could teach us to handle our cubs more effectively and would call each of us when it was our turn.  All we had to do was write down our phone number and give it back to her.  She passed out wrinkled up baggies and magic markers for this purpose and I spent the rest of the dream trying to remember my telephone number and write it down on a wrinkled piece of plastic with a marker that barely made a mark and when it did, my hand smeared it, or erased it almost immediately.  But I kept trying.  Not because I had any cubs, but I desperately wanted to talk to Whoopi!