I Have A Dream. Two, To Be Exact.

Martin Luther King Jr. may have had a dream, but I'm pretty sure it was nothing like the dreams I've been having lately. In 1963, Dr. King was laying in his bed in a nocturnal sea of liberation, which inspired the dialogue of the speech that set the standard for everyone who ever took a speech class after the day ol' Marty told us about his dream. 37 years later, I was thrashing on my navy blue IKEA futon with a completely different vision in my brain. Here's what I remembered:

Dream #1
I am a Marine. With me are several Englishmen. My guess is that I'm in the middle of World War 2. How do I know this? Because everything around me looks like something out of Schindler's List. The world is devoid all colors except black and white. And things look pretty bleak. Not a word is spoken as we enter what looks like a storage room similar to the one my mom used at her nursery school to put snacks and toys and spare clothing in. "I don't see him," breathes a Brit. Curiosity got the best of me. "Who don't you see?" "Hitler." Someone's speaking German outside. For my own convenience, the cinematographer of my dream panned outside the storage room doors to show me three Nazis about ready to enter. One of them looks like Ralph Fiennes, a supporting actor in Schindler's List.

So, to recap, I'm an Allied soldier in a grayscaled world looking for Hitler in my mom's nursery school closet. And the enemy is just about to invade. The suspense is building, but the roof is now collapsing. Time to get out before it's too late! But then, out of nowhere, Oscar-nominated director Spike Jonze enters the picture. The world is colorful now. I can't find my British comrades. Spike shows me a deep, rusty linoleum sink with green slime gurgling at the bottom. As tears stream down his grubby face, he tells me that it's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen and immediately decides to make that the topic of his next film. Then, as Spike and I dash out of the crumbling building, my dream cuts to black. "Wakey-wakey, eggs and bakey!" says my ill-timed internal clock. NO! I want to finish the story, dammit! I try to close my eyes and fall back into my dramatic slumber, but all I see is an all-encompassing darkness accompanied by an endless bombardment of abrasive machine gun fire.

Dream #2
It's a lazy afternoon on a summer Thursday. Robert De Niro and I are at my friend's house and we want to go down to the basement to play ping pong and watch television to see if Paris Hilton had committed suicide yet. Unfortunately, the door was locked and nobody else was around to unlock it for us. Robert gets an idea. He recites a few lines from Goodfellas, snaps his fingers, and opens a wormhole. We promptly walk through and find ourselves in a musty room at the very bottom floor of Dracula's Castle in Transylvania. We make our way through the dimly lit corridor until we find what could only be none other than Nosferatu standing in front of a door. With a pitchfork, the vampire stokes a bonfire made from countless copies of books from the Twilight series. With a demonic giggle, he also hocks two chartreuse wads of phlegm upon the rumpled, lifeless bodies of Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner before eerily rotating 90° toward our general direction.

"Robert. David. So good of you to join me. I must ask you both one question before I let you pass. Where does the Twilight series take place?" Clueless, we venture a guess. "Uzbekistan?" Nosferatu is grinning at our obliviousness to Twilight trivia. He lets us through the door. A sign points us toward where Anthony's basement was. Two miles due east through the imaginary catacombs beneath the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. At first, we figured that the cartographer who designed that sign must have been smoking some Velveeta or something. But once we began our sub-oceanic voyage, we realized that some divine presence had enabled us to move at an incredible rate of speed. Another news flash was the fact that we were being chased by what appeared to be a whiter, more emaciated version of Emily Dickinson. Could have been Nosferatu's wife. Or Miss Grisselpuss from Spongebob. I'm not sure. Regardless, I happened to notice an almost hallucinogenic blur of a gold plated sign as we kept moving in fear of the creature. Bobby noticed it, too. Only he had seen it before. As our feet began to swell, he explained that it marked the halfway point as well as the entrance to an imaginary portal to 19th century Colorado that was off limits to all humankind. Except for Indiana Jones, but only if there's a fifth movie.

With half a mile to go, De Niro glances behind. She's gained considerable ground. "This might end badly," he muttered as his right Versace loafer disintegrated. A small ray of luminescence was now visible with 400 meters to go. I also heard a dull demonic chanting of what could only be Anthony DiSanto screaming, "MEH! MEH! MEH! MEH!" Emily Dickinson knew she didn't have much time. So, with our optimism in mind, she desperately dove toward the Oscar-winning actor adjacent to myself.FOOM! We laughed as the broken door's mahogany shrapnel brought the vampire her inevitable demise. And, in the midst of our laughter, we were greeted by a library of beverages. All the liquid pleasures of the world in Anthony's basement for us to enjoy. Robert De Niro had whiskey. I had Dr. Pepper. Life was good. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! "What the fuck is that, Dave?" asked Bobby as he cracked open another bottle. A syringe with a Magnavox logo fell from the drywall ceiling and injected me with a combination of radon, erbium, argon, lithium, iodine, tellurium, and yttrium. The potent power of R.E.A.L.I.T.Y.