Dreams can be weird. We all know this, right? This isn’t news. Dreams jump from one place to another, people act strangely and out of character, and objects can be different and frustrating. The stories we experience in our dreams rarely hold together logically, at least in my experience.

I had a dream this morning. I woke up right before a guy in the dream punched me in the face. So much of it didn’t make sense, so of course I thought I’d document it here.

I was at Wrigley Field when I realized that my phone wasn’t working, because it wasn’t my phone! First I had to try to find MY phone. Did I lose it? Did I leave it at home? How would I find out, without a phone? So I “borrowed” a phone from the guys who were sitting behind me, called my office, where my mother-in-law answered, but of course it’s not my office, she’s at my house with my wife. My wife calls my phone and locates it by my son’s room. Why was I back there? Why was his room “back there?” (I have no idea.)

So now it’s “what to do” with the phone I have, which doesn’t work. It’s in the pocket of my sweat pants (I rarely wear sweat pants and certainly wouldn’t wear them to Wrigley Field). It starts buzzing but stops before I can answer it. Then the phone’s owner is somehow standing right in front of me. I give him his phone back, but he’s mad because I picked it up mistakenly from a counter where he set it down. “Where?” I ask. He won’t answer; instead, he demands money. Why? I gave him the phone back. If anything, I tell him, he should give me money for finding it and returning it. He doesn’t like that idea much, and before he attacks me, I wake up.

Strange things about the dream:

Our seats. They are tiered, but they face OUT of the stadium, and are quite obstructed-view – I can hardly see the game.

The number I give the guy to call. It was almost my second line at the office, and almost my fax number. It is off by one number from each.

Why was I at a baseball game? Before that, in the ‘foggier’ part of the dream, I was at work, referring a patient’s daughter so she could play soccer at high school. (???)

In the few minutes that this phone stuff all happened, the game progressed four innings. I looked around the pole to see the score and it was 10-0, Cubs losing. Three in the first, one in the second, two in the third, and three in the bottom of the fourth with the opponent still batting. And that was strange, too — the Cubs were the home team but they had batted first?

The guys behind me were wearing masks, but no one else was. They would not give me their phone to dial, but dialed it for me. (That’s how I remembered the number I gave them so exactly.) When he handed me the phone to talk, he’d wrapped it in some sort of cloth sleeve so it wouldn’t touch my face or hand while I was talking on it.

The phone I had wouldn’t do anything for me. I couldn’t even shut it off or power it down. It continued to play odd videos which seemed to switch often.

Some people dream of stories. I have had that experience twice. I dreamed once of a psychic (I think mostly it was someone else, but sometimes the guy was me or I was experiencing what he was as he went through it). This guy owed money to a loan shark or something, and needed to contact the ghost of an old bank robber to find out where he’d hidden the money he’d stolen. That dream ended up becoming a 5K short story. (It is in my collection DIE 6, and is called “Blood Ties.”)

The second time was for a short story called “Garage Sale.” That started life as part of a dream where we were hosting a garage sale disappeared from view and we were certain she’d somehow slipped past my wife and entered our house. (That story is in the current version of the three-short-story collection called THE STRIKER FILES.)

Is there a point to this post? Not really, beyond the creativity that the mind can show during our dream-filled sleep. It won’t usually lead to anything that is cohesive, but maybe, just maybe, it provides tidbits for our conscious creativity.