Disruption / On the Run / Explosion

Friday night

Dream 1: Disruption

My wife and I were sitting in a state-of-the-art movie theater; we had seats toward the front left of the audience. The theater had a large rectangular central screen, and smaller square screens to the left and right, just below the level of the main screen. These square screens were inside protective clear plastic boxes, and were used mainly to show commercials before the lights went down.

I soon found that these smaller screens could do more than show simple flat images. A commercial came on to advertise a bra, and the first thing we saw was a picture of a woman's exposed breasts. Suddenly that picture became 3-dimensional, and the breasts (and body) grew outward, toward the audience, until there was an illusion that the box contained a nicely-developed torso. Not being mature enough to leave this situation alone, I decided to play the fool. I got up from my seat, opened the box, stood in front of it, raised my hands, and appeared (from the perspective of the rest of the audience) to be fondling the breasts in the picture.

This performance did not sit well with theater security, which promptly sent two employees running in my direction; I sat back down. One of the guards was carrying a dossier with my name on it. (Apparently I'd been caught performing similar stunts before.) He began to interrogate me and said, "Are you [CPC]?" I said that I was. He said, "Did you work at a T-shirt company with Stuart R.?" I was surprised that he had that much detail about me and my work history. I said, "Yeah, ...but that was a long time ago."

Dream 2

Some bad dudes were after my brother Jimmie, and they were monitoring his communications. I found him at his hotel, and told him that he had to get out of there right away. We packed up his stuff, and headed out on the highway. Unfortunately for us, the bad guys had anticipated our moves, and had posted small movie cameras on some highway signs so they could monitor our chosen exit(s).

Dream 3

I was walking in a long hallway toward the back of my old elementary school (Jamestown), when I noticed some brown smoke seeping out from under a doorway to my right. I called out, "Is everyone all right in there?" A voice answered, "It's O.K., it's just a [small] fire in the chemistry lab." I figured that they had it under control, so I walked on down the hall. Suddenly, a loud explosion was heard from the same room; it made a very strange sound due to the acoustics of the hallway.

This time I didn't wait to call out; I ran the opposite way, toward the door which faced the back baseball diamond; I was going to get help. As soon as I got outside, I noticed a policeman off to my right. He was standing next to his patrol car, talking with someone. I said, "Are you here because of the fire?!" He shook his head nonchalantly, and resumed what he'd been doing.

******

Dream 1: Disruption

The funniest thing about this dream is that my wife remained at my right side throughout the entire ordeal. I told her about this dream this morning, and she confirmed that she would have been out of there immediately. She said, "You would have been on your own!"

Stuart is a friend that I've known since high school. We never worked together, at a T-shirt shop, or anywhere else.

I never did anything too crazy in a movie theater, although I do remember acting mischievously sometimes at the State Theater in Falls Church when I was a kid. I liked to sit in the balcony during weekend matinees. Every so often I'd throw popcorn down on the patrons below, always making sure to look like a choirboy before they turned to see from whence it came.

Dream 2: On the Run

This dream was influenced by the new George Clooney movie ("Michael Clayton") that we saw at our local theater last night. Surveillance factored into the plot.

Dream 3: Explosion

This dream was also influenced by a movie that I saw recently: Al Pacino's "Dog Day Afternoon," from 1975. Pacino played Sonny, an inept bank robber, who, realizing that he'd shown up after most of the cash in the vault has been trucked away for deposit earlier in the day, decided to steal a bunch of traveler's checks. He burned the check register in a trash can, but the brown smoke from the fire escaped from the vent in the bank's wall, and aroused the suspicion of a man from the insurance company across the street. He came to the door and said, "Is everything all right?"

There were no chemistry labs or science classes in my elementary school, but we had them in junior high.