Destruction / See 'n Say

Friday night

Dream 1: Destruction

Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith were at my parents' house, and were constructing a bomb. I was monitoring how things were going when they heard a noise; I figured that one of my folks was coming into the room, so they handed their project to me, and I placed it into the right pocket of my white terry cloth bathrobe. The bomb itself was round, the size of a baseball, and it had a fuse on top. It was pretty heavy, and had a sort of a rough metallic texture. Its color was a dark piney-green. I walked out the front door and around the yard to my left, with my hands in my pockets. I stopped and stared at what remained of the new-er addition to the house, the part that had extended further into the yard from the family room and basement playroom. That large section of the house had been smashed to bits, destroyed in a recent tornado, but the original part of the house (well, the part dating back to 1968) seemed to be unscathed. My mom looked out of the family room window and spoke to me. She didn't seem upset about the turn of events. Evidently, she'd already come to grips with the situation, and was simply happy that no one had been hurt. She marveled at how the storm had destroyed that part of the house, but had left the telephone poles standing, and the wires in place.

*****

Dream 2: See 'n Say

It was Christmastime, and my wife and I were at Gordon and Barbara's house, visiting with them and our friends Ed and Dawn. We were exchanging Christmas presents, and Gordon said that he had one more thing for me. He knows that I love old Hot Wheels cars and Christmas in general, so he usually gives me a neat retro Hot Wheels ornament. This time he had something different up his sleeve. He reached into a Christmas bag and handed me a round, vintage See 'n Say, a beloved educational toy from my childhood. This one had a plastic "dial" in the front, featuring a toucan. I was delighted and turned to my wife and said, "Look, Honey! It's the Fruit Loops bird!"

*****

Dream 1: Destruction

This was a weird one, but I know where I got some of these ideas. For the record, let me state that I've never met the two gentlemen from Aerosmith, and the bit about bomb making is completely fictional. I'm sure that they are very nice people, and neither they nor I want to bomb, or hurt anyone, or anything.

Believe it or not, the rounded, heavy pine-green bomb in this dream is based on none other than an emu egg. You read that right. Whole Foods has just opened a fancy grocery store here in Nashville (which we adore) and the other night we were buying fresh produce when I noticed that they were selling emu eggs. I had never seen an emu egg before in my life. I picked one up to get a closer look. It was a beautiful dark green, and quite heavy. It wasn't round; rather, it was the size of a small football. For some odd reason, I thought it was rather unique, and a feeling came over me that it was a crime to eat such a thing. Of course, that didn't stop me from eating the chicken that we bought that day. Still, it seemed a shame to me to eat something so special, so unusual. What would one do with it, anyway? Make the world's largest omelet?

Last Tuesday (the evening of Super Tuesday) a rash of deadly storms blew through Arkansas and Tennessee, killing 54 people, the last I'd heard. It was a very scary night. Several different bands of terrifying bad weather passed to our north and south from 6:30 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. We had to spend a good deal of time sitting huddled in our basement with our cat, listening to the radio, with a lantern at the ready. Winds were whipping around the house, lightning and thunder were crashing, and the tornado siren was blaring almost constantly. I wasn't worried so much that the tornado would come down our street, but I was plenty concerned that a large tree or branch would fall on our roof or our car. Fortunately, that didn't happen, and we made it through unharmed. People in Jackson, Tennessee weren't so lucky. One of my coworkers e-mailed me several photos showing destruction of dorm rooms at Union College, and of havoc wreaked in the parking lot. Cars were literally picked up, turned over and tossed on top of each other. Those ripped up dorms became the destroyed extra addition on my parents' house in this dream.

The "extra-addition" to Mom and Dad's old house as outlined in this dream does not exist. Dad sold the house around 2001, and, as far as I know, the new owners built up (on top of the old "family room") but did not build farther out. I'd like to think that this dream simply combined the emu egg and the tornado into a bizarre story, but since the destruction in the dream only affected later additions to the house (theoretically made after the kids moved out), there's a possibility that it represents some hidden, residual resentment or anger that someone else is messing with the floor plan of "our" house. Jeez, I hope not. I have no conscious feelings in that regard. After all, it never really was "my" house to begin with. I just lived there. After reading this dream again, I got the sense that three of us could be seen as plotting to destroy any addition to the house that didn't correspond to the house of my childhood. That's the way it looks, but there was no sense that we destroyed the addition ourselves. The weather did it, and there was no implication about what we, or they, were doing with that project of theirs. In any case, it was disturbing.

*****

Dream 2: See n' Say

Once again, my age is showing. Isn't it amazing how this stuff is packed away in our brains, just waiting for a chance to come out and play? See 'n Say was a wonderful toy that I had when I was young. You'd pull a string and the character in the middle would spin around until it pointed to an animal or a word, etc., then the toy would tell you something about it. The most famous version featured a farmer, and the famous line, "the cow says: MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" I don't recall having a version that featured a toucan in the middle, but maybe such a thing existed. Fruit Loops was a cereal that we ate at our house from time to time. It was introduced by Kellog's in 1963. Its mascot, of course, was Toucan Sam. The first See 'n Say was brought out by Mattel in 1965. I always loved the thing, but couldn't remember what it was called till I described it to my wife this morning. She knew right away.