Frank Burns, and spies in the bookstore

Last night’s dream was another strange one. It had two, very distinct parts.

In my dream…

The first person I encountered was Frank Burns, the goofy Army Doctor from the movie and TV series Mash. We weren’t in the jungles of Korea, however. This dream, both parts, were set in the loosely imagined, central downtown district of Bloomington, IN, as it sort of was approximately 25 years ago.

Someone had played a practical joke on Frank and he was running in a state of panic into Bloomington’s Monroe County Courthouse. This Courthouse in my dream was larger than the real one, but the layout of the rooms was essentially unchanged.

The Courthouse was closing for the day and most of the lights had been turned off and the offices were empty. I don’t know why I was following Frank, or if I was involved in the joke, but I was keeping a discreet distance and laughing almost as loudly as Frank was screaming.

Frank ran into one of the main office areas and the door locked behind him. He heard the click of the lock and became even more upset. He thought his only way out was to climb up to the transom above the door and squeeze himself out through that. He tried and tried but couldn’t get himself coordinated enough to pull it off. He kept falling down and screaming, over and over again.

Though the Courthouse was technically closed, I had no difficulty walking out through one of the main doors and into the next part of my dream.

There was a bookstore across the street from the Courthouse and that’s where I went. With extra money in my pocket, I decided to pick up some leisure reading.

Inside the store were counters, long tables, and shelves of books, as I expected to find. But there were also a lot of shady-looking men dressed in long, black coats, most wearing sun glasses, all wearing hats, trying to be very sneaky (but being very obvious) about watching what particular books the customers were browsing and buying. They reminded me of characters one could find in the old Spy vs. Spy comic strips found in Mad Magazine years ago.

Two of them followed me like shadows as I made my selection and took it up to the cash register. While the clerck was ringing up my purchase I picked up the book and started leafing through it. One of my two “shadows” was standing so close to me I could almost feel him. When I turned around to look for the other guy who had been following me,…

…I was looking at the digital readout of the clock by my bed. I was waking up.

Such a short dream, so many elements

Last night’s sleep was a rough one; the wonky sinuses had me sort of awake but still half-asleep through much of it. But there was some dreaming in it, and that’s a good thing.

Though I suspect there were more dreams last night than what I can now remember, the one that was with me as I woke is freshly in mind.

In this dream:

I was much younger than I am now, probably in my thirties, and had just finished a leisure ride on my mountain bike. The “home” I was headed back to was a rented room in a big house that could have been a composite of houses I knew in Peru, Warsaw, or Bloomington IN.

When I was about a block away from the house, a mysterious woman appeared on the sidewalk next to me. She was wearing a flowered t-shirt and black lycra running shorts and seemed to be headed to my house, too.

As I approached the front porch and shouldered my bike to carry it up the steps, the mysterious woman bounced up to the porch and let herself in the front door ahead of me.

The scene then flashed, and I was standing in the house’s big common living room. Another blond woman, whom I only know in a very tangential way over the Internet, looked up at me from a couch, smiled and said, “Surprise! Bet you didn’t think I could come right into your dream like this, did you?”

And then I woke. Sort of. It was a sinus thing that made me sit upright for a few minutes, but I never came fully awake.

When I laid myself back down, I focused on the last image remembered from the dream just mentioned, and I smoothly transitioned back into it. The woman on the couch was still smiling up at me. This time she said, “Hey, let’s use Latin, okay?” And she started speaking to me in Latin. And she laughed. Then I woke for real.