Oddness

I dreamed that I was working part time as a waiter in a hoity-toity black tie restaurant.  I needed to wear a tux—as a waiter—and some of the folks I was working with I vaguely recognized from my car sales and bar tending days—though I can’t remember their names beyond “Anthony” or “Curt” and one guy we called “Action” because his last name was “Jackson”.  I think his name was Rodney, but I couldn’t pick him out of a group of random people.  But then there was a lot of other faces I recognized, but there were no names that went with them.

 

Anyway, it was one night of work—some kind of special event that seemed like the big ball in Stephen King’s “The Shining” but it wasn’t quite—but it was sort of uneventful.  I think I worked a couple of tables and smoked some pot and then hung out with some of the guys afterwards and drank some beer.  I’m not entirely sure anymore since this was a few days ago. 

 

Come to think of it, it was the last night I took pain meds before bed on account of my bashed ribs.  That might explain a lot of this.

 

Anyway, home, sleep, wake, night time comes again.  For some reason this hoity-toity place is only open at night.  I get back in my car—the 1994 white mustang I drove when I was a kid, again, weird—and head back to the place in full black tie tux uniform to pick up my check from the night before and I’m driving like a bat out of hell—just like I did when I was a kid.  I’m having a grand old time, then see the cop and know I’m busted and start to pull over even before the lights come on, but I’m on the feeder road of the freeway all of a sudden.  Then it occurs to me that he hasn’t even flipped on the lights yet when, sure enough, the lights come on when I’ve already come to a near full stop.  So, naturally, the dream me guns the engine and enters the freeway, then exits, the takes the u-turn under the overpass, then goes to the restaurant like nothing happened.  I go in to a restaurant completely devoid of people except for staff and they act like they’ve never heard of me and don’t know who I am.  Of course, the other guys on staff know who I am, they just won’t look at me and scurry around like they’re guilty of something.  The doorman (with typically cliché long nose and glasses) says “I’ll be right back” and then vanishes into the back of the restaurant and the place is like a ghost town.

 

Next thing I know, people are at all the tables.

 

I walk towards the back and there’s nobody on staff.  Not a soul.

 

So, I say “F^©% it” and open the register in the back to find my check sitting there—and nothing else.  I take my check, exit out the front and into…

 

My bedroom.  I climb into bed with my lovely wife who rolls over and says some stuff to me that I don’t dare repeat lest she get eternally embarrassed and it’s at this point where the thin veil between sleep and wake lifts.  I look at my clock and it says 4:30am.  I’m stuck on my right side because of my busted left ribs and I’m laying there wondering if any of that stuff was real or not when I become almost certain that I was not part timing as a waiter for a night and I probably didn’t run from the cops, but maybe he wasn’t coming after me…  but I probably wasn’t even on the road…  and my wife doesn’t talk in her sleep (usually)…  but by then it was close to 5:00am on Saturday morning and I was again lost to sleep. 

 

The weird thing is that even though I know not a single event happened, it seemed so damn real that I can’t shake the feeling that something odd is about to happen.  Not odd on the level of taking a part time wait staff position in an eerie hoity-toity restaurant, but odd on the level of “Hi, can I speak to Joe?  I’m So and So from thatplaceyouworked, do you want to grab a beer?” odd.  It’s shit like that that puts me on guard for one of those “other shoe dropping” moments.

 

Hmm.