I Hope the Sleep Study Can't Record My Dreams!

What Steve-O of Jackass
will look like in 30 years,
if Steve-O lives that long.

When I previously blogged, I was dealing with a somewhat fitful night of slumber at the sleep center. I'd already woken up a couple of times and had to summon my caretaker, Harold, to unhook from a machine all the wires attached to my head, chest, and legs so I could take a leak.

Eventually I fell asleep again, and then I had The Dream, which I'll try to explain in as much detail as possible.

Keep in mind that I didn't "write" this dream, so I can't necessarily be held responsible for the weirdness that was crafted by my subconscious. I'm sure you've all had crazy dreams, too, dreams that are rendered crazier when you're sleeping in a strange bed.

So anyway, here it is...


IT BEGINS, LIKE MOST DREAMS, IN MEDIA RES
I'm in a large area that could be a school auditorium (not the auditorium, per se, more like an elementary-school cafeteria that has a stage that's used for plays) or a large lawn; whether we were outside or inside is kind of fuzzy. I'm seated in a folding chair along with a lot of people seated either in chairs or on blankets, as if a summer concert were about to begin.

Hi there!

I look to my right, and I see the crusty character actor Seymour Cassel (right) on his knees begging a guy, who was clearly some sort of mafia chieftain, for more time to pay off a debt. Standing on either side of the mafia fellow are two young but menacing fellows whom I understood to be enforcers or bodyguards. None of the three guys was moved by Seymour's appeal.

At this point I turn to the person I was with, who was not identified, and say, sotto voce, "The ironic thing is that those guys [the two younger guys] used to borrow money from him [Seymour Cassel]."

Then, as if a film editor cut out the next 20 minutes of the film, I suddenly found myself in some sort of park that has mostly grass, a few spots of trees, and sidewalks. It might have resembled part of Central Park, but I wasn't making that connection during the dream.

"WHAT AM I DOING?"
At this point, I felt like Guy Pearce's Leonard character in a particular scene in Memento...

...because people are running around and shots are being fired and I have no idea what the hell was going on. Like in most dreams, I received a kind of information download that brought me up-to-speed: there was some sort of attack going on at the park. It wasn't exactly a capital-T Terrorist (i.e., Al Qaeda) attack, but it was an organized kind of gang assault. And the information download told me that somehow that the park was actually an office. Only it was at the same time a park. Dreams make this kind of sense, right?

So I see a young woman who happens to be a former manager, one of my favorite former managers and really one of the nicest people you'll ever meet either in real life or a dream. I'll call her Jane. The information download told me that her husband, who was a founder of this company (I never learned what kind of company) but also some sort of good-guy spy, had just been killed, and she was being chased by the bad guys, who were those two young dudes who were menacing Seymour Cassel. I can see Jane running into a closet, which at first seemed to be somewhere else in the park, but suddenly appeared right in front of me. That is, the back of the closet, which I guess was more like a phone booth, faced me. This closet was also white; the color comes into play shortly.

I can't see any other action, but I can feel the tension all around me. Out of nowhere, the actor Chazz Palminteri (see the top photo) does this "Electric Slide" move to block the closet a bit from my view, which seems unnecessary because it's the back of the closet.

Chazz, who is younger and has more hair than the photo above (think of him from A Bronx Tale), and who is Italian in real life but seems in the dream to be Russian like Vincent Cassel (no relation to Seymour) in Eastern Promises, stares at me with those briquette-black eyes and a sinister smile that seems to say, "Watch this, comrade."

I hear gunshots and on the back of the closet, which now resembles a white sheet, red blotches appear.

HERE'S WHERE IT GETS REALLY WEIRD
Everyone is suddenly gone, and the park/office is calm. I'm now facing the entrance to the closet, and I walk in. I see that Jane is clearly dead or at least in really bad shape, but thankfully there's no blood anywhere. It's like those old made-for-TV movies where someone gets shot once and he falls down dead and there's no wound.

And by this point the information download has informed me that the probably-late Jane and her late husband have very young twins.

I look at Jane's lifeless face and I don't know what to do, and I'm start to freeze from panic. But a voice in my head yells at me — something like Do something, stupid! — and I exit the closet and see some people I recognize jogging on one of the sidewalk paths and at the top of my lungs I yell to them for help and they rush into the closet to help Jane.

DENOUEMENT
But she's dead. And I'm still in the park but the closet is no longer there and I'm watching a group of eager employees being addressed by someone I identify as a middle-manager of the company. He tells them that a Russian business is interested in doing partnering with the company and they're going to buy some of the park where we were all standing. No, this doesn't make any sense, but to the other employees this is obviously good news, and they applaud enthusiastically.

I'm standing there a bit dumbfounded, wanting to say something like, "Uh...don't you remember when the owner of this company and his wife were killed, leaving their twins as orphans?" Instead, I notice standing next to me a young guy who's a co-worker at the place where I currently work, dressed in his work attire of shirt and tie. I can't remember exactly what he said, but it was something like, "So that's how it goes"; i.e., the wheels of history and business keep turning.

I nod, a little wiser and a lot sadder about the way the world works.

AND THEN
I woke up. The room had no windows, so I have no idea what time it is. I guessed it was probably around 5, because I'd already woken up a few times. I was in that half-sleep state where I know I'm awake but I can't really move and parts of the dream are replaying in my mind very quickly as I try to process all the details and I can still feel the sadness about the very nice person I used to work for who was killed and who was going to raise her twins (note: she doesn't have twins in real life) and I blinked and I could feel a single tear on the outside corner on each eye rolling down my cheeks as if they were racing to see who would reach an ear first.

I could hear my breathing and the unfamiliar silence you sense in a room you've never slept in before. With all that shit on my head, the whole experience felt very out-of-body until I heard, in a loud Desi-accented voice filtered through an ancient intercom speaker in the ceiling:

GOOD MORNING, MISTER ANTHONY, TIME TO WAKE UP.

And within seconds, my door opened and Harold walked in and turned on the light.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about the rest of my sleep-study experience. Compared to this post, though, it could be a letdown. No one gets shot!