Boardwalk Sally

Can somebody show me the way off this island?

I went back to Coney Island again last night through yet another of my infamous nutzoid dreams.

Maybe I should sell tickets to my brain, stand outside my subconscious mind and shout like a boardwalk barker, "hurry, hurry, hurry, step right up and see the Amazing Bizarro Boy and his demented dreams!"

The setting was no doubt related to the video shoot I did out there last week, and, the memories of visiting my father in a nursing home on the boardwalk.

That all makes sense: it’s what happened within the dream that has me going in circles.

The dream place doesn’t really look like Coney, but somehow I know that’s where I am. I am with a woman, an older lady with tattoos and rather bad teeth—perhaps a view missing, it’s hard to recall—thank God.

She wears a sleeveless t-shirt and jeans. One notch above being homeless, she is clearly a victim of some kind of substance abuse.

Sounds enticing, no? Well, apparently I thought so because—this is the dream, remember—I start putting the moves on her.

I am nuzzling her neck, where I quickly learn that she needs a bath. But the smell doesn’t stop me, nothing seems to stop me, as I bury my mug into this woman like we’re about to be swept out to sea.

And she didn't seem to be that into it, as I recall she had an awkward look on her face. Of course I was molesting her on the boardwalk in broad daylight, which might have been a factor.

At sound point, ever the tactful, I actually tell this woman that she stinks. Oddly enough, she gets angry and starts yelling at me.

I guess I could have phrased it better, but she was pretty rank…and I still tried to have my way with her.

I’m as randy as the next guy…maybe the next three guys…but she clearly wasn’t my type. I wish I could dream about getting jiggy with a supermodel.

I suspect this character has her origins in the two women from Springfield, Ma. I met during my recent weekend trip to the Berkshires. One had a faint goatee and the other, by her own admission, was learning disabled.

I wasn’t interested in them in the real world, praise Jesus, so why was I after them, more or less, in dreamland?

I do have a habit of getting involved with women who aren’t my type, usually due to a combination of loneliness and lust, which is somewhere in the vicinity of matches and gunpowder for sheer destructive force.

On The Beach

Time after time, I have gotten cozy with women whom I do not find attractive, whom sometimes I don’t even like. Maybe this dream is a warning and if it ain't, I'm going to take it as I such.

The next thing I remember I was in some kind of official looking building, like a hospital, trapped in a faulty elevator.

We weren’t moving and the fellow on board was trying to break down the door. I looked out the window onto a flooded street and saw huge a tentacle rise up out of the water and disappear.

Now this image probably came from "The Host," a Korean horror picture I watched but haven’t sent back to Netflix yet.

It was a decent enough movie, but I didn’t think it packed the emotional weight to show up in my dreams. The tentacle might also be a phallic symbol, but I really don’t want to think about that.

The next day at work I was looking through office email when I got a message from the "Sperm Manager." I looked again and saw it was actually the "Spam Manager." Now that's a Freudian slip to beat the band.

It's fascinating how this dream breaks down in recognizable parts. You just put them all in the Mix Master of my brain, hit "Liquefy" and step back.

What comes out was this rather disturbing tale, not where I wake up screaming, but kind of open my eyes and go "bleech..."

I got out of the elevator through a second door—it was a dream, after all—and approached a security guard to tell him about the creature that was lurking in the streets. But he cut me off.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, “about your father…”

What about my father? He hadn’t appeared in the dream at all, at least not physically. But Coney Island and my father’s stay at the nursing home are forever joined in my subconscious.

I can live with that, but I don’t ever want to see Boardwalk Sally again.