My brain can only be described a deep fried, kinetic, David Lynch fever dream that is allowed to slow down once in awhile, and ONLY once in awhile. It has to think, ALL THE TIME. It’s never not thinking.
Even when you think I’m thinking about nothing I’m pulling some kind of Doctor Strange in my head, trying to see the possibilities, all fourteen million of them, and act them out in my head. It can be exhausting. It prevents me from sleeping, quite often.
That’s why it came as such a surprise this morning when I finally got an ounce of sleep that was worth a damn, and dreaming on top of it! I’m lucky I can sleep five hours a night, maybe six if I’m truly lucky. Sleep has become a luxury, afforded to those who aren’t as affected by stress, no less in a pandemic. It also doesn’t help that I live across the street from a construction site where heavy things are regularly dropped with gusto and the men wearing hard hats giggle and laugh like hyenas (I swear this is true). We’ll get to my dream in a second though.
But the dream was the simplest one I’ve had in a long time. And just to give you a brief run down on the types of dreams I’ve had before, let’s take a small tour of those, shall we?
- The first dream/nightmare I can ever remember is a Zantac 75 Commercial (what a throwback), that morphed into a nightmare where I was trying to escape The Blob, yes, THE BLOB, and it ate Mickey Mouse in front of my horrified, eight year-old eyes.
- Surrealist Dreams that often feel like something I’ve experienced before – a building I’ve been in before but actually haven’t – a conversation that’s been discussed.
- Having a nightmare where Russell Crowe came after me in the angriest way possible.
My dream this morning was the simplest one I’ve had in a long time, though it ends in a bit of a giggly “But, of course!”
My friend and I were simply going from place to place, eating pizza. Restaurants, store fronts, didn’t matter the place. We just went and got pizza. We ate it, we delighted in it. We ate the damn things like the hungry SOB’s we were. No frills, no wacky complications or David Lynch fever dreams. We just ate a lot of pizza.
It was wonderful, it was simplistic, it was likely a human response to missing out on the day-to-day functions of human life that we used to have before the pandemic. It could also just be my inner Anthony Bourdain, a yearning for social interaction over food and the bonds that it can bring. It could also just be a dream about eating some fucking pizza with one of your best friends, but I digress.
Of course the dream ended in the most ‘me’ way possible. After traveling to the last place in my dream before we departed our beloved pizza-filled dream world, I noticed it was a specialty pizza shop. We’re not talking about your neighborhood Dominos, or a Papa Johns, or some dude screaming at you to get a slice of pizza, but a fancier, cozier place with dessert pizza. It looked and felt like a chocolate shop with the fanciest and most gourmet of pizzas. It was the Fanny May of pizza.
So when the time came to delight and gorge myself on the delicacies in front of me, I stepped up, practically cleared my throat as if to announce the greatest pizza order of all time, and the trays of pizza in front of me were whisked away in one fell swoop like Wiley E. Coyote had pulled a magical cartoon lever, NO MORE PIZZA FOR YOU FUCK-O. I was stunned, taken a-back. My mouth was agog.
The magical pizza man in front of me grunted something about the day being over, and I was slightly saddened to hear such a thing, not even staying open long enough for me to stuff one piece of greasy-filled cheese & bread into my face at a Roadrunner’s pace. But the fix was in, the day was done, and then I woke up, much to my dismay. No pizza, no friends, just the cold silence of the morning, and the hum of the fucking construction crew across the street cackling like hyenas.
Of course not long after I had woken up, the very friend I had gotten pizza with in my dream started texting me some of the ridiculous shit Rudy Giuliani was doing to try and overthrow the election, and it was like we hadn’t missed a beat. Happy Thursday.
You can find Coleman on Twitter, where the pizza runs down his face like hair dye on Rudy Giuliani.