It never ceases to make me laugh when I awake from a dream and am able to deconstruct why pieces of it were in my mind. I recently flew to North Carolina to see my family for a few days near Christmas. On our way to get some pit-smoked barbecue from my favorite place, we passed a place very familiar to me that was entirely different. A building that used to house a second location of my favorite seafood restaurant and a skating rink named imaginatively ”Footloose” had become a Mexican restaurant and a newly-named skating rink “Wayne’s World.” Come on, now. You have to give the Albemarlians credit for being imaginative. It’s not like this new name was *also* a movie, right? I went to the skating rink once, and my sister broke her ankle within a few minutes. That was my full life experience of skating. Here’s the building: http://bit.ly/yZb91Z. I forgot to mention – there’s a healthcare something something in the middle of the two. I digress.

What did this building become in my dream? The restaurant portion was replaced by a sushi place. Still a restaurant, but I distinctly knew in my dream that I was in Minneapolis, even though this building looked almost exactly like the building in Albemarle, down to the street and setting. The skating rink? That became, of course, a theater. As I walked in (with Matthew and his mom) I noticed a poster for the show: The Kids in the Hall – On Tour! I took off my overcoat slowly and peered at Matthew. In my dream, I hadn’t heard of The Kids in the Hall, but Matthew assured me it was one of his mom’s favorites and that I would absolutely love it. It turned out that only David Foley made it to the show, and he showed up too drunk to be funny; we ended up leaving halfway through the show. At that point in my dream, I woke up.

It was then I realized how many things my brain was piecing together. I had just gotten a Boxee Box (LOVE, by the way – if you’re thinking about getting one, do it! http://bit.ly/wWEEsa). One of the shows I saw available right before bed was The Kids in the Hall. I had also just spent a very hectic week between North Carolina and Minnesota, with lots of traveling and visiting friends and family. My mind totally mixed up which things go where, and planted that building in Minnesota. I did seem to remember, however, that we had recently gone to see A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie together, which turned out much more delightful than this show did in my dream.

Every detail I considered from my dream had been somehow on my mind in the past week. It kind of made me wonder – If I can pinpoint where all the details of my dream came from, is it possible a completely different life experience could be had with all the same details, just jumbled around in a different order? Which also made me think of all the hypotheses swirling around regarding our understanding of the cosmos. Perhaps the dream I had really happened in another universe (queue the Twilight Zone music)? Perhaps I’ve been watching too much PBS lately. Whatever the case, it’s certainly fun to discover my life on shuffle, in my dreams!