So last night I dreamed I was in a dead man's party, we were milling about in a quasi- workplace scenario, a lot of people from around the establishment wandering and prepping for a celebration because word came out that none other than David Bowie was showing up as a guest, so everyone was as well dressed as they could be for the occasion, and I remember that my hair had been trimmed and my wife had buzzed the sides in a sort of mohawk that was concealed however due to having grown a sufficient amount of hair on the top of my head which fell over to the sides covering the shaved parts.
There was a real feeling of excitement buzzing in the air as people prepared and I wandered past a table where a few middle eastern folks sat enjoying olive leaf wrapped foods and rice with sweet aromas of spice drifting upward. One man in particular sat at the picnic table with a turban and his eyes were extremely dark and commanding, the color of burnt sienna, and as I passed by his stare drilled into me as if beckoning I come over for a visit, so I did. As I sat across from him on the opposite bench, those eyes never once flinched. He asked me how old I was and while I replied I was born in the sixties he informed me he was from the 1850s. I quickly did the math and offered with surprise, "So you're one hundred and seventy years old?" and although he didn't answer, his silent repose was sufficient for me to know it was true, and I believed it.
At this time I rose up and suddenly, food began emerging up from inside me--not throwing it up from my stomach, but rather regurgitated entirely preserved slices of cake that would fill my mouth until I had to finger them out in chunks. I kept scooping with my two main fingers these almost entirely whole pieces of frosted cake, one after the other, which would drop to the floor beside me. It was embarrassing enough that I wandered off to the side to continue this action as unobserved as I could manage. After seven or eight cupcake shaped pieces were scooped out (they were only deformed slightly enough from having been compressed by the shape of the interior of my mouth plus the small amount of saliva coating them) other foods began to materialize within my mouth from out of nowhere. I scooped out some yam, and at one point I scooped out a large chunk of a beet. It dropped to the ground by my feet.
At another part of this strange dream, I found myself in the main hall when a sudden buzz of excitement spread through the crowd. Right then I noticed my old friend Andrew Phillips (who took his own life in his San Francisco apartment fourteen years ago) standing there, and we noticed each other right away, and walked towards each other and hugged. This electric moment of the dream stood out with crystal clear clarity to me, and I cherished the lucid five second embrace as it galvanized itself into us. After letting go of each other and stepping back as if it were nothing too extraordinary to have met at a party such as this, we looked over to a newcomer entering the room. David Bowie was dressed in such a spectacular fashion that I can't even describe it in familiar terms. There were shades of his old characters, a tweak of Screaming Lord Byron but he contorted himself by squatting, as if in some Russian dance posture, rendering his body into that of a dwarf, and he hopped like a toad across the floor while everyone gasped in disbelief at the sheer grotesque oddity of it.
He hopped across toward me and nimbly leapt up onto the table in front of where I stood, and there was a moment in the dream that I can't exactly recall but in which he leaned in toward me in greeting. I can't remember what he said, nor what I said back to him, but this exchange between us remains charged with a significance that evaporates like steam from my mind when I try to think of it. Suffice it to say, I made contact with some dream incarnation of the thin white duke and it was really rather incredible. At no point during the dream did I stop to think that both Andrew and David were examples of people who have died in real life. This strikes me, in retrospect, as being somewhat peculiar and meaningful.
The dream went on to become hazier as Bowie worked his way through the adoring crowd and I wandered off to regurgitate more foodstuffs that kept cropping up into my mouth, and which I had to keep scooping out with my fingers and watch as they dropped to the floor in piles at my feet. A lot of the foods were sweets and desserts but there were mashed potatoes and other normal things as well. This is a recurring theme in my dreams to be honest, and I can't exactly pinpoint what it means. It wasn't until I woke up from the dream that I realized my best friend Greg Grub wasn't in it, despite having parted from this life himself last year toward the end of January. His absence from this dream remains quite conspicuous, and while making my morning coffee today I asked out loud in my mind, "
Why didn't you come to the Dead Man's Party, Grub? Andrew and David Bowie were there!" As the daylight diffused into my kitchen through the window over the sink, there was no reply at all, just silence while I stopped for a moment to think.
