Hot Dogs Dream of Mustard

            After a surprisingly and particularly depressing night of haunted memories and disappointing discoveries I eventually made my way to bed.  I was feeling exceptionally drained and slightly angry. I rested my foul dispositional head on the pillow and I soon fell asleep. It seems I purchased a ticket to the Fever Brain Station as I boarded the sleepy train from Lucidville to REMmington.

            As it is with most insane dreams, I do not remember how the whole thing started. I can try to piece it together from the brief snapshots now in my now waking mind. The first thing I remember is being at a hockey game. It was clearly an ice rink and there was a hockey game going on. There were regular hockey players, skating their hearts out, and it was clearly a very tough game. There was lots of hard hitting action and the crowd loved it, cheering and roaring with each vicious hit. Plus there were the elephants on the ice to contend with.

            There were elephants on the ice and it seemed they were there to maintain some sort of order. There were perhaps five or six giant elephants acting like line judges. At one point, one of the hockey players got too close to one of the elephants and a minor scuffle broke out and the hockey player slashed at the elephant’s neck with his ice skate. This was met with boos from the crowd and the elephant became enraged and tried to squash the hockey player, but the other elephants came over and sat on the upset elephant until he calmed down. There was some struggling as the elephants sat on the prone elephant on the ice.

            While the elephants regained some composure, Titanic on Ice started. I’m not kidding. An Ice-Capades version of James Cameron’s 'Titanic' started. It starred Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel. They were pretty good skaters actually. There were some tropical themed ice dancing numbers that weren’t in the Titanic movie and the whole time “Jack” and “Rose” saw each other, Jack would remind Rose that they were jumping ship and when the left they had to remember to take the others with them. The others always seemed to be some sort of Disney type characters like clocks and talking animals. It got to a point where Jack was ready to jump ship into a near-by canal of flowing water cut into the ice rink surface. He asked Rose if she was ready, she said she was, so Jack jumped into the roaring canal. Rose didn’t jump in though. She skated away from the edge of the canal, wringing her hands near her bosom and that seemed to be the end of Titanic on Ice. I don’t know where the elephants went. I’m assuming there was a very creative ice-capade stage crew.

            I felt myself being pulled backwards and everything switched to a very personal point of view angle. My mind’s eye refocused backwards through the tunnel that led from the stadium to a darker place, a nondescript and undefined place. I found myself confronted by an old chimpanzee. He was sitting very close to me and we were looking at each other. It was almost looking in a mirror. We looked right into each other eyes. I was looking at him through my own eyes. He looked very old and gray, and he was missing some hair in places around his face. I remembered that I had looked at the elephants when they were on the ice and noted that they looked very old too. They were dry and wrinkled and seemed as if their skin was made of crepe paper.

The chimpanzee was telling me something in sign language, or at least Chimpanzee sign, because I don’t think it was the classic American Sign Language. This chimp was trying to tell me something and he kept pointing to the right side of my head. I reached up to the side of my head and noticed that my arm was a chimpanzee arm. It seemed that I was also a chimpanzee. I reached up with my chimp hand and felt the right side of my head and there was something there. I started to pull on it and it really hurt. It was very painful but I kept pulling and eventually I plucked a little square, black, transmitter looking thing from the side of my head. It had a little blood and hair on it. I passed it to the other chimp. I seemed to be crying. The old chimp just continued to look at me and I noticed he had a little dried blood around his nose and eyes. He was crying too it seemed.

The sleepy train arrived at its destination and started buzzing its wake up horns. There was a vibration that accompanied the buzzing and honking and I was very disturbed.

            I woke up. I didn’t want to get out of bed. The dream, combined with the emotional stress of the previous night made me want to stay in bed all day. I hit my snooze button and reminded myself that I shouldn’t be upset. I wasn’t omitted or forgotten. I was the role model, the first one, the best one and the one that all others were eventually judged by. Or at least that’s what I told myself so I’d stop feeling so sad.

            The alarm went off again and I got up. I hated getting up. I couldn’t put this crazy dream into any kind of sense as it related to the evening, or even what had transpired through the previous day. Ice Elephants and hockey players, Titanic on Ice, chimpanzee medical experiments, a reminder of an old poem I once wrote about the doom of short haired girls and how I always seem to be by the window of the bar waiting for her to come and sit next to me.

            I wondered as I got into the shower if hot dogs dream. I wondered if they dreamed of mustard.