(No no no, not THOSE kind of mushrooms!)

I woke up the way I almost always wake up on a Sunday: blissfully after noon, knowing that I don't have to work. It was quite a long drive back from the Blue Oyster Cult concert last night, but being the expert nocturnal driver that I am, we made it in fine. I closed my eyes again. Gloria was awake. I wrapped my arms around her tattooed body and said "I had quite a weird dream." Now I've heard that describing a dream to somebody is supposed to be the most boring thing in the world to hear (sources: George Carlin book, and a Dilbert stip). But she always liked to hear them, and would offer her interpretations when it seemed relevant. As usual, I had quite a number of unrelated dreams that night. But this was of course the one closest to when I woke up.

"Well before I begin describing this dream. There was this game I had in my head that, in the dream, I just seemed to know. There are two groups of these multi-colored items. Let's just say they're rods. One group of people takes one group of rods, and the second group of rods goes to one person -- let's call him the 'chaser'. Anyway, the first group looks though the rods and each person picks one of them. Meanwhile the chaser picks one of the rods in his pile. He can't see what the group is choosing, and vice versa. In the group of people, whoever picks the rod that's the same color as the chaser gets chased by him. Sorta a sophisticated form of tag."

"Anyway, in this dream I'm in a big house with a bunch of other people I know: ex-roommates, Joe (who you met at the party), my Tantra instructor, and some others. Maybe about 20 people total. I think some of us all lived there together. There was a storm brewing outside. We knew because Joe had one of those 'talking' cars parked outside, and it speaks some kind of warning when the barometric pressure is low or something. So as we were hanging out in this room of the house, I see a 15-inch TV playing this old Disney cartoon in color."

"In it, some character, a duck -- it looked like Scrooge McDuck or one of those Donald duck character spin-offs -- is walking out of a cottage and looking at this tiny spinning garden of 4 colored mushrooms. And you know, there's the typical happy cartoon music playing. Up on a hill overlooking the duck though is some aggressive-looking character, I think the Big-Bad-Wolf. The wolf is carrying 4 colored rods that match the mushroom colors. He's watching the duck, but the duck can't see him. So the musrooms slowly spin around, and the duck is about to bend over to pick one. The wolf, seeing his choice, puts the appropriate colored bar in his hand, to humorously give himself the permission to run down the hill and attack. But the duck pulls his hand away and changes his mind. He looks again at the mushrooms, really finicky. And the wolf gets frustrated because just when it looks like the duck is making a choice on which colored mushroom to pick, he pulls his hand back and rethinks it."

"In the dream, I looked up from the TV and half-jokingly said to the nearby people 'Hey, maybe this could be interpreted as some kind of philosophical lesson!' Joe said something that he might say in real life to me, especially for something so geeky like that: along the lines of 'Um, OK! Yeah, sure, Bill.' He was then trying to get me away from the TV and into the other room."

Gloria immediately picked up on the storm, going through the symbology of that. "The storm is the archtypical symbol of trouble or catastrophe coming. Was the storm approaching?" "No, it was distant. The air pressure was just low at the time." She also had a long rant about mushrooms and their various symbols. It was her turn to babble on as I listened there in bed with closed eyes. When she was finally finished I added "Yeah, but I think the fast they were mushrooms wasn't important. They were just short cartooney mushrooms. It's this whole 'game' idea that's making me wonder, especially since I blatently said that in the dream." She suggested ideas on what "life" stuff it could be: career, etc.

But I thought that, like all my dreams, it had something to do with what was on my mind the night before. What WAS on my mind last night? Of course I was watching and enjoying the Blue Oyster Cult show, but what else? I know I saw BJ and his band perform last night. It was one of 3 bands he was in.

As Gloria kept talking, my eyes suddenly opened up wide. I stared straight ahead. Maybe it was a moment of revelation. "I just thought of something. Is it my music?" Of course it was possible; there are innumerable ways to interpret a piece of a dream like that. And of course, it all begs the question of whether I'm making a mountain of a molehill here. But it's something I'll certainly be wondering about this week.