Dodging the Planes

MORNING OF NOVEMBER 17, 2008

This dream is so largely influenced by entertainment/the media that it's almost embarrassing.

I first remember watching some fictional scene from the U.S. version of The Office on TV. The only part I remember is Pam was sitting in a chair alone in the middle of a desert. She was giving some sad-sack monologue having something to do with her engagement to Jim.

Then I remember someone came in the room and handed me a newspaper. There were two large, color pictures on the front page, each relating to a different headline. One picture was a still from the movie WALL-E, accompanying a story about the movie's release on DVD this Tuesday (which is a true to life fact).

The other picture was of two huge, colorful, Muppet-style monsters. The article was about some play they were featured in (sort of an Avenue Q type thing).

I got up to go use the bathroom and on my way noticed a picture hanging on my wall that I had supposedly only recently hung there (I don't know if I hung it in a forgotten, earlier portion of the dream of my subconscious just created this memory on the spot). The picture was a print of what looked like some classic painting from the renaissance.

While examining the art, I also remembered that on the back of it was an original sketch of some cartoon pin-up girl, supposedly by one of the old pin-up artists of days gone by. I wondered why I had decided to hang the print and not the original sketch. Then I realized I couldn't remember the artist's name, so I googled it and found a blog that was full of his sketches, including the one on the reverse of my framed print. All of this was fictional and not based on any real artwork.

Then I was at what looked to be some sort of outdoor concert or festival. It was after dark, and I, along with many others, was seated on the stage (we were not part of the entertainment--they just had seats on the stage as well as on the ground for some reason).

Will Ferrell was the emcee of this event, and I recall him rambling stuff at a microphone nearby. As he rambled, I noticed a little replica of a castle tower, roughly as tall as I was. There were several "windows" up and down the tower, and each one was stuffed with small teddy bears. You could press buttons on each teddy bear and, as you heard gears turning and switching inside, they would stretch and distort into whatever shape and size you wanted them to be in.

I "customized" two or three of the bears, and the last one I made as short and squat as could. Will Ferrell, still announcing at the microphone, noticed the squat bear, picked it up, and then began making midget bear jokes. Someone suggested he sing that midget song from Walk Hard, a movie he was not in.

Then Will joined those of us who were seated and we were all looking out into the sky when two or three passenger jets began flying extremely near the ground. It was so loud one could hardly hear anything else, and it was quite scary as well! Two of them nearly crashed head-on, pulling up just in the nick of time. One of the wings came so close to our stage it nearly hit it, and I jumped back. Will Ferrell laughed at me for jumping back and said something like, "Yeah, if the plane had crashed into the stage, we'd all be dead, but you'd still be alive because you scooted back a few inches!"