Dream Diary

Here’s the way to end the year! A vivid and fucked up dream.

I’m the US Ambassador to Estonia and all is going fine until their president becomes obsessed with forming an old-school pre-World Wars full on defensive military alliance with the US. I have to go to the palace to break it to him that he’s a fucking lunatic and no way will that happen.

Estonia’s national bird, in the dream, is the crane. For most of the dream, I’m unable to escape the spectacle of the president’s latest statue — a seemingly mile high crane made out of some silvery substance with a built-in optical illusion that makes it looks like it’s always watching you and dipping its beak slightly towards you.

The president is also obsessed with soccer, and goes everywhere in a uniform and with a soccer ball under his arm. This is because, of course, Estonia, in my dream, is a tropical, land-locked South American nation surrounded by enemies. But the architecture and people are all still Estonian. Go figure.

So I go to the palace and tell him no joy on this alliance thing. We have this meeting on what appears to be the remains of the old sundeck of the house I grew up in in Kensington, MD, while the president’s three beautiful and scantily clad wives watch us warily from an adjoining sundeck. The president is very angry and he throws his soccer ball off the sundeck, where it plummets hundreds of feet to the crystal road below. This makes him even more angry, and he challenges me to a game of golf to determine the fate of the alliance. I agree.

He takes me to a golf course where you have to guess where the holes are through complicated geo-caching clues. It’s in the middle of a forest and isn’t visible unless you actually get right up on top of one of the holes. I’m somewhere on the third hole and the president is way ahead on the 8th and I realize, via the whispered help from one of his wives, that the geo-caching clues are different for me because I have an Android phone and all of Estonia’s geo-caching fanatics are Apple people. This pisses me off, so I throw down my golf clubs and stomp off through the forest, which shifts from Estonia to Narnia within a few paces, and I black out as the primeval darkness descends around me.

I wake up on a bus to Frederick, MD with my old high school friend Trevor. I’m in my younger body — maybe from around 1993 — but Trevor is his current age today. He’s blathering on about how grateful he is that I quit the government so he could inherit my job translating Russian to American. I tell him that that wasn’t my job, and he gets angry with me.

Oddly, the whole Estonia thing isn’t in this part of the dream. I know that my previous government job — which I have indeed just quit — is, in fact, translation, in a way. It involved putting captions on government training videos. So Trevor definitely does not have my old job, but I can’t correct him because I have super high-level clearance, and once a spook always a spook.

As I remain tight-lipped, he becomes increasingly enraged with me. Finally he climbs on top of me and starts to beat me senseless, and I take every punch because I’m a loyal American.