Musta been something I ate..........

The icebergs were drifting by my picture window, the sunlight glinting off their blueish-white precipices in the perpetual Antarctic summer. My coffee cup slide down the table as the trailer rocked gently from side to side, and I grabbed it just in time to keep it from falling off. I contemplated taking some dramamine, while simultaneously wondering why I would have any and at the same time thinking it odd that home was floating in ice-cold waters South of the Equator. This wasn't really a problem until I noticed that I only had three cigarettes left in my last pack and I didn't see any seven-elevens floating along with me, or at least any that I could see from my dining room table. Even if there where, the prospect of jumping into frigid water and swimming over before hypothermia set in was not an attractive proposition. Yes, this was a fascinating dream, but it was getting old.

I was thinking it rather convenient, even in dream terms, that my electricity was still on, when one of Howie Mandel's beautiful models stepped out of the game show on the television and walked over to me, a pot of hot coffee in her hand. I eyeballed her up and down as she poured me a refill, thinking that cute miniskirt she was wearing would look better on the floor. She smiled, set down the pot, and took it off. It DID look better on the floor. I took a sip of the freshened coffee and thought that of course this would be the time you wake up, before the really good stuff happens, but I didn't.

Not that it mattered. Turned out on closer inspection that "Mandy" was actually more of a "Marvin", and I don't do drag queens. She, or he rather, gave an impertinent little snort, turned on his/ her high heels, and walked out the front door, a splash of salt wate announcing his/her departure.

Sure enough, as I walked up to close the door, I could see that my front porch, which I was so proud of building myself, had not accompanied the trailer. Well, damn, I thought to myself, that sucks, I put alot of work into that. Then I decided to go ahead and force an end to this rather odd dream and stepped out the door and into the ocean, figuring the shock would certainly awaken me so that I could get back to sleep and experience a more run-of-the-mill dream where the Deal or No Deal model would have been the real deal and the dream more productive.

No such luck.

The shock of the cold water drove the air from my lungs as I plunged below the surface, and I frantically clawed my way back to the surface, sputtering and yelling as every nerve ending in my body screamed "WHAT the FUCK did you just DO?!"
This was not going according to plan. I should have been awake in my nice warm bed, thinking what an odd dream this had been as I drifted off to sleep again. This was ANYthing but a nice warm bed; this was really ice-cold salt water and I had this nagging suspicion amongst all the other emotions running rampant in my brain that I could really be in trouble if I didn't make it back to my front door.

Then the killer whale appeared. Beneath me. Just rose up and there I was, sprawled across his back, hanging onto that dorsal fin for dear life as he took me for a spin around the trailer. This was getting much too fucking surreal for my tastes, but hey, it's not everyday you get to ride on an orca without paying admission to Sea World. As he swam over to my front door and I clambered off, I asked him, "So why didn't you just eat me?" I guess I was half expecting him to answer me, in perfectly fluent English no less, but he didn't, either because he couldn't or wouldn't. He just swam off towards a floating slab of ice in the distance hosting a pack of seals, whom I figured he wouldn't treat so charitably.

OK, fine, this was pretty interesting as dreams go, but I was more than willing to wake up right then and there, shivering as I was like a wet popsicle, but NOOOOOO, this puppy was persisting, so I made my way over to my wall thermostat and cranked it up to "make it warm, NOW". I suppose that the fact that a trailer heat pump is pretty much attached to the house neatly fit into my assumption that it had accompanied the house when it made it's way who-knows-how-or-why into the Antarctic Ocean. As the place began to warm up, I made my way into the bathroom, grabbed some towels, and started to dry off, staring into the mirror and instructing myself to wake the fuck up.

While I was attempting to alter my reality, which by now was seriously screwed up, A Chilean Coast Guard Cutter pulled up next to the trailer and offered me a tow. What I didn't know was that they meant to tow me over to one of their fishing factory ships, making me pay for the tow by dumping a load of freshly caught krill into my spare bedroom, which I couldn't actually spare, having converted it into a workshop for my wife. I knew if she came home to find her workshop smelling somewhat fishy, there would be hell to pay, that is, if the trailer was there for her to come home to. I was saved from this little bit of chicanery when an Iranian suicide navy rowboat came out of nowhere and sank the cutter, along with itself. I didn't even know Iran HAD a navy, much less a suicide one, which probably explains why they don't, usually.

After the fireworks had subsided and the sea around me was reduced to a salty slick full of Chilean and Iranian flotsam and jetsam, I fished a survivor out of the water and offered him some hot coffee. He politely declined, insisting he had to return to Punta Arenas to report the loss of the cutter to his government, in case they wanted to send an army ice-cream truck to join the Allied Coalition and extract some revenge on the Iranians by taunting them with dream-cicles in the desert. I wished him well and loaned him one of the bathtubs and a broom to make his way back in.

By now I was seriously in need of getting out of this insane dream and started searching for a Jerry Springer episode on the television, reasoning that anything Jerry Springer could come up with was always weirder than any dream I could have dreamt up. Unfortunately, the only station I could pick up this far south was the weather channel, which was showing how nice the weather was somewhere other than where I was presently located.

Then I tried reverse psychology, and accepted the reality of the situation, which promptly triggered a rebellious questioning of my circumstances, and I found myself wide awake. Leaping out of bed, I ran to the nearest window and was greeted with the scenery I was more accustomed to seeing from my trailer. That set off a severe case of depression, having hoped against hope that my reality was actually living in this trailer smack dab in the middle of Denali National Park in Alaska.

So I went back to bed and tried again.

All I got was Kermit the Frog singing "It's not easy being dreamed....."