the basement dream

[click image]

My mother and my uncle and my cousins and their friends and who knows who all were staying with me in a huge basement of many, many gloomy rooms. We were mostly sleeping, but I was not being able to go back to sleep, and pretty soon there were people grumbling about being roused from their slumbers. Then my doughy old gray cousin turned into this young, slick, muscular guy who thought to romance me, stalking, menacing. I told him rape was not romance and if he didn't leave me alone he was going to find out just how unromantic being a rapist can become. This disappeared him.

I began scouting out the rooms of this basement. Some of them were not rough, unfinished, moldy and dark rooms. Some of them were elegant. There was a gorgeous library that, while dim, needing some light, was clearly the property of a gracious hostess, and this was the basement of her mansion. She, while never materializing, began showing me around and making me welcome to have the run of her house, inviting me and all my friends to a ball upstairs later.

I put it about that we were all invited to a ball, and should get ready, make ourselves presentable for the occasion. Girls started running around and tittering, looking for rooms with dresses in them. Men milled about, tying their ties, everyone looking forward to this event. Suddenly a hairdresser showed up.

It was Barack Obama.

He asked me if I wanted my hair done. I said no. But the girls were scrambling to get in his chair, and each was receiving the wildest do you can imagine. Everyone was becoming giddier by the minute. He was doing one last woman before his break, when I decided maybe I should get my hair fixed up a little.

"I thought you didn't want a hairdo?"

"I didn't, but I'm thinking a quick and simple little French braid might be in order... after your break, if you have the time."

He was agreeing to this and going off to have a cigarette, when the dreamscape broke up and turned back into the mad jumble. As I was in the jumble I was also realizing that every one of the girls who'd gotten hairdos from the master hairdresser himself had turned from anybodies into movie stars in the chair. Thought how odd that I was so focussed on the wildness of the hairdos, and ridiculous popularity of the hairdresser, that I registered, but did not notice, the women turning into movie stars until after the dream had stopped. After I got out of bed this morning I found myself so grateful that I'd only asked for a simple and elegant braid....

I mean, maybe it would have been just enough to turn me into someone more likely to be taken seriously by the mass of sentient being out here in the basement of enlightening being....