Dick, George, Barack, and me--a nightmare in one act

On my recent vacation, I had nightmares every night. I suspect that had a lot to do with the fact that there has been significant stress in my life lately and my brain hadn’t had a chance to process all of that until I had some long-overdue “down time.”

Here’s what the National Institutes of Health have to say about dreams:

Some scientists believe dreams are the [brain] cortex's attempt to find meaning in the random signals that it receives during REM sleep. The cortex is the part of the brain that interprets and organizes information from the environment during consciousness. It may be that, given random signals from the pons during REM sleep, the cortex tries to interpret these signals as well, creating a "story" out of fragmented brain activity.

Well…on the last night of vacation, my cortex decided to create a humdinger of story…

***********

I am in a fancy office. It looks like the photos I have seen of the Oval Office in the White House. Richard Nixon is telling me that George W. Bush has decided to run for a third term against Barack Obama. (Of course, this is completely unconstitutional—but it’s a dream!)

Dick has decided that I should be Dubya’s running mate.

Even in the dream, I am flabbergasted. My first words are “But he’s ANTI-CHOICE! How could that possibly work?!?!?!?”

Dick is insistent. My jaw is on the floor, but I pick it up and tell him, “We don’t agree on anything!”

Dick sees that as a positive, rather than a negative. Apparently he believes that if Dubya and I run together, the nation will see that completely divergent views do not keep people from working together.

I continue to remonstrate with him. There is simply No.Freaking.Way. that Dubya and I can run as a team.

And then I look out into an adjacent room, and I see Barack Obama getting ready to announce his new running mate. Apparently Joe Biden has been kicked to the curb, because President Obama has asked an African American woman to be his Vice-President. She is standing in the wings with her husband and a teenaged son. I do not recognize her.

My thoughts are racing. “Great! Obama has chosen an African American woman, and so it will be the white man/white woman ticket against the black man/black woman ticket. And I don’t agree with Dubya about anything!”*

Then I wake up. And I am very, very grateful that it was only a dream…

**************************************

*IRL this is not quite true. I did agree with George W. Bush about one thing--the need for the PEPFAR program. I only wish he had been as interested in the HIV/AIDS epidemic in this country...