The dreamlife of a crazy man

"No one wants to hear what you dreamt about, unless you dreamt about...them..."

-Built to Spill, Made Up Dreams

So I'm still in California. Northern, now (Oakland to be exact). I'm crashing on a friend's couch. Maybe this partly explains the oddity of the dream I had last night. But mostly, I think it's just that I'm a little nuts.

In this dream I was hanging out at Sarah Palin's house with her kids. They weren't her real kids, or her real house (as far as I know), but I just knew that was the situation like you do in dreams. I was apparently a high school classmate of one of Palin's daughters. Whether I was dreaming a made up adolescence in Alaska or the Palins had been relocated to early 90's Orange County, I don't know.

Either way, I was aware (again, as you often are aware in dreams about unstated things) that Palin's daughter had a crush on me that I didn't share. But she was my friend and I thought she was a very nice girl. So we're hanging out and Sarah Palin is basically just a presence in the background talking to official-looking people in the other room. The daughter asks me if I want to go check out the "grow room." When I say "OK," she makes me swear not to tell anyone about this. I agree.

So we go into this room off of the kitchen that is more like a cinderblock warehouse. It is filled with marijuana plants in terra cotta pots. There is also a swimming pool near the door and a bunch of garbage bags full of cultivated, dried out, weed, ready to smoke or sell.

As the daughter is pulling buds out of one of the trash bags to show me the quality, Sarah Palin and the officials she'd been talking to walk in. She looks like she does on the stump and they are dressed in conservative but sharp gray suits.

Sarah Palin yells at the daughter that she knows this place is off limits and to get the hell out. We leave, and the daughter tells me again that I have to promise not to tell anyone and that I should go.

As I'm leaving, I'm thinking that I made a promise to this girl whose only misstep was to have a crush on me, so I really should just keep this under my hat. But then I think, revealing the grass-growing operation could finally sink the McCain candidacy, so I almost have to spill the beans. But then again, I think, I don't really have a problem with people growing pot, so it would be massively hypocritical of me to let it out. Besides who can I tell? I can't trust the cops because they want McCain to win, so they'll just hush it up. I don't know any reporters, and they can't prove that the operation exists even if I do.

Then it dawns on me that the gray-suited men are going to remove any trace of the grow room and then probably hunt me down and kill me.

Then I woke up.

Make of that what you will, but I think it was a delightfully surreal way to spend a short spell of unconsciousness. At the very least it tells me that I have a truly massive ego and that I need to avoid eating burritos at night.