Dreams: Can't sleep with them, can't sleep without them

There’s no figuring dreams. They come and go as they please, when they please, if they please. The dream itself determines the setting, the situations, and the eventual outcome. Our minds are just the screen that the dreams need to bring them to life.

Nevertheless, practically everything in a dream can somehow be tied one way or another to what’s going on in our real-life physical world. It’s the epitome of using someone for everything it can get and giving nothing back in return.

I’d been having some ulcerative colitis flare-ups a while back and as a result I was taking a lot of tests and a lot of medicine. The medicine finally seems to be working with the only real annoying side effect being that my bladder is going soft and I have to pee all the time.

I had a dream last night in which I was casually engaged in preparation for yet one more test or exam. I don’t know much more than this because the most vague part of any dream seems to be how we arrive at them in the first place. One minute we’re lying in bed with every single electrode in our head frozen in shutdown mode, a totally blank screen, an empty book, a vacant lot when suddenly a dream appears and it’s like watching the previews of movies to come in a theater where one scene after another is thrown at us and all we can say, if we could talk at all, is, “yeah, that looks pretty good.”

I don’t know where the exam was taking place but apparently a blood test was called for and there was some difficulty sticking the needle into the vein. This struck me as a little bit out of the ordinary since I’ve never experienced this problem in real life. I have the easiest arms in the world to stick if sticking needs to be done.

In fact, I wouldn’t even be aware that this was a problem were it not for the fact that when my daughter was 15 months old she had some kind of a stomach virus. They wanted to take a blood test and her arm was so tiny that neither the doctors nor the nurses could make a clean stick. They were passing the needle around like a hot potato taking turns sticking her arm and getting nowhere until finally someone remembered that the guy down in the lab, the man who normally analyzed the samples, was actually a whiz when it came to sticking hard-to-stick sticks. Turns out he was as good as they said he was and that was my last involvement with that whole stinking sticking problem—until last night when it popped up again in my dream.

Like I said, I’m only in this dream as an unwilling accomplice. Somebody else is running the show, a show in which apparently the whole staff is having a difficult time drawing blood from my arm. To my credit, I seem to be showing remarkable restraint considering that this is a problem I have never encountered before and, the fact that I know it shouldn’t be a problem at all. I demonstration no frustration or aggravation, even when they tell me that they are taking me somewhere else to get the blood drawn.

So did they take me down to the lab for the multi-talented lab guy to work his magic? Or did the magician come to me—wherever I was? Did they call in another doctor, another nurse, Dr. Seuss perhaps?

No, they did not and this is where the dream gets weird—not scary weird or spooky weird or outlandish weird. It’s not that kind of dream. Up to this point this dream has been moving right along like all good dreams do, progressing steadily and deliberately as all good dreams do and to be honest nothing to this point has seemed too farfetched or out of the ordinary. It has been a very pleasant dream—one that I would never lose any sleep over; at least not until I walked into “Joe’s Barber Shop” for my blood test.

Let me tell you about Joe’s Barber Shop. For the first ten years of my life, I had my hair cut at Tripi’s Barber Shop, on the corner of Goodman and Norton where the town of Irondequoit and the city of Rochester met. Tripi grew up with my father, cut my father’s hair, cut all my friend’s hair, and cut all my friend’s father’s hair. He cut everyone’s hair the same—flat tops, crew cuts or regular cuts leaving everyone looking pretty much the same, which was okay with the fathers and okay with the boys for the first ten years or so.

But at some point a kid is looking for a little more out of a haircut. He reaches that age where looking pretty much the same doesn’t cut it anymore and he now wants to look different, only he wants that different look to be a better look not a worse look. He wants that little something special, that little something extra—what would you call it—oh yeah, I know—something that will make the girls notice him.

In seventh grade I transferred to a Catholic school in the inner city. I met two new friends there, Guy and Joe, who introduced me to Joe, the barber.

Joe was an old, white-haired, Italian who took pride in cutting his customer’s hair so that it exhibited style and flair. I had so little style and flair growing up that a teacher once called me up to the front of the room and put a bobby pin in my hair to get it out of my face.

Joe the barber was the first person to enlighten me about cowlicks and the fact that I had two of them. He told me that they would, like two tornadoes approaching each other on the open plain, be a continuing source of frustration since they would prevent the hair in the top of my head from ever sitting down nicely. As he said this he rubbed his hand across his own scalp to emphasize what a perfect head of hair should look like.

Looking at Joe’s bushy white, perfectly coifed hair I never doubted for a moment that he knew what he was talking about. From the first day I met him I felt pretty good about the cuts I got at Joe’s Barber Shop.

But back to my dream. It’s hard to believe I didn’t protest Joe the barber performing my blood test—hard to believe because Joe has probably been dead for forty years; hard to believe because Joe’s Barber Shop, even when Joe was alive, was located about a thousand miles from where I now live; and hard to believe because I’m absolutely convinced that Joe never performed a blood test in his life.

Joe welcomed me into his shop for my blood test with a sweeping arm movement, directing me to a vacant chair, as if he were beckoning me to accompany him in a stately waltz in a Venetian ballroom.

He wasted little time and before I could say, “What the hell?” he had tossed the cape over me and I was being prepped for a 110 year old, kindly, still bushy-white-haired Italian barber to draw my blood. But first there was some other business that had to be taken care of.

Before he could stick me I had to pee. I asked Joe if I could use his bathroom and in that same, smooth easy motion that old Italian barbers seem to have perfected over the years, he directed me to a little bathroom in the back. And I didn’t get there a moment too soon. Apparently, I must have really had to go because as soon as I got in there, I started—

Wait a minute! I’m not peeing in the bathroom of Joe’s Barber Shop. I’m peeing in my bed in the middle of my dream. I quickly woke up, closed the gates and got to the bathroom. Send that dream to the archives; I’m back in the real world now. The damage was minimal but one question remained unanswered.

What the hell was that dream all about? Obviously, I was in a deep sleep at about the same time that my bladder was bursting. My bladder took the perfectly normal course of action of going to my brain with a very simple request—get me to the bathroom. My bladder was counting on my brain to wake me up. But what was my brain thinking?

Obviously, it had every intention of completing this routine task but at some point, for some reason, my brain decided the best way to proceed was with a dream that dilly-dallied its way through fifty years of haircuts, blood tests, stomach viruses, and Viennese waltzes. It’s true that the dream got me to where I had to go when I had to go but it damn sure took its sweet time getting me there.