My American Dream

This is what I dreamed last night.

I was in a school gym, remembering how we would be made to run laps around a gym just like that in high school in the Netherlands. And I remembered that I could. I’d be tired, and I’d be protesting loudly like any self-respecting un-sporty teenage girl should, but that’s all. And I resented–in this dream–that I can’t run for two minutes now without having a gimpy knee for the next two weeks (this is real; I ran for two minutes last weekend, and now it hurts when I walk down steps). Then I began to run around the gym like I used to, because I realized it was a dream, and that I could probably run without injuring my fat self in a dream. And sure enough, it didn’t hurt, the reason being that it only hurt if I ran to the right. If I ran to the left, it was painless. Incredible that I had never thought of this before! The only problem was that everyone around me (because suddenly the gym was packed) was running to the right, and people were making annoyed and sometimes even rude comments about my left-running tendencies every time I bumped into one of them. As smoothly and completely logically as these things always happen in dreams, I was now in a doctor’s office, discussing with T the sixteen shots B was scheduled to have this year, and which ones could be given together as a “cocktail”, so he wouldn’t freak out as much and so he wouldn’t miss so much school. Because I did the mid-dream math and sixteen shots meant an average of one and a half shots per month. As we were waiting for the doctor to finally show up, we wandered off to an enormous mansion under construction just off highway 290. It was about as wide as a football field, seen from the road, and who knows how far back it went. It turned out that the owners were having an open house to help pay for the construction, because they had run out of money. We wandered through the huge kitchen with a lot of wasted space (in my Dutch eyes, because in Holland space is at a premium) and an odd guest bedroom with a coffee table that I wouldn’t mind having in real life. In one room the hostess was talking to us, but I was distracted because the outrageously expensive silk wall covering had been hung so shoddily and with so many air bubbles that it looked like something in a claymation movie. People here really don’t know how to build a house. We ended up in a living room where I found myself to be topless among a group of dressed-to-the-nines Texas women. Thank goodness I happened to be my young, trim Dutch self at that moment, and not my obese middle-aged American self, but it was still pretty damn awkward, until I found an opportunity to excuse myself and put my dress back on and blame it all on T. Because Americans can be such prudes. Then T and I were trying to find the builder; T wanted to ask him about Austin building permits, but at some point we got separated and I was asking the teenage son of the house how he took notes in class, because I felt that my children are not learning to take proper notes in school like we used to do in Holland. He was skeptical about my teenage note-taking skills, so I showed him the callous on the side of the middle finger on my right hand (that I really do still have) from writing so much with a pen when I was in high school. That just blew him away, and everyone crowded around to see my Dutch note-taking callous, and they were still loudly voicing their amazement and admiration when our dog woke me up with her polite could-I-please-go-out-because-I-really-need-to-pee bark.

I kid you not.