Swimming with Kurt Russell

What are dreams? Random electrical discharges across the brain? Distant memories mixed with recent events? Or are they our way of processing the day’s events? Do they signify anything, if so, what?

Kathy sometimes cries out in her sleep. Someone is after her. She is mad at someone. Once she had won the lottery. She talks a lot in her sleep. It was every night in the year after her mom died. She constantly visited the old house, at first without seeing the new owners and then sometimes getting caught by the people who had moved into her childhood house. All this in her dreams.

The other night Kurt Russell and I were swimming underwater. He was showing me how to stay under for a while without surfacing, as he would when a script called for it, but I already knew how to do that, so we came up laughing together. There was some other actor sitting on the edge of the pool, but who it was has faded now.

Now mind you, I’ve never dreamt of Kurt Russell before. I’ve always like him as an actor, way back when he was in those Mickey Mouse Club movies. Sure, he’s taken some really dumb roles sometimes (“Overboard”, “Escape from New York”), but hey—he’s married to Goldie Hawn who, btw, is finally starting to show her age. Have you seen those “Family Table” ads? So how did he pop into my dreams? Swimming, I understand, since I swim every day at work, but I don’t usually dream about actors. Not even Mariska Hargitay. Darn.

Maybe I want to be Kurt Russell. He sure seems to have a lot of fun.

Ever wake up and try to write down your dreams? Can you even read what you scribbled at 2 a.m.? It never worked for me. Absolutely unintelligible gibberish.

Like my dreams.