I wrote this early, so I could recall the imagery. I am glad I did, since the news of the massacre in Paris drove everything out of my mind as I researched frantically to attempt to understand what happened, and why. I did a nice little piece on it, but I think I am going to tuck it away. It is not self-censorship, but rather just prudent these days. We are headed for some big trouble- well, let’s put it as “bigger trouble” and this cannot end well.

Anyway, I did not dream about that, though I may in the future.

There were 54 emails that came in since I fell asleep and the iPad slipped off the big bed and onto the floor last night. I have no idea why I took both the device and a real book back to the bedroom- the exercise and the adventure of the snow day had me pretty much committed to unconsciousness the instant my head hit the pillow.

I liked the walk to Willow in the snow and ice yesterday- Jamie and J-Gary and Jon-without and The Lovely Bea were there, and J-Peter was present as well. He just got his name. He is an intelligent fellow with a dry wit and wild sparse hair, and we struggled for weeks to identify what his true name might be after he started coming in.

Since we are all J’s at the Amen Corner end of the bar- Jayare, Jon-without and John-with and Old Jim and Jamie- we decided he was J-Peter, sort of like J. Crew, and that was done.

But that is neither here nor there, and before I do anything else I need to capture it before the images drift off into the ether from whence they came.

The dream occurred in the little sleep, the one that followed a brief period of wakefulness at 0330 this morning.

It was the Magic Caddy. There was no inconsistency in the dream, though some is apparent now. What remains was surreal and wonderful and included many of my favorite associates. So was David Niven, the great British actor, movie star and author.

I wish I could recall more about the why of it, as I rolled to the right in bed and had the pillows just right to enter the dreamscape. It was not a perilous entry, and natural enough to cross the frontier from mild irritation at being awake to being fully engaged in activity in the other plane.

I can connect some of the bits to things that happened in the land of reality. I had the block-long black beast of an auto probably because of a story I read about an authentic American original, a cantankerous rancher with a couple hangars full of vintage war-birds and automobiles. This was the story.

I think it might have been there on his cotton-country Texad ranch that we got the Caddy. It was a remarkable car, with the classic lines and fins of the design works in Detroit. By turns, it was a multi-story vehicle with a blister observation pod on the roof, and a windscreen that could be adjusted up and down in front of the driver’s position, a throw-back to the open phaetons of another generation.

My best pal was there, in fact, was right there in the passenger’s seat when we went to move the car on the service drive next to the New Office to pick up our passengers. At the end of the driveway there was a set of traffic barriers that channeled us down to a place where I could not turn fully to the right and had to back up.

There was a car approaching from the alley to the left that I could not access, but managed to hit only one barrier with the rear bumper and extricate the long car from the confines and turn it around. It was remarkably agile for a car that big.Once I had it pointed back up the service drive to the entrance to the New Office, I saw that the silver Jaguar that had been approaching had followed, and then stopped mid-way up the drive.

The Driver emerged, and stood next to the sleek British car. Looking in the rearview, I noticed that it was David Niven himself. He stood with that thin aristocratic military bearing, shoulders back, pencil-thin mustache and slicked back dark hair, looking very much as he did in his role as Phileas Fogg in “Around the World in 80 Days.”

He was curiously back-lit in Hollywood fashion and tall as shit as I glanced back to the road and pulled the magic Caddy to the curb to pick up the crew. I shouted out a greeting but I was not sure he could hear me.

I turned to my pal and said: “David Niven is dead, right?”

My friend nodded, and said, “1983, in Switzerland.”

“And he really wasn’t that tall, was he?”

She shook her head. “No.”

Then we went in to get a crew that looked very much like the ones from the Amen Corner. Leaving the office, I almost fell into the Koi pond by the path, and I don’t know who wound up in the observation blister.

Once in the driver’s seat, I pushed the windscreen forward in preparation for getting underway and noticed that there was classical music on the radio in the dash, which made me realize that the journey was beginning in earnest, since that was the same music that the clock-radio plays when it is time to join the morning world, and I accepted it.

So here I am, 54 emails to go, and still trying to figure out why the loonies are shooting us down and we are doing nothing at all about it. Apparently we cannot even speak its name.

It is more surreal than the dream, and I wish I could go back. David Niven would know what to do. His generation did.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303