"You charmed the hell out of Snow Cat!"

DISCLAIMER: THIS COULD BE A BORING POST, AS IT'S ABOUT A DREAM. BUT IT DOES FEATURE A GUY WHO GOES BY THE NAME OF SNOW CAT, A PICTURE FROM LABYRINTH, AND A MITCH HEDBERG QUOTE. SO IT MAY BE WORTH A SKIM.

An hour and a half ago, I awoke from a nest of dreams chock full of recurring themes: I was running late and couldn't seem to get anywhere in time while the clock raced ahead, every set of stairs I encountered seemed to dead end or go in the opposite direction (a la David Bowie's Labyrinth), I suddenly had a paper to write that I hadn't been aware of before, and the whole thing took place at the Air Force Academy, a frequent JEG dream setting.

My duties were done for the day. I'm not sure what those duties were --I assume it included swimming lots of laps, as I was at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and I used to go there each summer for the Falcon Summer Sports Camp program to train. (I was once a rather good swimmer.)

I was trying to rush back to the faraway parking lot to fetch my car so I could make it back to my family's hotel room just in time for a 6:30 dinner with my sister, mom, and grandma.

But the stairways went nowhere. Long lines greeted me at every elevator bank, so I willingly raced up the carpeted stairs only to find that after one flight there was a glass wall in my face. You had to take an elevator to get up the stairs. Once I waited for an elevator to take me up to the stairs, I encountered a similar snafu.

Stairs leading nowhere--or leading to dead-ends, at least--have been in my dreams for as long as I can remember. In 1998 I visited the Air Force Academy with my dad and a friend from high school. A retired AF Lt. Col., my dad's status allowed us to roam around wherever we wanted on campus. I peeked in the cadet dormitories just once to look at where I'd stayed all those years ago (in reality, only 3 years had passed since my last summer there, but at the time it felt like an eternity). And there I saw them: the stairs that led nowhere! I'd forgotten that one stairwell in one dorm there went up a certain number of levels and then just stopped with no warning. Was this the reason I dreamt of dead ends so often? It was an interesting explanation, nevertheless.

To make a long story stort, the dream careened out of my control shortly after the stairs/elevator debacle. I eventually decided to go for the elevator and, in rushing to catch the elevator before it closed, had to lift my legs high over a deliberately-placed lamp that had been laid in my path. I got into a playful tiff with the young man in charge, telling him he had only put it there so women would have to lift their legs high and he'd catch a glimpse of their undies. He denied it and seemed annoyed with my defiant attitude.

When I got off the elevator minutes later, a woman presented to me a white carnation, a gift from Snow Cat. As in the show The Bachelor, this granted me some kind of immunity, a guarantee that I wouldn't be kicked off. "You sure charmed the hell out of of Snow Cat," she said, and it slowly made sense to me that the young man dressed in black working at the elevator bank had been the almighty Snow Cat.

But how did I have time to be relieved? Just then the woman also told me about a SAT prep course paper that was due, and I only had 5 minutes to get to my car and meet up with my grandma for dinner.

"I hate dreaming because when you want to sleep, you want to sleep. Dreaming is work. Next thing you know, I have to build a go cart with my ex-landlord." -Mitch Hedberg