Kablammo!

Last night I had a number of very vivid dreams, perhaps as a result of drinking until 4:30, getting the munchies, and preparing (and then eating) over a pound of mashed potatoes from scratch before making my way to bed. I dream pretty frequently, and sometimes I even remember snatches of my dreams for a few minutes after waking up, but last night’s are sticking in my mind pretty tenaciously.

One dream involved a friend of mine getting a job. It was, no doubt, influenced by all his recent talk of interviews and the like, particularly how happy he was with how an interview yesterday went. As it happens, this dream literally came true. (In the sense that what I dreamt actually happened, not in the sense that “my prayers were answered” or “I got something I’d specifically been yearning for”.)

Another involved an academic corporation and was also obviously influenced by recent events and nonevents. It stayed well within the bounds of plausibility, up until the end, when it devolved into some kind of police showdown in a (suddenly and inexplicably) condemned and decaying building. At this point, I woke up, thought “what the fuck?” and went back to sleep.

This is when things got interesting.

I was with two guys who were more or less Ryan Philippe and Benicio del Toro, and we were in a situation much like they were in The Way of the Gun: would-be professional criminals getting way more than we bargained for.

We were in it for the money, at least at first. However the situation soon spiraled out of control and we kept being promised ever-greater sums of money by organized-crime types — in exchange for doing Just One More Job. And then another and another.

One of these jobs involved ensuring the safety of a deck of cards, of all things. The cards must have been extra pretty or special or something, but I certainly wasn’t in an appreciative mood when I ended up having to play a game of 52-Pickup while dodging a hail of gunfire. (The 52-Pickup, incidentally, was played on a hillside eerily reminiscent of Tartu’s Pirogovi Plats.)

We got the cards where they needed to go, whereupon we were rewarded with a once-in-a-lifetime offer for yet another job, this one the biggest of them all and certain to get us quite a lot of money. Much as we might have liked to turn it down, doing so would have guaranteed our immediate and grisly deaths, and anyway we were in way too deep already.

What we had to do was get jobs on the waitstaff at a tremendously exclusive and expensive French restaurant, and then work there for six months. For, you see, the man we were supposed to assassinate was currently six months down on the waiting list for the restaurant. That was the plan: work there until the guy got a table, wine him, dine him, and murder him. So we got jobs there. (Benicio Del Toro was the sommelier.)

The guy (who was, among other things, a world-renowned hairdresser) eventually came in as scheduled, and after a deliciously savory meal — and an appropriate, complementary wine — we launched into some Hollywood-style too-cool-for-words Tarantino-inspired dialogue. Then we killed the guy, collected our tips from our other tables, and made our getaway.

Our getaway vehicle seemed like some kind of cross between a Chevy Astrovan and a double-decker bus like you might take between Tallinn and Tartu. (It was a dream; it made sense at the time.) Our getaway was going smoothly, everything was going well — until we got into a fairly minor fender-bender. With a gnome or something.

For, you see, there was a small but very vocal minority of various fantasy creatures living in this world, and they viewed themselves as a very oppressed minority. They had a lot of great lawyers and lobbyists, and were quick to label everything a hate crime. So the gnome (or pixie or elf or kobold or whatever the fuck it was) we got in a minor accident with decided to call the police and make these ridiculous claims about us saying dreadfully racist things to him and bla bla bla.

The dream ended with us getting away with murder (quite literally), but being sentenced to a court to pay a big fine and complete a fantasy-races-sensitivity training program for what we did to that poor gnome’s feelings.

FIN.

Song of the Moment: «Dire Straits» — Giant Robot