Dream Q:

Dream Q:

I.                    At this sort of bizarre gathering that was the setting of this dream I ended up playing a new card game with an intimidatingly well-adjusted group of young people. I nearly won, but folded at the last moment (folded as in a folding chair folds, not a poker-player.).

My last move came. I had a four. I had a Joker. I passed, deciding JUST TO WAIT, as I do in OTHER GAMES, for a five, so that I might only then play down the four. It was only mere moments after I had past that I saw that I lost my opportunity, and mere moments later a MORE SEASONED player took it.

Kinky.

The truth was that I could have used the Wild Card as a Five, and then I could have just played down my four.

Yet having seen the four, ALONE, I QUICKLY DISMISSED it as IMPOSSIBLE, proceeding to examine my Joker SEPARATELY. I suppose the ‘Joke’ had been on ME that time. It was analogous to my analysis the preceding evening of how elaboration causes us to grow one-sided as seeing opposites that had been taken to extremes unsettles us with Cognitive Dissonance in proportion to our egoes. The winning stroke, a rookie victory, would have been a paradox, but in my insecure one-sidedness, precluding the ‘impossible’ by focusing on only one item at a time, and not both at once, I lost the chance to PROVE THEM ALL WRONG. People hate to be up-staged; I know this.

II.                 It seems as though this whole sequence of the dream was a sort of game-show set in one of those kids-arcades, except for adults.

After playing cards with the youngsters, I joined a group of OLDER PEOPLE, less attached to the passions of Nature, and more settled, but no less daring. The host described to us the challenge: to consume a caustic acid which he went in greater detail to describe.

When it was brought out, it turned out to be no more than a large, orange bottle of hot sauce. I asked a fellow contestant, a portly chef fashioned after Tom, if this would be much hotter than his own salsa, which I Knew, as IN Actuality, that I could handle. He replied, frowning with characteristic diligence: “OH, yeah.”

I might have ended up staying away from that PARTICULAR challenge.

III.               ******* had appeared within this one. I remember having to leave the room to contemplate the salsa: would I dare to try it? By then I’d all ready seen her, quite peripherally. There was an unspoken intimacy between us, one that skeptics may bewail but that a quiet heart will all ways find evidence for before long. It was meant-to-be, but yet there loomed the danger of our paths remaining parallel, uncrossing.

As I made my way back in through a familiar tunnel not unlike the walk-in SHARK TANK in the Baltimore Aquarium, I saw her pass me on her way out. I suppose she’d tried the salsa, and that she was either on her way to the next challenge or the nearest water-fountain. (Sexy.)

We exchanged polite helloes, per chance confined to glances that could be expressed in feelings if not words. And I felt tempted to attempt the salsa challenge.

Dm.A.A.