Unlike my Dream Sequence #1 (The Lost Bowling Alley of Atlantis), this is someone else’s dream, which I am mining for fun and profit. Yesterday, I was walking down St. George Street, on my way to pick up a book I had ordered, when a man dashed from a doorway and joined me. He was older than me, though not by much, with a full head of grey hair and a well-formed mustache. He was smartly dressed in a business suit and carried a leather briefcase. He greeted me with a comment about the weather and I agreed with him; it was indeed fine weather at last. Because he was walking at a good clip, I quickened my pace so I could share his company for as long as our paths remained the same. The man had a habit of speech—maybe you know people like this—that assumed more than was warranted. I did not, in fact, know that he was a litigation lawyer on his way to court, and yet he spoke as if I already knew as much. He seemed wound up, like an actor just before he has to step onto the stage. The words came out of his mouth like sheets of rain.
When we crossed Dundas St. and passed the west corner of the AGO, the man pointed to the long façade that flows from east to west like a great wave, or maybe like the hull of a ship. It reminded him of a dream he had. In fact, it was a recurring dream and he first had the dream years ago when he was a younger man. It was a dream of the ocean, which is why the AGO’s façade reminded him of the dream. But in his dream, something had happened to the ocean: it had turned orange, the colour of the desert. And the sky was green. Although his dream was very much a terrestrial dream, it looked like it had been transplanted to an alien world. An aircraft carrier approached, a massive ship in the middle of an orange ocean. It was under attack and didn’t have adequate defences. The enemy struck it in different places and it capsized, sinking below the waves.
I asked if he watched the news just before he went to sleep. Maybe that accounted for the dream. He quoted Jean Chrétien. When a reporter asked the former PM if he watched the news before going to bed, he said he never watched the evening news because it was all bad. The lawyer thought Chrétien was a wise man. He told me how a friend had loaned him a boxed set of Two And A Half Men and he watched episodes of that instead of the news. After a good laugh, it was easier to sleep and he wasn’t so much troubled anymore by his dream of the warship on the orange ocean.
We parted company at Queen Street where he went east to the courts and I went west to my bookstore. It was indeed fine weather at last, and I noticed that the homeless were everywhere. It was warm enough they didn’t have to shelter themselves from the elements. Then I thought of Michael, the homeless schizophrenic I had written about last year. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m losing my critical faculties. I’ve lost my ability to discern any qualitative difference between a spontaneous conversation with a homeless schizophrenic and a spontaneous conversation with a well-dressed litigation lawyer.