A Palace and Men Galore

Ok I had the craziest dream last night.

I remember it beginning in the theatre. I’m not sure if I was watching a movie or if it was some kind of awards presentation or concert or what, but it was in a theatre and I was wearing a nice black sweater. There was a kind of handsome early 40s man sitting next to me (kind of light hair and not SO much my type, but very warm and nice chiseled face) who started talking to me and, to my surprise, kind of grabbed my arm while we were talking – like to see if I’d pull away.

The dream is really scattered so you have to try to follow.

So I’m not sure what kind of community this is that I was living in … like maybe some kind of academy or something (I remember feeling like we were all professional students, or at least a lot of us were) and I lived in this huge old building that was, rightly called, the “palace.” You know when you are in a dream and you realize that an element has been recurring? Well that’s the palace for me. I went “home” and discovered that my room had been moved and saw the guy from the theatre down the hall…like if I was standing in my room with the door open then I could look down a long hallway and see his room, and I remember that we kept stealing looks. I was really disoriented that everything had moved, probably to make room for him, and I remember thinking how silly it was that I felt lost in my own house just because my bed had moved one room over (and as it turns out it hadn’t, but that’s not an important detail). When I was walking on the grounds one of the administrators/attendants (like someone who worked there and who treated me with respect but was himself middle-aged and also obviously a character of some weight in the community) asked me if “Robert _____” (don’t remember the last name) had moved into the palace where I was living, and I remember thinking that I knew the answer was “yes,” because I’d seen him in his room, but calling where I was living “the palace” really threw me off. When he walked away, the history of the building came back to me (it used to be a palace) and that’s when I realized that building had occurred in other dreams.

The dream (unfortunately) moves away from what could have been a pretty hot romance lol, because we were all assembled in the palace and it was announced that there would be a competition akin to one of those dinner party mystery games. Robert was looking VERY handsome in his tuxedo, and we had this kind of silent flirtation like “this would happen but right now we are competitors” going on, and of course everyone had growing suspicions about the role everyone else was to play in the game. The dream lost a bit of coherence in this part because I just remember going up in a very modern elevator, after our roles were announced, with the game master (who himself was playing), and he was given a clue about me to the effect of “don’t trust him because he has knowledge things that other people don’t and has done all of this before” or something like that, but, true to his warning, I knew that he had received that clue about me and could kind of read the situation. We had this sort of odd conversation in this long elevator ride that would be fitting for some kind of experimentalist French play or something where I was trying to figure out my own clue, and where I should get off the elevator, and he was trying to feel me out to see exactly what his clue meant – like saying to me that I must already know the solution to the mystery, and me saying that I didn’t know what the solution was, yet, but I knew what it wasn’t. It was very weird. The elevator stopped, and I thought for a minute it was broken, but then it was clear that I had to climb out of the elevator through a false passage into one of the chambers of the palace where there was this smokey room full of black dancers dressed as 1920s flappers. I had some kind of test with them that I don’t remember, but I do remember sort of grinning, at that point, because it was clearly going to be a very interesting game, and it was fun to see them a bit dazzled by my sudden appearance from a secret passage.

The dream totally changed gears, I’m not sure how, when I made some kind of emergency visit to my mother, who I was shocked to find out had remarried. Not only had she remarried, but she became the third wife of an Iranian man living in Dubai (like I said, the beginning part of the dream with Robert was the best lol). I entered into this setting of domestic chaos, as one of the children of the second wife was getting married and there was a huge celebration that my mother wasn’t invited to (being sort of the black sheep who was resented and looked down upon by the first two wives who were better in rank and because they were Muslim). I was totally puzzled as to why she would enter into that situation, because I thought she was fine single, and being married hadn’t even changed her life substantively. She kept her place in California and he occasionally visited her. She was only in Dubai for this celebration that she wasn’t allowed to officially be part of. When the party guests returned to the house, and in my mind I was thinking of how to make her husband answer for making her a pariah and treating her like some secret mistress, and while I was also trying to figure out why my mother had made such an awful decision, they wanted her to perform some kind of ceremonial dance with the daughter who was getting married (which was mysteriously like a pairs figure skating spin, so I’m clearly watching too much Olympics!) and my mother caused a huge scene by refusing. The problem was that she was so emotional and this huge drama was caused, but she wasn’t interrogating her husband in a productive way, and I intervened to really grill him on how things turned out this way. I remember telling her: “You still have your place in California…we can just go home and forget about this.” I also gave her a funny speech about how unjust it was that if they were going to exclude her from the ceremonies, then he could at least send her on an all-day shoe shopping trip to compensate. I’m not sure exactly how the dream ended, but I think I persuaded her to come back to California with me.

OH! I almost forgot – when I was in Duba,i someone from the palace called (Robert?) and I remember saying: “This will sound crazy, but my mother became the third wife of an Iranian man but she doesn’t even live here, here being Dubai….” and I said I’d have to call him back. I also almost forgot about another kind of interesting part – during the whole scandal about my mother refusing to perform the dance, she was SLOWLY claiming her place in the house and insisting upon mingling with the guests (awkward but bold) and we were sitting at this bar when I heard two guys (kind of hot brothers) speaking Dari to each other (and of course since it’s a dream, I could understand it). I immediately knew that they were Tajiks from Afghanistan and was waiting for them to make their way closer to my mother and I so I could introduce them, surprise them with my knowledge of Afghanistan and my Tajik friends, and finally have SOMEONE (my mother) get to see how hot Afghan guys are. I remember they both had really, like, almost blond hair, and were young (like my age) but muscled in that way that you might not notice at first but then when you realize what their bodies are like you’re like “wow, he is BUILT!” The hotter of the two brothers, interestingly, when he saw me (before I even had a chance to approach) said to me in Dari: “You are Tajik!” and I told him no, but that I knew what he was saying and that I’d predicted that he and his brother were from Kabul, which they were. He told us that they had just moved to France two years ago, and I woke up when I was asking him why France, as he spoke such good English (his brother did not).

That’s my dream!

VC