If you’re a new reader, you might think today’s post is strange.  Let me quickly set the stage for you:  I don’t have particularly restful sleep and sometimes when I try to improve it, I have funny dreams.  It all started by thinking a seed catalog under my pillow would help me to dream in flowers; since then, the project has taken on a life of its own.  Just remember, it’s all a dream sequence and the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

The culprit for today’s dreamscape, in part, was my friend at work, Lee-Annie Leonie.  She’s so thoughtful.  Knowing I’m always looking for new gardening ideas, she brought in a garden accessory catalog for me.  She said “look at those elevated raised beds!  That’s my kind of gardening.”  She was right, too.  It was a sweet little set up; easy on the back, easy on the knees.  Planted just right, it would be like a living salad bar.

The catalog made good bed time reading and I was studying a soaker hose system when I finally drifted off to sleep.

The dream started in Lisbon Falls and I was wandering around town, carrying a shopping bag.  I ran into a girl from the math team and we had a little chit-chat about going back to college for the spring semester.  I told her I was taking my father’s Plymouth Gran Fury four door sedan back to school and the next thing you know, we were driving around the University of Maine’s Orono campus.

There had been some major construction over the summer; our dorms and cafeteria had all been done over to look like Roman temples.  My dorm room was shaped like a parallelogram and one side was adjacent to the cafeteria.  As I was bringing my bags and my vinyl records from the Plymouth, I noticed some construction workers building a giant salad bar outside my dorm room.  I tried to talk to them to find out what they were doing, but they didn’t seem to hear me.  The next thing I knew, I was marching into the cafeteria, full of righteous indignation.  How dare they build a salad bar outside my dorm room!  Didn’t they know how much I studied?  A salad bar would attract undesirables and ruin the ambiance of my intellectual oasis.  Plus, salad bars were full of germs and wilted lettuce.  They didn’t have “sneeze guards” on them for nothing.

I was on a mission to tell the cafeteria manager I refused to have a salad bar outside my dorm room.  But the cafeteria manager was nowhere to be found and all the cafeteria workers were chimpanzees like Lancelot Link.  I was wearing my leopard print fleece bathrobe and I’m not sure if it scared the chimps, but they were all chattering and ignoring me.  Every time I would ask one of them “where’s the manager?” they would put their hands over their ears and make the kinds of noises chimps make on Tee Vee.

I got back to my dorm room and got the keys to the Plymouth.  I start driving around campus looking for a place to park the car, but I hadn’t studied the parking maps and I couldn’t find a spot large enough for the Plymouth.  I kept getting farther and farther away from the dorm.  Suddenly, I was out in the country and I thought to myself “parking this far off campus isn’t really going to work.”

As can only happen in a dream, the country roads were snow and ice-covered, even though it was sunny and warm back on campus.  I made a sharp right hand turn and ended up in a snow bank.  Luckily, the old Detroit iron was like a Sherman tank and it crushed through the ice and snow.  I performed a masterful three-point turn and was on the road again.  The snow melted as I drove and suddenly I pulled the car over to the side of the road to investigate a beautiful vegetable garden with rows and rows of cabbage, lettuce, peas, and kale.  I thought to myself “how can this garden be so far ahead of the season?”

Getting no answers, the Plymouth and my leopard print bathrobe disappeared and I was running on the side of the road in my underwear.  Although the sun and heat felt like Sedona, there was cold mud everywhere on the side of the road.  I was running through the mud, sinking deeper and deeper into it, yet none of the mud got on my snow-white underwear.

I was exhausted and there seemed to be no end to the mud.  I’m not sure why I didn’t run in the road; the road was dry and dusty and seemed like a good running surface.  Then, out of nowhere I heard the sounds of hoof beats.

Two chariots were racing each other along the dusty road.

The lead chariot was driven by a toga-clad white-haired presidential candidate and in his chariot was the secretary of the Lisbon Historical Society.  It was obvious he had kidnapped her because she was screaming and it looked like a silent movie version of Ben-Hur, all dust, smoke and tears.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any weirder, following close behind the kidnapper-hopeful and the damsel in distress rumbled the second chariot, driven by (I kid you not) Billy Idol.  He was bare-chested and wearing a leather kilt with long chains hanging off the sides of the kilt and the chariot.

I knew if I didn’t grab some part of either Billy Idol or his chariot, I might never get out of the mud so as the chariot approached, I reached out and tried to grab Idol’s leather kilt, flapping in the breeze created by the kidnapper-hopeful’s chariot.   I managed to get a grip on the leather hem of his kilt for the briefest of moments before he slipped away.  With no strength remaining, I fell in the mud.  Billy Idol turned around, curled his lip, sneered at me, and then cracked his whip.  His chariot sped off in hot pursuit.

After what must have been the mother of all struggle dreams, I woke up.

I sat pensively on the edge of my bed, waiting for my coffee to brew.  I think I’m going to grow my own living salad bar this year, just not in an elevated raised bed and certainly nowhere near my bedroom.  Oh, and no gardening in my underwear, either.

Where are you going to plant your lettuce this year?