Chicken Soup for the Feverish Mind

There are familiar elements I revisit in my dreams when I am feverish. The house I grew up in is larger (probably the way I saw it as a kid), and there is a non–existent set of stairs that look remarkably like the entrance to the basement in the house at Storms Avenue in Jersey City. I lived there for about four months when I was eleven. Then I returned every summer and almost every Christmas until I left Puerto Rico. My great grandmother had been moved there by one of her daughters.

There is also a beach that, in my dreams, it's located just about where the river bends in Bayamon. And I even have a few friends that I meet there when I visit. Not real people. I have no idea who these guys are. But we are friends and I always feel welcome. Surely, as the architecture, they are amalgamations of people I’ve loved because they comfort me.

I am finding a sinus infection: hello, spring! And last night I had one of those dreams. It’s always interesting because there is always some sort of caper involved (usually I “borrow” a car and go joy riding).

I awoke early because I apparently needed to stop at the pharmacy before going to school. School figures prominently in these dreams because being a student has always been one of my favorite things. The classroom brings me joy. I know some of you do not quite relate, but trust me, if there’s a classroom and studying involved, it’s a good dream for me. For most people, finding themselves in a dream about to give an oral report, for instance, is a source of major anxiety. They find they forget their speech. Suddenly they find themselves pantless or naked. Me? I teach a whole class because I am full of citations. Yeah, sometimes I am naked, but I’m cool with that.

In this dream, I awoke and left my room to turn off the alarm radio in the kitchen. And it was the old transistor radio Mami kept in her kitchen. And it certainly was the kitchen I woke up to since I was almost two until my seventeenth year.

After I left the house, the trip to the pharmacy took me through parts of SoHo and Chelsea, and then into the McCrory’s on Bergen Avenue in Jersey City. A ways from Santa Rosa in Puerto Rico, but in my dream within walking distance…

Then I had to deliver some papers to the office. The dream office is always some dream bastardization of the Disney offices on Fifth Avenue off Union Square. But I was in some floor that did not quite belong. It was a labyrinth of makeshift cubicles and tiny hallways dotted with tiny, windowless offices. I assume it was an insurance place, but cannot swear to it.

There were bags of tiny M&Ms everywhere, and as I was leaving, I briefly chatted with a young woman who told me she was meeting a mutual acquaintance for lunch. Shortly after that, I drove past a beautiful old theater (which used to be across from Journal Square but which I believe got raised years ago). I saw the young woman sitting on a sidewalk table with a young man who looked remarkably like Aaron Tveit. Why Tveit? I have no clue. Daniel Sunjata would have been far more interesting.

I stopped to talk for a minute, knowing I had to make it to school, and as we chatted I remarked that I had not formally dropped a philosophy class the previous semester and I was not sure if I’d drop it before I automatically failed it or if I’d be forced to take the final without the chance to defer it. Their advice was to talk to my professor to see what could be done.

Before heading to school, I went inside the bar to use the facilities, but instead found more bags of tiny M&Ms—some spring colored. Then somehow found myself in the Disney building, trying to take the elevator, but apparently it only stopped going up and I took one and found myself chatting up with Anne-Marie Johnson, who apparently knew the exact forms I needed to fill out and the right words to make sure that my professor would grant me a deferment.

Coincidentally, when we all came out of the building—and this part was a little different because it looked like we came out of the side of the building that faced Sicily—there was my professor: Bernie Sanders!

He agreed to let me defer, but first he lectured me on the best ways to pass the class. And because he’s from Brooklyn, he waved his hands to punctuate every word (sometimes every syllable spoken). I can’t tell you what he said. I stopped paying attention after I realized it was Bernie and my own laughter woke me up.

So, what have you guys been dreaming about lately?