Tales From My Slumbering Subconscious, part something

Last night I dreamed I was infiltrating a bank building downtown. It was very tall, and I wound up on the top floor in a cramped little room with about ten call center reps. One of them was a friend, so he and I were talking and laughing about whatever.

Suddenly the tower swayed and the part I was in fell off. This was moderately alarming, what with it being hundreds of feet in the air and me being inside it. But apparently it caught a gust of wind and rode it sideways a mile or two. It smashed into a beautiful lawn in front of a church. People came running to see what happened, but all of them except Mneme were far more interested in the building fragment than me.

I was fine. Mneme and I went to a movie, where the lady sitting on the other side of me was talking to us and eating our nachos. It turned out that the movie was actually some kind of training class for future Mission: Impossible team members. (Because you have to have nachos for that, obviously.) They picked teams to go on the assignment, and I got picked last – sitting there by myself in a big empty auditorium.

There are a few things interesting to me about this dream.

1) Falling. I wasn’t terrified – frightened, alarmed even, but not terrified. And heights are generally pretty scary for me. Being in a piece of skyscraper that’s falling to the ground would probably in fact frighten me to death long before I hit the ground. Curious that my subconscious didn’t go there this time.

2) Getting picked last. Despite the fact that I’m nowhere near athletic, I don’t have a lot of awful memories about getting picked last for stuff in school. In the neighborhood where I grew up, I wasn’t usually picked last. I wasn’t asked to be a receiver or an outfielder much because I’m barely decent at catching and I’m all but hopeless at throwing. But if you want me to swing a bat or tackle someone, I can do that tolerably well. (Besides, if you’re doing impossible stuff, Mneme and J are your go-to people, not me. And I just fell out of the sky, so cut me some slack.)

3) The church. I think about church and Christianity a lot. I was listening to NPR the other day, and they mentioned that until the evangelical movement really started becoming more mainstream most people had no idea what a “born-again Christian” was. This startled me. I just figured that everyone who went to church (except maybe Catholics) knew all about that. Which shows you that what I really know about my former faith is far less than you’d think, considering all the time I spent studying it and being immersed in it.

Anyway, it seems significant that I landed in front of a church. Not sure what it means, exaclty. I didn’t spend the time in free-fall praying.

Something to think about …

EDIT: Also 4) no Paula Patton? Come on, subconscious. Not fair.

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