Dream Diary, rated PG(13)

I fall asleep to Indie Arie, and seven hours later these bizarre events occur:

An outdoor barbeque in Hong Kong -- memories from my adolescence.
This leads somehow to an immense music talent audition held in a raked concert hall, like Lang*, only the organ is in the center. There is a director and a haughty Chinese woman with a boring mid-length straight hairstyle who plays piano and doubts that anyone talented enough will walk through the door.
Enter Tommy*, bearing a guitar and I think probably a homemade burrito wrapped in foil. He is optimistic, almost naive in this setting. Three other equally country-ish boys join him and they play a simple but happy folk song. Somehow the youngest of the group (I suppose now they are brothers?) is asked about his specific talent -- suddenly there is a large audience. He is asked to play piano. He's never learnt piano. But he will give it a shot, despite the odds. Everyone waits, chattering. The casual chatter amongst the crowd starts to turn cacophonous, when there erupts from the piano "DUN-DUN-DUN-DUHHHH ... DUN-DUN-DUN-DUHHHH ...." I've known this since the beginning of the scene, but this is a warped version of the discovery of Amadeus Mozart.
Now we are being treated to a concert by the discovered genius in cosy outdoor amphitheatre. Everyone is clamoured around the kingly/teacher/authority figure, an old blond woman. We have an argument about immigration, the difference between foreign nationals and expatriate Americans coming from Hong Kong to the States. This, disrupting the concert. I am angry.
Again, four boys, friends. A Steve Weintraub-y* figure is in trouble with his girlfriend because he has attempted to hawk off videos of the two of them having sex in 69 different positions. Somehow the colors here are dark turquoise, blue, green. The girl is blond. She is upset, but misses him greatly.
Cut to scene of angry parents of said girl: pillow-talk. Big, Oafy, Bearded father--frankly, looking a little like Bernie Saffran*, bless his soul--is livid about the treatment of his daughter. Elegant brunette wife seems to be trying to calm him down -- "don't take it down, take it up" -- when, in a sick twist, it is evident that she is encouraging his lust for revenge -- "Take it up to the cupboard, where you can use the extension cord." (implication: for strangulation)
Cut back to turquoisey bluey dormy room. Big, Oafy, Bearded father has snuck in to lay in wait for Steve Weintraub-y figure, and decides to hide in the closet. Somehow, miraculously, he fits.
"Steve" is repentant only in as much as he misses the girl desperately. There is an odd joviality and pride in his manner -- it is understood that he sought to share their intimacy as a testament to their great, genuine, love, not as exploitation. They are both unabashedly proud of their sexual feats. (maybe this is coming from the plot of Salman Rushdie's Shalimar The Clown, which I just read?)
Cut to flashback scene of their first time. This is pretty hot. Somehow, I have more of the viewpoint of the man.
Cut back to dorm room. There is a list, and people are lining up, signing up. Turns out, "Steve" is actually signing people up by number to purchase each of the 69 positions he and blond girl achieved, but he is doing this as a declaration of his continued love for her. B.O.B.Dad is still in closet, somehow softening. This ends happily.
Now we are in a large theatre watching a Broadway show. I am seated with my immediate family -- Mom, Dad, Sue. We are in the first few rows. It is a show I suppose based on the previous, um, love story, since everyone's singing about sex. I am busy critiquing the theatrical elements in my head. There is a Nutcracker-winter-like scene where everyone enters in white, and a revolving white-polka-dot gobo is swirling. Next scene is the big musical number. Lead is blond girl, and her name, stage or real I don't know, is "Kelly Rorque". Chorus of teenagers/children. Everyone still in white. That girl from Oliver Steele's class who has a sweet face, and sandy hair in two Chinagirl buns is in the chorus, as is an unfamiliar, but specific-looking young Chinese boy. They are all singing Kylie Minogue's Locomotion, except that the lyrics of the verse are all rhymes about sex. It's a little disturbing, kind of like the diarhhea-song, but more so.

I wake up.

Notes:
*Lang Concert Hall, award-winning performance venue situated in Swarthmore College.
*Tommy: Caucasian Vassar-graduate who is dancing in the piece with Alice. Works for a hedge fund. Short buzzed hair, prominent nose with a sharp angle at the top but bulbous nostrils. Nice guy.
*Steve Weintraub: NYU kid I went out with a couple times. Graduate student in Art History, straight out of Oberlin undergrad. Snooze. Jewish, brunette, here: a goatee, petite features, bright blue eyes. Slender. My age, looks alternatingly intelligent & sexy or Twelve.
*Professor Bernie Saffran: Swarthmore's much beloved and be-missed Economics guru, who passed away earlier this year.

***

Much like my deeply-lined palms, which contain many a unexposed revelation, anyone out there was to decipher my crazy dream?

The interesting thing about writing out a dream is that your judgments about the characters and their motivations is entirely inside-out, and are as critical to the shaping of the narrative as the sequence of events that occur. Meaning, as the author of your dream, you are simulataneously 'inside' each of the players even though you don't feel like you control what they do or what happens to them. Like when the reconciliation between "Steve" and the Blond Girl I know is happening only by the dissipating anger of the hidden Father. You have eyes in all places.

The deja-vu in dreams is such an interesting feeling: "I've been here before, yet it's not quite the same." The locales are all distorted memories of places I've actually experienced, and of such variety. Like my wardrobe, on the occasion that I actually take inventory. Something from everywhere around the globe.