Lucid Dreams

My friend Senta posted something about lucid dreams. She said you can determine that it's a dream by looking at numbers, then looking away and back again. If the numbers are different or scrambled when you look again, then you know it's a dream and can do anything you want! I thought of trying this before going to sleep last night. This morning, I thought about my dreams last night.

Did I try the lucid dreaming technique? I guess not, because the one dream I can remember involved an awkward situation that I couldn't seem to fix. For some reason, I had joined the arty New York quartet Interpol as a replacement keyboardist. I don't even know if they have a keyboard player in real life. It didn't really matter, because I was more caught up in finding the right thing to wear on stage. "Why don't we wear the old red and black, like you guys did on the first album?" The singer was just like "okay, whatever." I tried on various black slacks and red tops. I tried on a red flannel button-up shirt backwards. This seemed pretty edgy to me. The other guys didn't seem to care. In fact, they didn't seem to care much about what they were going to wear. They had moved on, and after 3 albums, their sound was the real focus (you can always tell if a music artist wants to be taken serious by the amount of facial hair they're sporting - look at that guy from The Killers). Being the new guy, I was more fixated on style.

Before long, it was time to play. We hadn't rehearsed, but we were rushed onto the stage anyway. It just occurred to me that I didn't know how to play the keyboard. Maybe I could sorta fake it, you know, throw down some chords and blips like a regular Depeche Mode member. I didn't even know how to improvise. I panicked a little. The other guys were having technical difficulties too. They started taking it out on me, and suddenly I felt like I was back in high school, working as a dishwasher at Dee's Family Restaurant. At Dee's, I was busting my butt washing dishes, taking shit from the other guys who mostly sat around showing each other how well they can flex their abs.

I don't remember the rest of the dream, other than some stage equipment breaking and me trying to hide backstage. I realized this morning that the guys in Interpol didn't ever really dress in red and black as a uniform. I must have been thinking of these guys: