Back to blog

I met him in the You Can’t Get There From Here section, it’s the biggest one. The section next to it is the I’m In The Wrong Place aisle which also has the You Don’t Belong Here group. That one is vast but its also stupid, yeah, yeah, what is David Bowie doing with your mother at the yacht club where your first boyfriend worked. Who cares? It’s a dream.
He looked better than most of the guys I’ve met at the Dream Café. He was probably as sleep impaired as they are but he looked fairly healthy. Its easy to fall into conversations here but its not an ideal place to pick people up unless you go upstairs to the Id floor where they keep all the Dreams Come True, I’m Okay You’re Okay dreams, peaceful oceans, vivid sunsets, childhood friends, ponies, dogs. Also, behind a discreet curtain – lots of sex stuff, all different kinds, bestiality, memories, fantasies. Some aisles sort out to known sex symbols. The Marilyn Monroe section is so pawed over they had to put it behind glass but the corners of the Justin Timberlake section were curiously ragged as well. JT. Who knew?
The men I’ve met up there were gentle, happy, some of them were about to buy dreams they’d already sold to the café, some more than once.
But I wanted an adventure that day and Dirk (almost never a real name) looked like a possible taker. A shock of his shiny dark hair fell fetchingly over his left eyebrow and he kept having to push it back with a slender, manly hand. He noticed me looking at the one where you’re at a concert, a rock concert, and you’re waiting for your friend (who wouldn’t be caught dead there in real life) to show up and you realize that you’re in the wrong auditorium. X (you fill it in) Group is in another auditorium across town and you run out and try to find the train/bus/car to there but instead are interrupted by a crowd of – here he took my wrist and said: “Don’t get that one. You just wake up feeling ripped off.” I wanted to ask him how he knew but he told me anyways, “I’ve bought it several times.” That took care of the ‘is this your first time here’ question.
I’m not going to say that I’m addicted to the Dream Café but I’ve been there a bunch of times. Its only open after midnight, which is when I need it. I still sell my old nightmares there but I never go into the basement where the nightmares are kept. I don’t need any, thank you, got plenty of my own.
I looked at Dirk’s bag and saw that one of my old Wish Fulfillment dreams was in his backpack. It was the one where I (you, anyone) walks into a forest at night and sees a massive Brown Bear in a clearing but you know that the Bear isn’t going to hurt you and he doesn’t and instead you climb up onto his big lap and lean your head against his warm tummy and he smells like honey and envelops you in his soft warm arms and then….
When you wake up the next morning you wonder when you last, if ever, slept so well, you even wonder why and you start your day feeling safe and rested, with the faint smell of damp wood and a bunch of short somewhere that you cannot quite define.