So I was walking around, after lighting a candle, with one of those long-armed lighters deciding where best to lay it down.  Not on the bed, not on the wood drawer unit, definitely not near those loose papers; the fear of starting an unlikely fire hazard moving through my brain at high speed.  Finally, I settled on my glass top makeup table.  No potential catastrophic issues there.

A few days later, the lighter still lay there.  And, as I set in motion the tasks of my usual morning ritual, I sat at the makeup table, hot rollers poking out of my head like an alien mind-reading headdress waiting for them to cool.  It gave me a moment to pause and realize how close that long-armed lighter was to a vintage White Rain Aerosol Hairspray can.  Images of killer Amazonian spider queens, venomous snakes on a plane and flesh-eating zombies filled my imagination.  If any of those archenemies should suddenly appear, never fear!  I will immediately makeshift a blowtorch to save the day.  Hey, if the technique worked for James Bond (LIVE AND LET DIE) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Swanson not Gellar), it can certainly work for me.  Maybe, just maybe, there is a reason that I put the long-armed lighter in this particular place.  Perhaps destiny and the universe are preparing me for an impending event.  And, then I started thinking about M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs.”  If you haven’t seen it, I won’t ruin it for you, but it has one of those great M. Night Shyamalan “A-ha!  Suddenly it’s clear why that has been happening…” moments.  Conceivably, nothing is accidental.

The good news is, nothing perilous has happened yet.  The bad news is, I am beyond anxious to finally put the long-armed lighter anywhere else.  I mean…what if?

However, should the adversary be of the flesh-eating zombie variety, I have had vast success fighting off zombies in my dreams.  Happily, I will share my basic tactics here in the chance they can help someone else.  Plus, if a zombie is actually reading this post, my tactics probably won’t work anyway.  The zombies I dream about aren’t these new fangled “smart” zombies – they are more mindless; and, certainly, not ones that might put the effort into reading some chick’s random “I’m turning 50” musings.

Okay, so zombie fighting ploy #1:  Pretend you are a zombie too.  Don’t run and hide – that’s an immediate giveaway.  Instead, slowly trudge down the street with a lifeless and dull facial expression.  If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck…  #2:  Talk zombie to trick the other zombies, diverting them the opposite way from where you are going.  Example:  If you are going toward your car (say, a white Chevy Impala), get the zombies to look for a different car in the opposite direction.  Speak in a flat monotone, droning voice and keep repeating their target, “tan Toyota Celica…tan Toyota Celica.”  They’ll start going one way and you can easily slip away.  #3:  when you drive by the Grand Canyon and you see a sign advertising a King Kong picture spot with “bones and all,” don’t fall for it.  First of all, not only was King Kong not real (not even sure why this was part of my dream); but, more importantly, I think this was an overall warning.  You see, touristy spots are legendary for zombies (think the mall in “Dawn of the Dead”), they go where they have gone before, so keep driving and put as much distance between you and the zombies that you can.

Amazing, the things you can learn from your dreams; assuming those methods from my dream would work.

If I could magically invent something that isn’t an actual thing, it would be a dream recorder.  That way, if you wake up and realize that you just had a dream that could be the plot of the next great horror film or your dream involved making out with Captain America (sans “Avengers: Infinity War” beard); either way, it would be worth watching the next day.  I’ve had a lot of dreams worth remembering.  And, luckily, I am one of those people that can semi wake-up; but, fall back into my dreams, if I really want to.  I usually want to, because I have a very active dream life.  Which is probably why my unfounded and groundless scientific theory on dreams allows them to be real “somewhere.”  Knowing they really happened, even if to another me out there, would be awesome.

This is how I speculate in my theory that dreams happen:  Life is like a car’s windshield.  The nick in the glass in front of you on the driver’s side represents the day you were born.  Follow an imaginary line over to the scratch on the passenger side of the glass somewhere and that is the day of your death.  That line doesn’t take up much room compared to the rest of the windshield, but the rest of the area on the windshield is actually filled by other “yous.”

Maybe one life starts up in the corner and goes all the way across where that particular “you” lives to be 120 or something crazy.  But, let’s focus back on the original imaginary line.  Somewhere on that line is “you” going to bed tonight.  And, once that “you” goes into dreamland; it picks up the life of one of the other “yous” on the windshield, perpendicularly.  Could be at any point in the other “you’s” life.  And, maybe in that particular world there are real superheroes or zombies.  Just saying.  I mean, sometimes dreams are so ridiculous, but also very realistic.  It’s hard to imagine where they actually come from; and, to me, this theory is just as valid.  After all, many scientists believe in another dimension, so why not many dimensions featuring different “yous”?

Some other dream thoughts:  First off, I do dream in color.  And, although I’m not sure if you can die in your dreams without really dying, I have been dead in a dream.  There I was in the coffin looking up at the people at my funeral.  It wasn’t even creepy – just checking out who decided to come.  And, I’ve also been other people in my dreams.  I fit that into my dream windshield scenario by believing that some off-shoots might put you in the position that someone else would have had in this life, but you have in the other one; so, a bit of an overlap if you will.  Or, one of the other “yous” is already in another year and you are pulling from the future?

For example, and this is one dream that has always really freaked me out a bit, once I was JoBeth Williams (the mom from “Poltergeist”) in my dream.  The year was 1989 – the year I had the dream, not the year in the dream – I know that because I worked at a video store at the time (which comes into play later).  Now, as JoBeth Williams in this dream, I was making a movie with Jim Belushi.  Up until that point, JoBeth Williams had a pretty full body of work from “Guiding Light” to “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “The Big Chill.”  Jim Belushi appeared in a variety of comedy roles like “Working Stiffs” sitcom, “Trading Places,” “Saturday Night Live” and, my favorite of his roles back then, “About Last Night.”  I don’t think anyone would immediately think to put them in a film together, but my subconscious apparently thought it was a good match, because there I was, on-set with Jim Belushi.

After that dream, I thought I must have somehow pulled knowledge from one of the many VHS boxes on the shelf at work and I wanted to see if my version of the film was anything like the real movie…so, I looked for it.  And looked for it.  And looked for it.  Nothing.  Okay, so just a strange dream I guess.  Fast forward to 1994 and a TV movie called “Parallel Lines” and 1999 to a film called “Justice” or “Backlash”   (it’s got two titles for some reason); and, there you have JoBeth Williams and John Belushi together.  Maybe, just maybe, the 1994 film started filming five years earlier and sat on the shelf somewhere?  Doubtful.  Thanks to the internet, I found out that “Parallel Lives” was written, produced and directed by Linda Yellen and it returns some actors and similar patterns of Yellen’s previous work, “Chantilly Lace” which came out in 1993.  They would have both had to be made much earlier.  So, where did this preposterous dream come from?  All that I know is that somehow my dream pre-empted real life movie casting.  And, although the plot was nothing like “Parallel Lives,” the dream story actually seemed a bit similar to “Justice.”  Did my dream see ten years into the future along one of the perpendicular lines where another me just watched the film, putting it into the dream of the me in this windshield line?  I don’t know, but I’m open to any explanation anyone has for me.

And, unfortunately, but more importantly…if somehow I actually can subliminally predict the future, I have to come full circle and ask myself, “did I intentionally leave the long-armed lighter here on my make-up table?”  #50WeeksTo50