Rhino’s strange and hilarious dreams, part 1
I’m finna start tellin’ y’all about my strange and hilarious dreams!
I’m on a variety of medications to treat bipolar disorder, thin my blood so I can avoid another pulmonary embolism (I had one that nearly took my life in August of 2016), and lower my cholesterol. One of the consequences of the interaction of these chemicals with my imagination and my subconscious is that I frequently have extremely vivid lucid dreams that feel precisely real and lifelike while they are occurring, such that I am almost always convinced that they’re really happening, to the point of waking up expecting to be able to greet the personages in them and being amazed when it turns out that I am alone in my bedroom. These dreams are frequently bizarre and hilarious, and it’s not uncommon for them to involve an absurd and remarkably varied potpourri of pop culture personalities, both real people and fictional characters, as well as anthropomorphic non-human animals or imaginary creatures. These dreams are mostly pleasurable – nightmares are semi-frequent, but are generally so cartoonish that they are seldom deeply traumatizing.
I have the good fortune to have a rather large and devoted audience on Facebook, one comprised of a wide cross-section of people from virtually every walk of life; in the event that I can recall my dreams well enough to relate them to others, which is not necessarily always the case but certainly sometimes it is, I generally write them down to share with my Facebook posse, because they’re so often silly and funny, and I have found that my community generally enjoys and appreciates them. I’ve decided I’ll start sharing them here as well. The following dream, which is roughly representative, occurred on the evening of August 31st, 2020.
“I had a dream that Kermit the Frog and Willie Nelson and I were all firefighters trying heroically to put out a huge fire in a large blue house in New York City. We managed to put out the fire, but were accosted on the street by Daffy Duck, who was trying to sell us a copy of that day’s newspaper. The Cookie Monster walked by, bought the newspaper from Daffy Duck, and immediately ate it. Then he walked away, with a pet billy goat toddling along behind him on a leash.
Elmer Fudd appeared and tried to shoot Daffy Duck, but Daffy magically levitated several feet into the air using special powers in his beak (his bill, I guess) and took refuge in a tree. This looked like it would work out well for him until he discovered that Ransom Drysdale, Chris Evans’ character from Knives Out, had built a treehouse in the tree and insisted on forcing Daffy to go somewhere else. Miffed, Daffy levitated to another tree, pulled a rotary phone out of nowhere, and hired Tom Reagan, Gabriel Byrne’s character from Miller’s Crossing, to get revenge on Ransom Drysdale by shooting him in the face. The shot didn’t kill Ransom or cause him to bleed, but he fell out of the tree, and a medical team comprised of small anthropomorphic elephants appeared and took him away on a stretcher. Elmer Fudd had been in the background, hoping to get another chance to capture Daffy, but when Ransom fell out of the tree, Elmer spontaneously fainted, so the elephants took him away too. The day’s firefighting work done, Kermit and Willie and I watched all of this from the street below, amazed and weirded out, as you’d expect.
Then Steve Buscemi appeared, sitting on the back of a giant yak. He was the informal leader of a group of friends who were hanging out and going for a ride on this yak – also with him were Nas, Terrence Howard, Saoirse Ronan, and the Road Runner. They invited the three of us to go with them to eat dinner at a pizzeria run by the ‘90s cartoon character Freakazoid, and we had just arrived at the pizzeria and were sitting down at the table when I woke up.”