Touch of Gold

I had a new type of dream experience this past Sunday morning. It will be difficult to describe (as are most dream concepts), so in the interest of clarity I will describe it chronologically, or as I experienced it. Here is the narrative of my recollection:

SETTING: An unremarkable diner. Slightly greasy, but acceptable. I’ve just finished a meal with my school-age daughter and we are on our way out the door.

We head out the door, but my daughter (we’ll refer to her as Alice, an homage to Carroll) asks a busboy for a quarter. He is caught off-guard, and fishes a coin out of his pocket to give to her. I pull some change out of my own pocket to reimburse the busboy, and a dime slips through my fingers and clatters on the dirty floor. The busboy deftly picks a quarter out of the change in my palm and Alice and I walk out into the car park. Approaching my car, I notice that the front wheels consist of a pair of wheel trucks on struts- each side has a truck with a pair of wheels, not unlike aircraft landing gear. The driver’s side truck seems badly out of alignment. Next I notice someone is snooping around my car.

I confront the snoop, he is a middle-aged man in a cheap but honest-looking suit. He apologizes, and by way of excuse explains that he is looking for a lost young woman. He fills me in on the sparse details surrounding the woman’s disappearance, and I come to a startling realization: I’ve been in this man’s position before. The whole scenario was an elaborate setup, a kind of suspended-reality game, a mystery novel performed in the flesh. I confirm this when I ask the man, "did Tommy Lee Jones ask you to look for this woman?" The man answers in the affirmative. Of course he did. Mr. Jones also asked me, years ago, to help solve the mystery of the missing woman. Something else comes back to me- the villain. The villain in this fiction is none other than Carl Weathers.

I help the snoop to look around the parking lot for a few minutes, remembering how much I enjoyed investigating the mystery when I went through it. Next thing I remember I’m driving at high speed down a dirt runway in the dark. There is a pyrotechnic display in the distance, and an ATV dragging a mattress passes me on the right side. The ATV operator is dressed up like a rodeo clown, and there is a young woman gagged and bound to the mattress.

This is all that I remember from the dream itself, but the experience doesn’t end here. When I awoke, I was certain that my dream "memory" was something more than mere ad hoc fabrication by my subconscious. In the first few moments of wakefulness, I thought of the memory as something which actually occurred in my past. Shortly afterward, of course, I realized that this was unlikely; I’ve never met Tommy Lee Jones nor Carl Weathers, and neither have I solved any missing persons mysteries. My next thought was that it must have been a movie I’d seen. I started thinking about that possibility, and the title "Touch of Gold" came to mind. I searched Google and came up dry. It turned out to be a fabrication after all.

This experience was very different from any other dream experience I’ve had, and makes me even more curious about the workings of my mind. It’s worth noting that the mystery in my dream bears conceptual similarity to "The Magus" by John Fowles and the movie "The Game" starring Michael Douglas. Then on Monday night (after the dream) I saw the movie "Ex Machina" for the first time, which is also thematically similar to these stories. Here’s to the ever changing, ever bizarre world of dreams and the subconscious!