I don’t remember my dreams very often. When I do, they’re usually the kind that wake me up with a start and cold sweat. Monday night, I had a good dream that woke me up, I think because of the sheer weirdness of it. I remember going to sleep thinking in French, which is really hard since I only took three years of it in high school and then spoiled any chance of speaking it well by following that up with a year of Spanish. I get verbs mixed up, and frequently throw in franpanglish when I can’t remember the word for shoes (in Spanish it’s zapatos, but for the life of me I can’t remember the French word). Towards the end of my classroom French, I started having French dreams where everyone spoke French and I had an amazing accent. I haven’t had a French dream in years.
Then came Monday night. I was a New York tourist shop owner. I was standing behind the counter in my I ::heart:: NY t-shirt polishing snow globes with the Statue of Liberty in them when a Japanese couple walk in with a map and thirty cameras strapped to them, speaking rapidly and stabbing their fingers at a map. They looked at me and started speaking Japanese much more slowly, as if that would make me understand. I laughed and asked them if they spoke English. They shook their heads and I started wondering if I was ever going to be able to help these poor short people (in my dream either I was very tall or they were very short – yes, in my dreams, all the stereotypes are true. It’s not my fault, I swear). Then, I remembered, I speak French. So, I asked them if they spoke French (in French of course – even in my dreams, I’m not an idiot). Voila! They do!! So, I tried to remember if gauche was left or right and vice versa for adroit. We apparently figured it out with hand signals and waving. I hopped over the counter, grabbed the map, led them out the door, flipped my sign to closed, locked the door, pulled down the big metal gate over the windows and door and we were off. We spoke broken japecais and franglais and laughed at our mispronunciation and lack of vocabulary as we went all over town taking pictures and seeing the sites.
I don’t remember the end of the dream: what happened to wake me up, or why I woke up. I was proud of helping those little tourists. I was proud that I remembered my language skills and put them to use for the good of mankind. I’m just amazed I remembered the dream. I never remember dreams. What does this mean?
And yes, I still don’t feel well. Maybe it was a Robitussin dream…