Worked at the Sleep Center last night. From the utility closet I listened to a woman named O----- F----- (name withheld: she seemed like she had social problems but was unaware of said social problems, and is therefore the kind of person who googles herself every day) tell her dream to Marcie, the attendant who was working last night.
O------- was in a mall where she saw a man with a machine gun sneak in. She rushed into a store where she and a small Asian woman hid among ceramics. As the man walked by with his gun, she realized she couldn't just sit there and do nothing. She grabbed a bat that was apparently available among the ceramics of angels and small boys in overalls "goin' fishin.'" She hit the man with the gun and celebrated that she stopped any crime from happening. A cop though, in what might be described as the ultimate buzzkill, told her that all she managed to do was stop the murder of a woman who was pregnant with a child who would grow up to murder Batman.
It is much more difficult to interpret dreams without reading the people's files, but a promise is a promise. Just hearing the way the woman talked though, she seems to think a lot of herself, as is evidenced by the fact that she a) stopped the mall shooting, and b) felt she was good enough to hide out with Asians. However, there is a fly in the ointment. The women was in a shop of what can only be described as sentimentalized dreck. She wasn't able in her dream to even hide out in a "cool" shop, or even one that pretends to be a "cool" shop like where kids buy shirts with distressed clowns and aliens on them. She also found her most heroic act to be an anti-heroic act by literally allowing the eventual murder of a hero. Clearly, this woman hides a debilitating lack of self-worth behind a thin veil of middle-class sentimentality and cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, by telling the dream she has a vague impression that sharing with another (even if it is a stranger) could lead to some realized sense of community. She will either come back for more treatments at the Sleep Center or be dead by her own hand within the week.
Today is the first day that Sammy can go in for an interview at the courthouse, so I'll let you know tomorrow how it went. Sammy called Boyce before he left for the courthouse to make sure he was willing to risk a fine/jail time just to stay out of jury duty, and Boyce told him he couldn't be away from his wife and kid for that long.
Boyce's wife is different. Sammy and I don't mind, though, but other people get in a fit about it. Charlotte doesn't really like to be around other people, though she doesn't mind being around us because we don't ask questions we know she doesn't want to answer. We just let her do her thing, and her favorite thing is getting out blank sheet music and writing the musical notation for everything she hears. Commercials, songs, people humming--she writes it all out on sheet music, and it's always right. I once gave her a cd of bird songs and she loved it because it was so hard for her to do, but she eventually got most of them right, I think. Charlotte would then give all the sheet music to Boyce who would then try to play it on his guitar. Boyce isn't very good on the guitar though, but now their son Boyce Jr. is eight and he's already better than his dad is. So now Charlotte gives the music to Boyce Jr. and he plays it for her.
The first time Rachel met Charlotte she used the s-word around Boyce. She called Charlotte a "savant." I didn't even know what the word meant--I thought it meant a kind of medieval sword, so I made this "swushing" sound and tried to cut everyone's head off with an air sword, which was obviously really inappropriate--but Boyce knew what it meant. He yelled at Rachel that just because Charlotte is good at one thing doesn't mean she's good at other things. Then Boyce shouted at Charlotte to add 150 and 146 and she couldn't do it, and both Charlotte and Rachel started to cry. It got really weird there, and Boyce apologized, and to lighten the mood I went to air-chop everybody's head off again with my savant-sword but Sammy told me to quit before I got revved up.
