Odd Dreams...

The other night I dreamed that my wife ran off with a contractor while I stayed behind and worked on someone else's house for free. We were laying tile, I think.

Last night we continued our RE Investing Inspired Dream Series (REIIDS) with a particularly odd one. Let me explain.

First of all, I just want to say "yaaaaaaAAAAYYYY, SLEEP!" It's been a long time since I've gotten a full night's sleep. I hit the sack at 10:00, which felt a lot like being grounded. Normally I stay up until midnight reading RE books, or lately, checking this site's stats because I loves me the love. I don't know what I'd do without you, dear readers. Probably find self-esteem in things like "hard work" or "integrity." Pthppt.

Where was I? Ah, yes, dreams...

So, I'm driving along in my dream truck, (which pathetically is still my little Ford Ranger--way to dream, loser), and I get a call to check out a property here in Arlington. I have no idea who called me, but whatever. You don't argue with the muse.

I get to the property, but now Arlington is my old neighborhood in Washington State. And I mean my OLD neighborhood. It's where I got my first bike (a spiffy Seattle Seahawks-themed, chrome and banana-seat number), where I went to school in grades K-4, blew up ant hills, built booby traps in the woods with my friends, and had my first "crush" (on my neighbor buddie's 13-year-old sister. I was eight, by the way. Aww, yeah.) It was a place where we could walk to school without fear of getting mugged or molested. We lived right across the field from the high school football field, and every fall, as the fog crept in over the field and those damned ant hills, we'd hear the whole town screaming for the Tigers to rip the hearts out of our rivals.

In some ways, it was a primitive, warlike place.

When I got to the property things started to get weird. It was a mobile home with a house on top of it. And the neighborhood was gone. I was now in a brown and dead forest with spindley trees and a layer of dead vegetation about six inches deep. There were lights on in the trailer/house, so I knocked on the door.

I don't know what I expected--it was a dream, after all--but the choir director from our church opened the door. He's an odd fellow, as I suppose most choir directors are. Balding, paunchy, and if you ever saw him in a leather cat suit, you just might not be surprised. But, he had a couple of guests over, so I figured it was safe to take a look around his place.

Inside, it was pretty much what you'd expect of a trailer in the woods. It was long, narrow, and there were dirty glasses all over the place.

"It's not much," the choir director said, "But the upstairs is really nice. You could knock out the bottom half of the house and have a mansion. Let's go take a look."

However, there were no stairs to the house on top of the trailer. You had to step on the kitchen stove and climb up through a small, square opening in the ceiling. In the magic of Dreamland, I scampered up there with no problems. And somehow, the choir director was waiting for me. I didn't see him climb up.

The upstairs house perched on top of the trailer wasn't a mansion, as you might have guessed, but it WAS a nice three bedroom, two bath home. I took a look around, estimated some costs, and told him I'd give him $150,000 for the place, IF he knocked out the bottom half, the trailer.

Then he said, "Accepted! And now, we dance!"

That's when my capacity for weird was exceeded, and I woke up.

Normally I can't remember my dreams, but as I opened my eyes to the haunting blue light of my iPod clock radio, I could remember everything about what I'd just "seen." I sat up and looked at the clock. It was 3:37 a.m. I looked at my wife, and she was wide awake, which pretty much freaked me out because she was looking at me.

"You were talking in your sleep," she said.

"I was?" I asked with dread. "What did I say?"

"You said, 'No matter how hard I keep pulling, it just won't work.'"

I dunno--your guess is as good as mine...