Nicholas Dreams

Failed pitch, temporary Astronaut and Obama’s extraterrestrial theories

I had been agonizing over a pitch we were doing for my friends commercial. I was waiting on Bobo’s animation treatment to see what were going to present. I was walking through an enormous bureaucratic complex. The halls were covered in dark wood with incredibly high ceilings.
As I proceded down a long hallway it opened up into an enormous, semi-circular auditorium with all the seats filled. Bobo was on stage giving his pitch on our project from behind a podium. In the audience were a number of government dignitaries including Barack Obama. My friend Leon was seated at the edge of a back row. It suddenly occurred to me that it was Leon’s piece we were pitching for.
I leaned against a wall to observe. The lights lowered and the curtains peeled back. What followed was an absurd visual orgy of animation. Bobo had taken the product we were designing around and had integrated it into an extravaganza of CG acrobatics. Lasers, fight scenes, exploding planets etc.
I was delighted by its thematic scope but realized immediately that he had completely overshot the mark and that it was going to offend every one of Leons aesthetic sensibilities.
As the lights came back up Leon wandered over to me with his hands in his pockets. He furrowed his brow and very apologetically said there was no way he could work with us considering where he saw the project going. I shook hands with him and gave me my assurance there were no hard feelings.
I went to tell Bobo the bad news when I realized my name was being called over the loudspeaker. Apparently I had been elected to be an astronaut for a day. I walked up to the podium suddenly attired in a tight-fitting bodysuit.
The podium was suddenly replaced by one of those old-school conical space probes they used for the first earth orbits. I sat inside to moderate fanfare (there were only a hundred people or do in the auditorium). I launched immediately through the ceiling and without much intermediate experience was immediately floating in zero gravity. I remember only having a quick moment to absorb all the cosmic beauty when I rapidly descended back into the auditorium.
I stepped out of the space probe into an empty auditorium. No more audience, just janitors sweeping up and putting the chairs back into place. Someone notified that as an astronaut for a day I had been granted an audience with Mr. Obama. I was directed towards his office and I immediately proceeded towards it.
As I knocked on the door I realized I had a rolling suitcase with me and I was still dressed in my absurd proto-astronaut outfit.

He opened the door with an enormous, pleasant smile on his face and beckoned me into the room.  He was tall and slender with amazing poise.  The room was surprisingly nothing like one would expect the presidents office to be like.

It was long and dark and filled with an absurd assortment of stuff.  Almost like a cliched room of curiousities where one would find suits of armor and various weaponry in glass cases.  His desk was crammed in the back corner behind a pile of boxes.  I wheeled my suitcase into the room to be closer to his desk.  He shut the door behind me and began shuffling about moving boxes here and there, unfolding and reading random documents.

I began unpacking my bag systematically to get to some garments on the bottom.  Normally when I have suitcase dreams I am quite aware of revealing my undergarments to passerbys but in Obama’s case I was utterly un-selfconscious.

So, I began changing out of my astronaut costume and back into normal attire.  I had all of my clothes neatly arranged in stacks on the floor.  As I was changing I began asking Obama what it was like being President and if there was anything of note he wanted to tell me.

He said, ” You know, one of the great things about being President of the United States is that I finally have confirmation that aliens exist.”  I remember holding a stack of underwear in my arms when he said this.    I pressed him for informtion.  I got right up in his face and implored him for more.  He wagged his finger at me and said, ” Let’s just say that we built a very powerful computer to say hello in every conceivable fashion and we finally got a response.”

Creepy Commercial Corridor and Spontaneous Hindu Statuary Fed By My Tears

The chronology is fuzzy, didn’t catch this one early enough but it is still fresh in my mind.  I was hanging out with a large belligerent, dark-skinned man.  Sometimes he was black and sometimes he was Indian (Hindu specifically).  We were living in some sort of multi-tiered structure.  It resembled a really high end shopping mall of sorts.  There were escalators and balconies and most of the walls were steel and glass.  We lived on the mezzanine in modern, harem style luxury.  We were perpetually going on shopping trips in the space and elsewhere to look for odd items.  Some of my responsibilities were to vet new displays and retailers.  Make sure they were doing their job and had the right kind of merchandise represented.  Sometimes people would install totally inappropriate windows displays and I had to call the out.

I had this one interaction with this creepy, little person.  They weren’t quite a midget or a dwarf.  Just like a totally miniature human.  He was clearly male but also had a disturbingly androgynous quality.  To top it all off he was mentally retarded on some fashion.  It was really difficult to put my finger on how or why exactly.  He had long, almost hipstery, rocker hair.  He had been given a small nook off of the main promenade to sell knives and other semi-violent implements.  To get to his particular retail space, one had to climb a ladder into a small room.  It had one enormous opening that faced out over the main shopping gallery and one could see the contents of his room from most vantage points in the mall.  He had this incredibly inappropriate poster and wall-painting that depicted people getting stabbed and flayed with his knives as his main promotional material.  I made an incredibly diplomatic attempt to persuade him to take down the artwork as I was sure it would not only fail persuade people to purchase his goods but would probably offend most of our patrons.  He reacted very angrily and couldn’t see how or why it was an unsuccessful campaign.  In a moment of exasperation I ripped down all the adverts and threw them down the ladder onto the floor underneath.  He began stuttering and stammering angrily and brandished one of his blades to come at me.  He was incredibly easy to disarm and I kicked him out of the building in a fit of anger.

For the rest of the dream I was always aware of the threat of being stabbed in the thigh by this disgruntled midget and was extremely paranoid throughout.  I went back down to the mezzanine to confer with my partner/boss, the large dark-skinned man.  He was reclining on some enormous chaise lounge, absentmindedly mentioning girls I ought to devote my attention to.  Extolling their various virtues and haranguing me for not taking advantage of any of them.  At that point he suggested we go on some sort of extended car-ride or road trip to get our hands on some frsh tires.  He told me to go into the basement to fetch some provisions for the trip.  At that moment, a female friend of mine (from waking life) appeared on the scene.  She was dressed for cold weather, looking very elegant and beautiful.  She is one of the people in my life that I have always been deeply attracted to but never have been able to stomach her lack of existential control in life.  We descended down an escalator arm in arm to go to what I presume was the garage.  On the way down the escalator I was happily nuzzling in her neck and beginning to warm to her intensely.  As soon as we got to the bottom my dark friend shouted to me to come back up the stairs.  At this point I completely lost my temper and began berating him for his lack of sensitivity and total personal abandonment of all proper managerial abilities.  He was beginning to get all worked up for his rebuttal when he looked above my head with surprise.

An enormous wooden block was falling towards us attached to a parachute.  It landed softly at my feet and lay horizontal on the ground in front of me.  It was an enormous, door-size, wooden carving of a Hindu deity in profile.  It resembled Hanuman or Shiva Nataraj in a running position.  My dark friend began shouting orders at us to get it upright and store it properly.  I began chanting mantram under my breath and crying profusely.  As my tears fell on the sculpture my tears began flowing through the various furrows of the carving. As the tears began spreading from the center everywhere channel they flowed through began turning gold. As more and more of the outlines and details of the sculpture began turning gold the deity began animating slowly.  It smiled broadly and looked at me from the corner of my eye and began running in great leaps and bounds across an enormous mountainous landscape.  All of the anxiety and perturbation that had been pursuing me through the dream instantly vanished as I realized that this particular deity energy was always communing with me and always psychically available.