I haven't dreamed vividly in some time, to my utter dismay, and thankfully reversed the trend last night with two of them (I guess leftover jambalaya, a bottle of cheap cabernet and The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer, Volume 2 are all you really need).

First, the new Todd Haynes Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There (which I still have to see) had become an all-time record-breaking moneymaker for the Michigan Theater. There was a gut-churning array of I'm Not There cash-in events and activities throughout the streets of Ann Arbor--rides, games, taffy pulls, the whole enchilada. Someone I knew who used to work at the Michigan came into the restaurant and--quite accidentally--grabbed someone's sandwich off the counter, thinking it hers. Fluffy somehow sensed that I knew her and told me to follow her, adding "she's the one who looks like Bob Dylan!" I should add that quite a vast percentage of Ann Arbor's population, maybe thinking it would make the place seem more like an actual city, had taken the movie's lead and swanned about dressed as the Zimm himself in one of his many poses over the years. The lady in question, of course, was trying to look like Cate Blanchett in the movie. I eventually found her, and as we hadn't seen each other in a while (in real life, she knows a rather unusual secret about me) we got to chatting and leafing through Bob Dylan pamphlets and coloring books. Before I knew it, a good two hours had passed, and I hurried back to Chateau Fluffy, where my boss was fuming. "Well? Did you find her? What's your decision?"

I woke up at that point, but thoroughly enjoyed it.

After falling back to sleep, I found myself thrown what seemed to be a couple of weeks in the future, as Starling Electric were going to play the first phase of Mittenfest at the Blind Pig. People came over to my house--which resembled no house I've ever lived in, but I could tell that the place rapidly shifted back and forth between Ann Arbor and Baton Rouge. It eventually seemed to settle on Baton Rouge, as we started watching the BCS championship between LSU and Ohio State (itself a month in the future, and even that could have meant Ann Arbor because of the whole Les Miles thing and Ohio State's involvement). An ex-fling showed up with some new guy (the latter alternately nice and rude to me, which I found consciously hilarious). It was an interesting assembly. I passed out, "woke up" four hours later, and realized that the show had already started. Rather inconvenient, that, as my house not only turned into a shack across the river (definitely Louisiana, this), but also found itself the center of a crystal meth operation gone wrong, with squat, shadowy figures in three-piece suits waving guns and chasing varied quarry in trucker hats. A little freaked by the gunfire, I crawled away on all fours so as to avoid detection and found myself in a secret country club somewhere to the northwest of Port Allen, with a still, shimmering lake surrounded by Renaissance statuary and Inca stonework. All of a sudden I was being driven through the place by a rather attractive anthropologist who I could swear I've met in real life. I asked if she could let me out (stupid! stupid!), as I really wanted to get to the show. She dropped me off in New Roads, which looked nothing like the real thing. It was now a charming interwar city of the kind that reminded me of what Sinclair Lewis' Zenith (in Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry) must have looked like. Running into an old high school friend, whose name I horribly mangled into that of film director Stephen Sommers, the criminal hack who gave us Van Helsing, I decided to visit a podiatrist, who I found immmediately suspicious due to the curious hat she wore. Hearing her giggle behind doors at the money she would make off me, I determined to make my escape and wondered when the hell New Roads had gotten so cool and attractive (noticing as I did the "NOW HIRING COOKS" signs in many restaurant windows). Finding that the bus for Baton Rouge (!) left in another hour, I decided to explore the downtown area by car (so many of my dreams have me driving) before I was offered a helicopter lift by a passing chopper pilot. "Sure," I said, and he took me for a spin before dropping me back at the bus station, where--really hungry by this point--I noshed down on a "Cajun" vending machine feast of smoked salmon and dill sauce (like they serve at Ann Arbor's Central European restaurant Amadeus). A guy asked me, "don't they have those at Common Grill?" I paused and looked at him. "Which Common Grill?" I asked. "The one in Chelsea," he told me. Chelsea, Michigan. Baton Rouge and Ann Arbor had become inextricably linked. Parts of "downtown New Roads" resembled parts of downtown Chicago, so I'm wondering if there's some sort of psychic triangulation going on. I sadly woke up before I could finally make it to Mittenfest (as I'm sure it was still going strong by that point).

I love it when places get mixed up in that way. There are two recurring places in my dreams--one some kind of Mediterranean port, and another in Latin America, both of which have featured frequently in my dreams (which is really all I used my journal for at one point). This one'll take some figurin', though, I don't doubt.