Dreams: WTF

[cimorene]

I dreamed that Lady Gaga was going to put on a small concert. I was with a group of random (imaginary) people killing time in a giftshop and idly flipping through cheap jewelry when she showed up alone with a studded leather sports bag over her shoulder. She was adorable and friendly, and asked our advice about the concert, like how long would it take to walk there. I had a whole conversation with her about how cold it was outside, and whether she wanted to put on her stage clothes first or change into them there. We walked up a steep hill right in the street - there was no sidewalk - and somehow ended up at my childhood church (a modest-sized Unitarian Universalist congregation).

A small old-fashioned lecture hall with a sunken floor and wooden fold-down seats had mysteriously replaced what in reality is a small library, and that was where she was going to perform. She filed in there with all 20 or so audience members and they started fiddling with the lights, but then I realized that I had to go to the bathroom. I snuck out and, completely ignoring the actual bathroom in the building, headed for the Nursery, which has its own bathroom with a door and lock, but there were two strangers in the room watching TV news in the dark, so I continued back to the religious education classrooms. The big classroom at the back of the building was my destination because I knew there would be one of those children's potties in there. (There wouldn't, for the record, in reality.) It was sitting under the window next to a teetering stack of fabric scraps and glue, and the bowl bit was sitting next to it with pee and poop in it. In the dream I guess I couldn't smell and this didn't gross me out at all. I decided that I would go to the bathroom in this tiny pot on top of the poop to save time or something, rather than risk embarrassment by walking past the strangers in the Nursery.

So I turned on the light and sat on this potty with no trouble. Not that I've tried, but I suspect in reality my ass wouldn't even fit on one. And while I was sitting there - though I didn't dream that I actually did anything - the back door of the Church opened and a toddler toddled up to the door and stared at me. I waved at him and gestured and asked him to please just walk on by but he refused, and instead entered the room. That's when I recognized him as the a little boy the same age as my now-18-year-old sister who used to be the bane of my existence when I was a preschool-level Religious Education classroom assistant at age 12 because he was such a little asshole. (He comes by it honestly because his mom is a complete asshole too. She's like my mom's nemesis, and is personally responsible for driving some friends of ours away from the congregation.) So right after this his mom walked into the classroom along with the hapless Absent-Minded Professor dad of my sister's childhood BFF, plus like three more adults, and they saw me sitting there on the little pot and started a conversation with me but we all just completely didn't mention it. I asked what they were doing, and they revealed that they'd come to have a committee meeting. I pointed out that it was 10pm on a Friday night. They pulled up tiny child-size chairs to a short, round table and passed around sheets of colored construction paper and crayons to take notes. Asshole Lady in turn asked what I was doing here then and I said that Lady Gaga was about to give a concert.

"Hah," she laughed, humorlessly and condescendingly, "I think you're thinking of Finnkino in Helsinki, and I think you'll find that it's actually tomorrow that she's performing."

"No!" I said. "She's here now. You can go down the hall to the library in a bit and check."

"I don't think we'll be doing that," said Asshole Lady with her hateful fake smile that's always made me want to stomp on her fucking dowdy ugly-ass shoes.

Then apparently I was done - although I still hadn't peed? - and tried to pull my jeans up without standing up as surreptitiously as possible, and sidled out of the room without another word.

I went back to the library-turned-small-auditorium only to discover that Lady Gaga was gone. There was a table with a row of very Srs Bzns people seated at it instead and they were in the process of introducing themselves prior to starting an audience-participation debate about the It Gets Better Project and DADT. My eyes sort of bugged out and I wondered if I had hallucinated the whole thing. But before they started actually debating, a door opened at the bottom of the auditorium and Lady Gaga eased back through with a smile and wave and called that her break was over and she was ready to come back now. A bunch of audience members came down to drag the debate table away and Lady Gaga stood there beaming and smiling at everyone. But then I woke up before I got to see any performance.