My fantasy life needs work.

I have a recurring dream. It doesn’t show up often – or at least I don’t remember dreaming it often – and it’s not at all unpleasant, which is odd considering the setting.

I was born in Detroit, and spent my earliest childhood palling around with the other little white boys in the alleys around Seven Mile Road between Evergreen and Lahser (I looked it up.) Wouldn’t recommend letting your five-year-old do that these days but it was a different time. Just about my only innocent time and I spent it in Detroit, which is an irony that should be served chilled with fava beans and a nice Chianti. Ol’ fin de siècle Joel, but as usual I digress.

The dream usually takes the form of cramped roads and alleys bound by crumbling brick buildings, around which odd but unthreatening things happen: a man selling cotton candy from a little booth. The guy who has a rich social life even when he’s all alone. Sometimes I’m futilely looking for something, sometimes I’m just wandering around. It’s “detroit” but no particular place in Detroit, y’know? Just your typical recurring dream, my brain spinning its wheels in old mud.

Last night’s dream had a twist, though. I was squiring around a young woman who looked suspiciously like Sandra Bulloch. (Bite me. She was adorable in Demolition Man.) And toward the end of the dream we’re walking down this residential street which for some reason doesn’t look like postwar Dresden. And this blinged-out early-seventies Cadillac stops, and two black guys start hassling her.

This is the sort of situation that never ends well even in a dream, but a man’s gotta do etc. so I interpose my tender body and tell them to get lost. And…

(I’m not proud of this but I swear it’s true)

…they simultaneously leer and snap open cheap Italian switchblades, of the sort I stopped admiring when I was maybe 15. And I raise an eyebrow ala Roger Moore and draw my seriously uncool Taurus 431 from a seriously cool tooled-leather holster, and I don’t know where that came from. And they simultaneously remember an urgent appointment elsewhere and squeal off to bless somebody else’s dream. And I laugh out loud as I reholster and say to Sandra, “I have always wanted somebody to do that.”

And I woke up, and groaned, and thought, “Other people dream in archetypes. I dream in clichés.”