Dream Project: Grilled Cheese and Lost Car

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Painting by David Campbell

 Over the last year or so, I attempted small projects every month that focused on something related to creativity. On the surface the goal was to become engaged in a specific subject or topic for four weeks and then move onto something else. The short-term goal was to feed the mind. The long-term goal was I hoped some of the things I did or daily habits would resonate and spill into my every day life and carry on when the project ended.

Some of these monthly projects included "listen to every Grateful Dead show from 1979", which I did last March, or "watch a documentary every day", which I did last February. In the short-term, I watched a lot of amazing documentaries on subjects I didn't know much about. The long-term affect... I've been actively watching at least a documentary per week.

Last November, I decided to write a blog post every day about sports betting, which is how Ocelot Sports was spawned on Tumblr, and I continued writing in December and it snowballed into a new site.

January's project was a Tao of Pauly revitalization project and I wanted to generate 500 words at least five times a week. That project blossomed into regular posting (six days a week and double sized posts), which has spilled over into February. Who knows how long I can keep this pace up before I get bored or hit the road for an extended stint.

In February, I wanted to maintain a dream journal, which became problematic from the start because I'm an insomniac. Whenever I eventually fell asleep, I didn't always fall into a deep enough of a sleep to dream. And on the few times I did dream, I always forgot about them upon waking. So, this month's project has been a bit of a failure. I had only 2 dreams of note that I wrote down, and o ne of them was last night.

I could only recall a fragment of last night's (early morning) dream. I parked a car in a strip mall parking lot for a mob guy. His grey Cadillac. But I forgot where it was parked... or it got stolen. Upon returning to the lot, I couldn't find it and started to freak out. I walked frantically back to the restaurant where he was eating and I tried to ask around if anyone had seen it, but trying not to let the mob guy know I lost his car. I walked back to the parking lot and passed a diner. The grill was in the window and the cook was making a grilled cheese with an old cast iron pan, but he used olive oil instead of butter. I got back to the parking lot and one of the low-level mob thugs helped me look around. He kept saying, "Where the fuck did the grey Cadillac go? It just didn't get up and walk away."

I woke up shortly after and recalled the dream while stumbling the the bathroom to take a piss. That's when I struggled to piece together the narrative of the dream... and I blurted out, "Why did I walk around the parking lot and use my keys to find it by pressing the UNLOCK button or the alarm, which could help signal me to the right place?"

Logic sometimes falls out of whack when you're dreaming. The weirdest thing about the dream is that I have slim to no details about the parking lot, but I have a vivid impression of the grilled cheese in an old pan. Olive oil? Really. That's what my subconscious wanted to point out to me?

Of course, that's not what's really going on. It took about thirty seconds to break down the dream. The mob guys were the bookies I worked for. The lost car represented my inability to pick winners in the NBA (I'm having a break even year in hoops and struggling to even accomplish that, compared to a remarkable year in the NFL). But, I'm still trying to figure out what the grilled cheese was all about.