Dream On
Has this ever happened to you, Dear Reader?
When I was at university, I used to go to the pub once a week to seek male attention for my looks AND sense of humour but, because I was shy about actually dating anyone, I would stick pretty much to sitting with girlfriends and drinking brewskis.
I also developed a pathological fear of dancing which may or may not have had to do with being a) left-handed; b) from the Sault; c) a tail-end boomer caught between rock & roll and disco - neither of which I could dance to on account of rock & roll is not dance music and disco is gay (in the retarded sense, I mean).
Anyway, this guy - AND HE WAS BLACK - took a shine to me and one night kept bugging me to dance to the point where I was forced to tell him I was a lesbian, "I'm a LESBIAN?!", which normally worked and was enough to put an end to the pestering. Guys would back away, "Hey, I don't want any trouble - sorry, eh - lemme buy you a beer", and that would be it.
But this guy was like, "I don't believe you", and kept bugging me until I was forced to say, "Look, I said I was a LEZZZZZBIAN?!"
Anyway, I forget what happened, how I got out of dancing (not with him, just in general), and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc, but later that night I had a dream. Not like Martin Luther had a dream, more like a dream where I said to the guy, not, "I'm a Lesbian?!", but, "I don't dance with *******."
Yup. It was awful and in that dreamy way of, "Hey look, a toilet. Right in the middle of the party. I think I'll get naked and sit down and do a big poop."
Everybody heard. The whole pub was quiet when I said it, of course. No music, no laugher, just me saying, "I don't dance with *******". And the guy got really violent and pulled out a gun and was going to shoot me because it was all justified on account of I'd just said in front of a whole pub full of university students, "I don't dance with *******", except that some kindly arts students talked him out of it, said I didn't know any better and obviously I was just a racist, and they'd call the police and let them deal with me, and to put the gun away.
Needless to say, my life was ruined, over, done. Luckily it was only a dream and I woke up, completely sweaty and freaked out, but conscious.
Honestly? It was the scariest fucking dream I've ever had. You'd know it was, too, if you ever had that dream. C'mon. Have you? Have you ever had a dream where you've said something really, really, really inappropriate and wrong, wrong, wrong and everybody's mad, mad, mad and your life is pretty much or as good as over because you said a bad word for no good reason and no matter how hard you try to justify it you can't because it's just so frowned upon and there's simply no denying that you said it and in front of lots of people?
I mean, there was context in the dream, too, so, it was pretty clearly racist.
Anyway, just so you know - THAT'S how shy I am about dancing in public.
