A Dream and a Half

I dreamed I was in a dim, cavernous room in some Mediterranean country.  The walls were thick, there was one door opening on the street which was an exteremely narrow cobblestone passage with a blank-faced row of houses across the cobbles.  It was an empty house being let.  It was all one room with a couple of appliances in one corner, a small closet bathroom, and stairs on one side.   The ceiling was very high and  there was one naked bulb, the light was almost all the weak autumn or winter light from the open door and one high, narrow window.

Three young men and the real estate agent came in.  I was only a viewpoint off at one corner.  They looked around a bit, asked a few questions, and after one unusual answer the agent sighed and said,  ‘you guys aren’t renters, you are here to rob me, right?’  They nodded assent and shoved him at gunpoint back into the corner near where my point of view was.  (By now the room had altered.  Still basically the same, but now the stairs came down from the entrance to the main room where I was.)  Suddenly one of the robbers drew his firearm and shoved it into my gut.  “You too,” he said, “hands up.”  I was completely taken aback to be involved in the dream.  More awkwardly, my hands were in the pockets of my trench coat (we were all wearing trench coats) and the way the guy pressed up against me my hands were trapped in there.  I told him I would have to jerk to get my hands out and not to be alarmed, and that was where the dream ended.

I woke up around 2 extremely tired but struggling to breathe with allergies.  I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower and then sat there with the lights off.  Eventually I was bored enough and partly awake enough to try doing a sudoku puzzle with a reading light (the reading light so I didn’t get woken up fully).  I must have been partly delirious because I then had an imaginary dialogue with an interlocutor and it seemed real to me at the time.  I explained to the guy that I had gotten a few numbers in and realized I had made a mistake, so I looked at the solution to find where I had gone wrong and erase everything I had done after that point.  I was doing pretty well right then so he said it was probably because I had unconsciously seen all the numbers and memorized them.  I patiently disagreed, saying it was possible but I had a lot of late night experience doing these puzzles.  We went back and forth as I worked the puzzle further, with him getting increasingly baroque in his insistence that I was too unskilled to do the puzzle as well as I was, and the only explanation was that I had committed 81 humbers and their arrangement to memory in about 15 seconds of looking at the solution.  We were arguing and I was hunting for a phrase that any educated person would know, I had said the first part but couldn’t bring to mind the second, and he just stared at me blankly, and that was when I realized I didn’t like the guy.