I Had a Dream

When I was a house builder I would occasionally have epic dreams about building houses that would leave me dazed and tired in the morning. Those have dried up over the years and been replaced by a panoply of the usual fare: melting telephones, missed airplane connections, my old high school filled with images from Abu Ghraib (never mind). But last night I had my first product spokesperson dream. You'd think after 23 years of pitching Motel 6 that this would have happened sooner. I guess you don't really dream about the things you are comfortable with.

The only reason I mention it is because the dream was very real and very funny. I was standing in a recording studio reading the script off the side of a cardboard shipping carton. Not my usual studio technique. The product was Royanne Hardware. The tag-line, and punchline of the dream, was "Royanne. When you really need a screw."

For some reason this cracks me up. Not the line itself. It is not too far-fetched to imagine some local or regional ad agency coming up with that kind of jokey vulgarism for a hardware client. What's so funny is that my ungoverned sleeping self would fire valuable and declining synapses to think of it.

Of course, the next question someone of a quasi-spiritual/psychiatric nature might ask is, What does it mean? I googled Royanne and only came up with a town in the Alpine region of France. Might be some past life stuff going on here, you think? Some of my ancestors came from France, but a completely different part of it. Could one of them have taken a trip to Royanne needing a screw? Is there an entire unrecognized branch of the Bodett (Baudet, Beaudette, Bodette) tree out there seeking contact? Do they still live in the Alps? Are they rich?

This is what passes for visions of sugar plums dancing around in my head. Happy Christmas. Dream big.