Condom Dream

I've been awake for about thirty-five minutes and I'm puzzling over a dream I had not long before I woke up.

It was a dream with multiple plot lines.

One plot line had to do with a course I was taking and involved a dream that recurs in my dream life. The recurring plot line was moving into a different apartment. I dream this often. I'm going to school and my school term is disrupted by having to move and the papers I wrote for a course are scattered and in this dream I was trying to sort out my grade for the course with my instructor, who was Denise, the woman who directed "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" when I played the role of Polonius in a 1995 production here in Eugene.

Denise and I got the grade straightened out and suddenly I was walking with a group of people down Michigan Ave. in Orofino, Idaho. We were going to a family gathering. My mother was born and raised in Orofino. Part of our group was a tall, strapping man named Jim Thompson, a stranger to me, but we were all talking about him and how important he was in the church.

We arrived at the family gathering. Everyone was really happy to see Jim Thompson. I didn't know anyone except my father.

A twelve-pack of Lucky Lager beer rested on a table and had become a bit warm. In my dream, I hadn't drunk a can of Lucky Lager for years and I was excited, except I had quit drinking and I puzzled over whether to drink a can. I decided to drink a can, in part to have a beer with my dad. I grabbed a can and made sure, with a stranger, that I wasn't taking a can away from anyone. I wasn't.

We were sitting around a table and I was next to a man who was older than I, and he had a box of condoms. He told me had seen a box of them at the store and bought them on a whim.

He opened the box of condoms and asked what they were for. He didn't know what a condom was.

I took his question very seriously. I didn't laugh at him or say, "You're kidding! Right?"

I gave a very straight answer. I told him that you slipped the condom over an erect penis before sexual intercourse and the condom captured the semen when a man ejaculates and provides a means of birth control.

He had kind of thick glasses and his appreciative eyes were magnified and he thanked me very much for my explanation. He said he didn't think he'd need them.

By the way, I knew what the condom was, but I couldn't get my can of beer opened. I tried and tried to get the pop top opened, but it kept closing back up. I never got to drink the beer.