Thursday, February 08, 2007

dream journal

Some time last night I started dreaming about superheroes.

I don't mean that in an unconventional way, like "Abraham Lincoln is my superhero," and I don't mean that I started dreaming of an conventional but nameless superhero forged in my own imagination, like Doctor Eyeball or Captain Asparagus, the sort of thing you might find in City of Heroes. No, I had a dream about Spider-man and Batman, two of the most recognizable superheroes in the world.

It was probably about 5 or 6 a.m. when the dream started. Rachel had climbed into bed with us, as she sometimes will; kicked me  in her sleep, as she often does; and pulled the covers off me, as is always the case; and I started to dream about the two superheroes -- or more exactly, about their alter egos.

Inexplicably, they were co-workers at the Daily Bugle, where Bruce Wayne was a reporter and Peter Parker was once again a photographer. That's about all I can remember, except that they knew each other's secret identities* and kept dropping veiled hints about it in the presence of one another and their co-workers, like Bruce suggesting that Peter should treat his subject like a fly trapped in the middle of a giant web, and view himself as the spider as he goes in for the shot, and Peter saying that Bruce had gone batty.

And although I wasn't a participant in the dream, I realized once again that I was dreaming, since my unconscious mind noted that the two of them were from separate comic book universes and had met only in a DC-Marvel crossover called something imaginative, like "Batman and Spider-man."

Stupid dream, really. You'd think I'd be dreaming about Siegfried and the Burgundians since I've been reading the Nibelungenlied lately, or that my unconscious mind would be turning over the JEDP authors and their anonymous redactor, since I've been reading Michael Grant's "The History of Ancient Israel," but instead I'm dreaming about grown men who run around in their pajamas.

* I guess my dream came before Marvel's "Civil War" blockbuster summer event, since Spider-man still had a secret identity in my dream. No surprise there, since I haven't read anything Civil War-related.

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