Nightmare on Main Street

I had a dream the other night that the country was being run not by our current leader – I want to be clear about that – but by a nameless, faceless body of otherwise ordinary women and men whose collective shenanigans in the political arena managed to combine the sly cruelty of a Karl Rove, the scarifying amorality of a Dick Cheney, and the sad smallness of mind that right now seems to have taken possession of a very large portion of the American public.

It was never quite clear who my protagonists were. One thing I do know for sure is that the figures in my dream were all born in the good old US of A. But I digress.

As in any nightmare worthy of the name, there was a lot that didn't make sense. I would catch a few spoken words – half-thoughts is all they were really, nothing to be afraid of. And anyway, they were quickly gone and I assigned them no importance.

A scene or two later came the muted sound (for now I seemed to be underwater) of new voices. They spoke too fast and in odd, dissociated sentences whose fragments, with an innocence that belied their intent, drifted away before I could parse their meanings.

There was more. Small, seemingly random events occurred. People who, judging by outward appearance, could not possibly have any connection with one another, came and went. (Addressing the remarkable fact of judgment being present in a dream I will save for another day.)

Then came the denouement – and none too soon, as my Blackberry's alarm had already gone off once.

It turns out that the people who'd been coming and going had formed an unexpected – one could say unholy – alliance, and that when all the half-baked snippets and unsupported declarations were strung together, they actually sounded pretty good.

Without pesky facts to get in the way, things took on a life of their own. Cunningly infused with false substance by the creepy aforementioned coalition, words and ideas were assembled into paragraphs and then into whole speeches which, unimpeded, spread across the land and were soon to be found sullying the pages of even reputable print media; disrupting what could have been informed discourse at town halls; and falling hatefully, gleefully out of Glenn Beck's mouth.

The crowd, now totally pumped by the inexplicable aura of legitimacy it had taken on, was getting out of control.

Thankfully, this is where I woke up. With eyes half closed and fingers still clumsy from sleep I fed the dog and made my first cup of coffee. Peet's French Roast, extra strong, extra hot. Next – before the dream was lost to me entirely – I sat down to replay its highs and lows.

Only then – you'll be familiar with this device from network television dramas whose writers are trying to stretch a thin plot or whose lead has suddenly dumped the series and made a beeline for Hollywood – did I realize that it hadn't been a dream after all. I'd been awake the whole entire time. Worse, the elusive dreamtalk of the night before had morphed into sleekly packaged utterances that were now coming at me in the light of day straight from my Panasonic hi-def flat-screen TV.

Talk about your nightmares.