dreams of impoverished bliss

Last night I dreamed I met a new man friend who took me home to meet his wife and nine kids. I'm pretty sure he looked like Aaron Eckhardt, but he was vaguely someone else from my life that I can't quite put my finger on. They lived in a tiny house where the master bedroom was sunk deep in the ground (presumably it had at one point been a family room) and was the center of the home, along with the kitchen/dining room. The family insisted I eat dinner with them, which was tacos made of different types of lunch meat and very bland bean salad. I knew they had almost no money, but they talked about it like it was funny, and they didn't seem to care. The generosity was palpable. They ate on two tables, with the oldest kids eating at the table with the parents' in the dining room, and the younger ones (and me) eating at a small folding table, and they were all watching some American Idol-like game show and singing along.

I realized I had my own room, which was essentially the size of the twin bed that was in it. And a few of my friends from college and my female next-door neighbor were also staying there. It was also on a larger property that was an Irish wedding bar (no, there is probably no such thing in real life, but it made sense to me in the dream). Right after dinner as the sun was setting, we were all invited outside to join briefly in the reception of a wedding that was going on there in the courtyard, and we did some line dance to which we magically all knew the steps and that made you feel like you were levitating. Despite the fact that everyone had a place to sleep, we all curled up in the master bedroom together to watch a movie (I had introduced them to my iPhone's ability to play Netflix, and we figured out how to connect it to their tiny television). I couldn't keep my eyes open and was so comfortable with these strange people that I fell fast asleep next to my new male friend (as we were lying there, we were also talking about writing, etc., and he was mentioning being displeased that his liberal arts degree brought him nothing but a minimum wage job on a local construction site). When I woke up, everyone was in a rush to get out of the house (and use the one bathroom). In my search for the bathroom, I realized family members seemed to be just disappearing one at a time, which I chalked up to them leaving for school and work. But then, as I was getting into an argument with the pre-teen daughter over the bathroom, she suddenly just squealed and disappeared into thin air, but her clothes stayed in the place she'd been sitting. I started to walk frantically through the suddenly VERY quiet, deserted house, and realized there had been a baby (that I'd been holding as I fell asleep the night before). I went to check the crib, and the baby appeared to be there, but when I started to move the blankets away, it was just the clothes, etc., still holding the shape and size of the baby.

I walked back into the dining room, and the calm, love-filled house had transformed into a very well-to-do mansion. A very uppity, cold woman I somehow knew was my mother and a teenage girl I knew was my sister grabbed me and asked me where I'd been, then said how happy they were to see me, since I'd apparently been gone for months. I started to tell them where I'd been, and they looked at me oddly, then told me it didn't matter; they were just happy to have me home ... and that they didn't even care they now knew I'd been in an insane asylum for the past few months. I woke up feeling unsettled and missing that crazy, extremely poor but generous family that never existed in the first place.

I think this might be a story ... or a screenplay. Maybe not.

Now if only I can dream in songs again, I can fix some of my problems.