Dreams past and present

    The other night I was going to go to a jazz show, the last one a friend of mine was going to play before leaving once and for all for California. I set out, but was defeated by a lack of parking. That night, I dreamed that Forest Whitaker and Denzel Washington were taking me to the jazz show. When we got there, my friend Walt was playing trombone instead of my friend Mitch, the one going to California. In dream life, I'm relieved that I've had an extended break from visits from deceased persons like my mom or my friend Evans Elliott. However, people like Walt who have absented themselves from my life as thoroughly as a dead person have tended to take their place. Odd.
    Night before last, I was having a dream where I was basically just sleeping. Then I had another dream where a bunch of fictitious people and I were trying to impress a small child for no apparent reason and I belted the heck out of "Born To Run" by Bruce Springsteen. Then my dream cross-referenced itself to the earlier dream and I apologized to the people where I was sleeping and explained that I just dreamed I was singing. I don't know if this as ever happened to me in a dream.
    Last night, I had somebody of indeterminate gender obsessed with me, mainly in the form of sending small sums of money to me anonymously. Creeped out, I rebuffed such assistance. Then the person decided to kill me. Fortunately, I woke up before finding out if s/he succeeded. That's the last time I eat split pea vegetable stew for supper!
    While I'm back to blithering about dreaming, there's something I'm puzzled about. (If I've blogged about it before, I'm still puzzled about it.) For years and years, I would dream that I had to go back to school all the way from kindergarten to high school. Mercifully, the dream didn't detail the whole journey, but usually would show me mired in some specific year, fourth grade or sophomore year of high school, say. For some reason, these dreams finally went away some years ago. I kind of wish I had kept a detailed (or even an undetailed) dream diary all these years so I could find out when. I'm really, really liking the idea that it happened when I quit gluten. I doubt it, but I'd love it if it were true.