A Dream

I'm pedaling a unicycle through the middle of a funeral.  Not the part of the funeral where everyone stands around the grave.  It's the part where they drive to the grave.  There's a row of hearses driving down a NYC street, and I'm on this superhigh unicycle.  And I'm pedaling between the hearses and the parked cars, but I'm really unsteady.  I.e. it's not like in the dream I somehow know how to ride a unicycle.  I'm scared shitless.

Anyway, like I said this unicycle is very very high.  Like so high that if I take my feet off the pedals I can reach down with a toe and touch the tops of the cars, half of which are hearses.  So this is actually helpful, because I can kind of coast, and bounce from car to car and not fall over.  And sometimes when I look down I see people I know, like one time my brother Aaron and his wife Daria are there, looking up, and they are very concerned for me.  "Get down," they shout-whisper at me.   And I'm like, "How? I don't know how I got up here and I don't know how to ride a unicycle."  And then I have this weird moment where I look down and suddenly my feet won't reach the pedals.  And I'm straining my feet down, because I have to reach the pedals to keep moving forward, but I can feel myself starting to slow and I'm getting scared that I'm going to fall. 

Then I suddenly realize that my feet can't reach the pedals because the pedals I'm straining down for are the pedals of ANOTHER UNICYCLE, like I'm actually looking past my own pedals to the pedals of another unicyclist, and that dude is right there on a unicycle beneath me, and not a small unicycle either, he's on a perfectly respectably sized unicycle himself, but his cycle is tiny compared with mine, and he's looking up at me trying to reach for his pedals (which the upshot is that I'm nearly kicking him in the head), and he's kind of swatting my feet away from his head like they're flies, which seems like a pretty natural response from him, but in my already vulnerable state this simple act of rejection, combined with the very far distance between myself and the already-high other-pedals, raises me straight into despair.

And that's when my alarm clock (i.e. cell phone alarm) goes off.  And I do nothing.  I'm still on the unicycle.  But I know it's a dream now.  And I have a kind of Inception moment, where everyone in the line of Hearses and on the sidewalks turns and looks at me, like I just ruined the party.  It's kind of a sad look, like we're saying goodbye, which we are.  I sit there on top of my unicycle, which has stopped being wobbly now, and I look at all these people.  I'm not sure how long I sit there, but my alarm is still going off and eventually I hear Hannah say "babe".  And I roll over and turn it off.