Lost in the desert with a litigious Jack Nicholson

I kept a dream journal for a few weeks several years ago. I don’t remember why I stopped. Maybe I had several boring nights, or just lost interest. I had a dream last night that makes me want to start again.

I was on a hiking trip with several dozen guys in the desert. We didn’t do much but walk around, drink water, and stop to camp when it got dark. It seemed pretty regimented, like a Boy Scout outing or something. It was pretty boring.

We went to sleep one night, and when I woke up, everybody was gone except for a fat guy with a bunch of Brylcreem in what was left of his hair and Jack Nicholson. (I suspect Jack Nicholson wasn’t the world’s foremost actor in my dream’s universe, because this didn’t seem like his kind of pastime, and I don’t think anyone ever acknowledged “who he was.”) So, it’s Nicholson, but it’s just some guy. Got it? He’s wearing jeans, a white button-down, and a tan blazer.

We could see no signs of life for five miles in every direction. (It didn’t make me nervous in the dream, but I woke up chuckling thinking about how poorly Nicholson’s Jack Torrance did with isolation in The Shining, my second favorite film of all time.) So in that sort of halfway-under-his-breath way that he has, Nicholson says “well, the bastards left us. Boys, let’s walk.” We stowed our gear and walked.

Cut to us being back amongst civilization, though I either don’t remember or didn’t dream how we got there. Now Nicholson, the fat Brylcreem guy, and I are standing on the lawn of an expensive urban residence, across the street from a club called Pussy’s. We’re downtown in a large metropolis—steel, glass, and asphalt surround us—and yet I can see a large bluff to the southwest that I remember seeing when we woke up in the desert. It’s considerably closer than five miles, yet I couldn’t see this city when we woke up. You know how dreams are. And as I’m looking over there, I see a Bell 206 JetRanger flying low and suspect it’s looking for us. I jump up and down and wave, and nearly immediately the helicopter banks toward us.

It flew over us pretty low—maybe 300 feet—and dropped something on the far end of the lawn. When I went to retrieve it, it was a large cutting from a purple hyacinth. The pilot circled around, and appeared to be maneuvering to pull up to us to talk. While he was doing that, Nicholson and the fat Brylcreem guy got mad at me because I didn’t want to try to gig the outfit that organized the hike for a lot of money.

After a couple of foolish moves during which he nearly destroyed the aircraft, the pilot got in position to talk to us. He didn’t land; he hovered just off the ground. He opened the door. (Again, this is dreamland; this would have been loud as all hell in real life, yet we were able to converse normally.) The pilot said “so you guys want to talk about this?” Nicholson said “hell yes, we want to talk about this! Set this thing down and we’ll go across the street to Pussy’s and talk about it!” Then I woke up.

Any dream interpreters out there?

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