I had my first reoccurring dream of adulthood last night. That is to say, I’ve now had the dream more than once.
I was in Chicago, but not a neighborhood I knew, and a group of friends from AmeriCorps and I were doing something superheroish, and we were all captured by Ali Issa and a band of villains. He took us below ground to a large cavern with a dirt floor. We were scheming a way to escape, and I discovered a hidden passage that went straight up. We engaged the villains in witticisms to distract them, and I made a run for the passage along the wall. My hands were bound, but I somehow managed to wiggle myself upwards, like up a chimney but sideways, away from the villains. I knew they’d follow me, so there was both a sense of fleeing and a sense of dark-small space. The upwards slant turned downwards, and I rolled down it hitting a plywood flap that flipped up, depositing me on a bright orange seat of a ferris wheel. “Huh, this secret passage ends up at Chicago’s oldest ferris wheel,” I thought. “Now I know of TWO cities with secret passages.”
(To clarify, this was definitely not Navy Pier, and I don’t know of any other secret passages in other cities. That was only factual in the dream.)
I ran down the street, which looked a lot like Wrigleyville, and ducked into an apartment building because I saw villains tumble out of the ferris wheel. They spotted me, and I ran zig-zag until I found another building to hide in. I was able to get into the building because there was a party. I went into the stairwell, and down the stair, and noticed my friend Noah sitting on a chair in the middle of the landing, getting a haircut. The person giving the haircut had taken scissors and cut most of his hair close, leaving a mohawk. He had shaved close around the base of the mohawk but was having trouble getting the clippers to cut. I asked if I could try, and started buzzing close to Noah’s head. I was doing a good job, but stopped paying attention and buzzed off part of the top of the mohawk. I was trying to figure out how to fix it when I woke up.
I’ve definitely dreamt about being a superhero, the secret passage and the ferris wheel, and running from villains down the streets of Chicago, but never have I given a haircut in a dream.
