Well, to start out with, it was my birthday and we were at Disneyland. It’s really quite disconcerting how often I dream about Disneyland. Anyway, in this dream Disneyland was huge, bigger even than it usually is in my dreams — big enough actually to merit the “land” in its title for once.
At first we were in the swimming pool area. There was a ginormous outdoor pool the size of a neighborhood, into which Disney boats would sometimes come with Disney characters on them that would interact with the swimmers; and there were several indoor (like, building-sized) pools that were more or less private because there were so many of them. There had been cake at some point, after which some family members and ZG and I were going to play some sort of game (beach-ball volleyball?) in this indoor pool.
Apparently Disney would provide you with opponents if you didn’t have enough people for a good game; a ship appeared outside and comically “shipwrecked,” so that Captain Hook was swimming toward our indoor pool to join us. I’m not hugely fond of Disney’s version of that story, but even so I was excited to inform Hook that it was my birthday and I was thirty years old, just to see what he’d do. However, it turned out that I’d either seen wrong or Hook had been heading for a different indoor pool, because all we got was stupid Pluto. Some little kids had wandered into our pool, though, and we asked them if they wanted to play with us instead.
Next, some of us needed to go somewhere. Because this Disneyland was so huge, we’d rented a special Disney bus to get around in, and my mom was driving it. On the bus were I, someone that was a vague mixture of my siblings that took very little part in the coming scene, and my good friends Heero, Quatre, and Trowa. Where was Duo? I have no idea. Maybe I identify with him a little too much.
As we went along, we were exploring the bus, which was so huge and old that it had been used as a storage shed for all sorts of outdated crap. Of particular interest to us was this compartment on the ceiling that contained these little capsules designed to entertain children on long bus rides. They were supposed to be Very Special — sacred, almost — and you were only supposed to take one per bus ride… possibly even only one per Disneyland visit, as a sort of keepsake by which to remember your visit and to help you through your life.
In actuality they were dental amalgam capsules, only instead of amalgam they contained little slips of paper that had Very Special meaningful quotes on them. At least, they were supposed to be meaningful; they were what people had thought was meaningful back in the 50’s or whenever this whole idea had been thought of and the Very Special compartment installed into the bus. We were so amused by this compartment and these capsules with their quotes that took themselves so seriously that, though we felt a bit guilty about it, we opened all of them. I would read them aloud and we would see how many of us recognized the source of each quote.
Most of them were from Disney movies, but some of them were from more interesting sources. A lot of them were so stupid as to be almost embarrassing. One wasn’t even a quote, just a brief reminder of what had happened to one of the princesses at the end of some Disney movie; we were all like O_o That’s doesn’t even mean anything… it’s just a summary. Another one said something rather pompous and incomprehensible about “seigi” (my dream used the Japanese word), and I said with a roll of eyes, “Oh, I know who this one’s from,” and handed it to Heero. He proceeded to read it out in such a perfect, deadpan imitation of Wufei that we all cracked up.
Once we’d read them all and were vaguely wondering whether they were ever refilled these days or if we had prematurely ended the tradition forever, my sibling-person was somewhat impressed that I’d recognized so many of the quotes. I replied with a shrug that they were mostly from Disney movies so it wasn’t all that amazing. My mom remarked that she’d known every single one that she’d heard, which made us all laugh again since she, driving the bus, had been up at the front where it was all noisy with bus-noises, and therefore hadn’t heard any of them (and I guess this was hilarious).
In an effort to involve her more in the conversation, I suggested she share with us this book that she’d found among all the old stuff that was stored on this bus. How she managed to do this while driving I’m not sure, but she complied. It was a Little Golden Book called What is Grilling? that had apparently been written in the 50’s and was designed to help young men understand the inappropriateness of cruelty to animals without turning them into nancy-boy vegetarians.
In the book, a chick was born when the egg he lived in fell off something and cracked, making him “an egg that made a mess.” He met another “egg that made a mess,” a slightly older male chick, and some Toy Story-style toys that could talk to and interact with animals as long as no humans or (I think) adult chickens were looking.
The book went on to explain about how chickens eventually die and get grilled and eaten, and how that’s OK. There was some big metaphor about “the egg that made a mess” and these uppity vegetarians, and how it’s OK to eat meat as long as you’re not cruel to animals. The dialogue among the chicks and the toys was written in what was super-cool teenager talk in the 50’s, and I really wish I could remember the specific language my dream provided to convey this.
Anyway, we were all half offended and half just rolling on the floor laughing (not Heero and Trowa, obviously) in response to this book; in addition, the Gundam boys and I were all snidely pointing out the barely-veiled sexual tension between the two male chicks. And at some point around here, I woke up. And now it’s seven in the morning and I’m awake instead of on a bus at Disneyland bonding with Heero over his great imitation of Wufei and gay kids’ books from the fifties. What is wrong with this picture?