Dick Powell Backs Up into my Neighbour’s Red Car in the Snow, While I Help to Move the Queen.

I presume that I dream as often as the next person, but it’s not particularly common for me to remember that I’ve dreamt or what I’ve dreamt.  Having woken up from this particularly lucid dream not too long ago, I sat down shortly after to try and write it down. It’s always difficult to capture a dream on the page, isn’t it?

There is a cat who is sometimes a bird who acts as though it’s caged beside some vines which are growing up inside, in the ‘office’ at the back of the house that my Nana rented. It smells like bird poop, and I add cleaning it’s cage to my list of things to do soon. Even though it doesn’t have a cage, and it’s sometimes a cat. I am a little annoyed at this.

I am helping someone move house. There are at least two, possibly three houses to sort through and it’s a bit unclear where they are moving to. It seems we are going to get rid of most of the stuff, and move what’s left essential ourselves, in the back of our cars.

Someone has a big shiny black car with a hatchback, I’ve never seen it before. I don’t see any of the cars that I’m familiar with in real life.

We’re in a small house crammed full of things and having a bit of a break. Is there tea? Are we eating cookies? There have been people in and out helping to cart things around, and now Dick Powell has appeared. He wants to know what we’re up to, so I tell him we’re moving. He picks up a side table and walks out with it. I assume he’s helping us move now, but then I learn that really, he’s here because he wants to go to the beach. Maybe it was a little rocking chair he picked up. Did anyone do an inventory before we started moving all these things around?

Some nights I fall asleep listening to Dick Powell in Rogue’s Gallery or Richard Diamond, the old-time radio shows, but tonight I feel certain the last person I heard before I fell asleep was Jack Benny, so why is it Dick Powell in this dream? Maybe it’s because I watched Murder, My Sweet a few nights ago. I’m a little bit surprised to see him in this moving dream, but why not? It’s a dream.

We’ll take Powell to the beach after we’ve finished loading up the cars. I somehow know now that the beach he wants to visit is a few hours drive away and it’s a beach that has appeared often enough in my dreams that I have a name for it now, it’s The Primeval Beach. It’s beside a town which seems like a sparse dream-version of the town of Summerland mashed on to the wilder bits of the Oregon coast – the waves are always high and crashing, wildly throwing spray into the air, nothing at all like placid Lake Kelowna on which Summerland actually rests. Is this a beach that represents the mysteries of life and death? It’s a pretty awesome looking beach, anyway.

Maybe on the drive to it I’ll have time to talk to Dick Powell. If he wants to talk to me. I don’t know what we’ll talk about.

He’s been helping a little bit and been courteous so far but I think he’s getting bored of this menial labour and of waiting around for us lesser-known beings to show him the way to the beach.

Funny, I never thought of Dick Powell as a beach guy before. Well, everyone likes a change of pace once and awhile, I’m told.

Now I’m looking out the door of a space that seems a lot like the old garage in Winnipeg, the one that was always crammed full of stuff and which honestly still had some trash in the corners when we abandoned the Winnipeg ship and drove away from the house I grew up in. I half expected to hear from the new owners about leaving garbage behind. Didn’t, though.

The view from the doorway is not of the old house, it’s a big parking lot, covered in a couple of feet of fresh snow. I see that the big red bubbly car that one of my current neighbours owns is parked several feet away from the black hatchback, it’s clear that people have just been parking any which way, because the red car is parked at a 90-degree angle to the black car. There are car tracks all over the snow. Dick Powell has jumped into the black car and I’m not sure what he’s trying to do, maybe move closer to the garage, maybe he’s stealing the car, I dunno, but what he ends up doing is backing it into the red car, in a sort of slow motion through snow drifts. The black car just sort of gently pushes up against the red car and I can see the red car bending in, but then the black car moves away and the dent pops back out.

It’s unclear if Powell is going to try denting the neighbour’s car again, or if he’s even noticed that he bumped into it, and all of a sudden, an old lady is walking along the endangered side of the red car, apparently intending to protect it with her body. I look closer at this lady, and I discover that she is Queen Elizabeth the Second. She’s wearing the same fur coat I saw her in when she visited Canada in 2002. It was a cold day.  

I guess she’s the person that we’re helping to move. There are a few moments of tension but it’s okay, the black car has stopped moving and Powell gets out with an “oopsie” kind of grin. There was no damage done, and the Queen just crosses her arms and waits for all of us to get on with it already. I shrug and think “Clearly the man from Los Angeles does not know how to drive in the snow, but that makes sense.” And I go back to work.

It does not occur to me wonder if there are also feet of snow at the beach up the road and if this is going to be a problem.

A little bit later, I look up again and Powell is gazing up at the hatchback of the car, which is now open. My Dad is beside me and he says something about how Powell seems to be fascinated with the automatic trunk pop. We’ve been driving between locations, jumping in and out of cars and buildings, and I’m not really thinking about the dream, I’m trying to figure out how we’re going to organise all of this stuff we still have to move, and I say, “Well, when did he ever see an automatic trunk pop?” And in my head, I wonder “when did he die?” and in my dream I have no idea, although a few minutes after I wake up, I remember at least the decade. (1960 something, cancer, possibly related to nuclear tests in the Utah desert, or more prosaically, smoking. Both are bad ideas.) I also wonder what the point of me wondering when he died was, since I have no idea when trunks began to have hinges that you could release remotely and knowing when Powell died would only solve half the question. Didn’t trunks pop in the 1990s? Trunk poppin at a distance was probably available on rich people cars earlier than on ye average car. The 1980s? 70s? For all I actually know Dick Powell in his life had a hatchback that opened with a key fob, although I know enough about car history to figure that’s a bit unlikely.

When I wake up, I try to find out with a quick internet search on the history of remote trunk releases on cars, because now I’m curious, but I can’t figure it out.

I’m awake now because something happens to the dream as soon as I have the thought that I’m seeing dead people. It starts to fall apart, people are shaking their heads and looking disappointed in me, and pretty soon I’m starting to wake up and I know exactly what I did wrong – I broke my suspension of disbelief, and that’s no way to watch a dream, or watch a film, or listen to or read a story.

Also, I worry too much about organization and keeping things tidy, and maybe I should go to the metaphorical or physical beach more often. Even if it’s snowing.