Forgive *this* dream

You'd have to know about a poem with which I've become a little fixated lately to really get that headline. But, nevertheless, I'm about to reveal a dream that may require some forgiveness.

It was all about Martha Stewart and my home.

Thus, No. 7 Dream:

Martha comes in with some guy I know. I couldn't tell you who, but I know him. She's also got a camera crew in tow. My home is in tatters. My kitchen is an abomination. My desk is an example of chaos and random order.

First thing she does is trip over an espresso-colored goose-down blanket that's on the floor. She clucks her tongue and then in a breathtakingly fast process, bends down, scoops of the blanket, expertly folds it and hangs it *just so* on the foot of my sleigh bed. She takes a moment to run her fingers on the scroll that adorns the foot of the sleigh and compliments me on my taste.

"If not your cleanliness," she says with so little affect that it's a nun-worthy type of scolding.

That aside, the real point of Martha's visit and her camera crew in tow seems to be my "special" bike trainer. She keeps asking me to take the bike off and put it back on, and asks me to narrate the process all along the way for this guy that's with her. She interviews me about the trainer, and I keep saying, Look, it's just a normal trainer. There's nothing special about it.

But Martha is having none of that. "I understand you can make it very compact for storage," she says.

Well, I don't know what you mean by 'very compact,' I reply, but it does kind of fold up like this. And I demonstrate.

And the next thing you know, Martha is having me demonstrate how both my trainer *and* my bike are somehow miraculously made to shrink down to a size small enough to fit in my refrigerator. But first, while Martha looks over my shoulder, I have to go digging around on all the shelves, moving tubs of margarine, bags of tortillas and whatnot, to make room for the bike.

I find a really old, limp, unbagged bunch of celery on one shelf, pull it out and hand it to her. I guess this is expired, I'd say.

" 'Expired' is not really the appropriate term for vegetables," Martha informs me. "But it does appear you need to eat more vegetables -- they should never go bad because you should be *eating* them."

(What a nag, huh?!)

I clear off some of the middle shelves before I remember: Oh yeah, the trainer and the bike usually go on the *top* shelf of the fridge. Duh! And then, I grab the whole bit, bike and trainer combined, and somehow compress it like an accordion and -- voila! -- it takes up only *half* of the shelf.

Martha is very impressed and pronounces it "a good thing."

Then she wants me to take it out and show the guy how easy it is to set up again. Unfortunately, while I have my back turned, Martha takes the trainer apart, breaking it down into pieces that do not easily nor obviously lend themselves to reassembly. She wants me to put it back together again in front of the cameras to "show how simple it is."

I am standing there with three pieces of something that don't look anything like my trainer. It's not simple at all, I replied. In fact, I think you've *broken* it.

.... Well, that's when I woke up.

Yesterday, one of my blog readers told me that this particular bit of the Internet constitutes "a direct line into your soul." Although I write about all sorts of personal foofaraw and otherwise give insight into my personal insanity, I'm not sure if it's a line to my soul. Rather more navel-gazing than soul-revealing, I'm afraid.

BUT, if any of you find the dream I have just recorded to be revealing in some way, perhaps you can share your analysis. I would be interested to know what people think it might mean. Because that? Is some funky shit.