A vacation from my vacation

I've been having this dream. In the dream, I'm on vacation somewhere far to the east of Caucasia. It's winter and everybody is bundled up in parkas and woolen mufflers, yet the temperature never falls much below 50F/10C. All the women in the dream are beautiful and have, no matter what their age, the slim body of a teenage girl. They smile at me and treat me as if I were…not Brad Pitt exactly, but maybe Harrison Ford, describing me with words like 'handsome, sexy, stylish, confident'. The men, far from appearing threatened by all the female attention I attract, call me 'strong, healthy, robust, jolly' and clamor to be my friend. Little children call 'hello, hello' whenever they see me on the street.

In the dream I'm on vacation, but the vacation seems to be perpetual. I never have to go back to a job. Instead, I meet a few times a week with some of the friendly, happy young dream people and they pay me to teach them how to talk like me—pay me enough, in fact, that I can live the life of a tourist week after week: sample strange foods, explore and photograph exotic locales, soak in the strange sights and sounds of an unfamiliar place. Occasionally, as if my life weren't easy enough, I get a vacation from the vacation—like this week and next, when I don't have to do much except eat and relax. Some of my friends are going out of town, but life here is so good, I wonder why they would bother.

I float around the streets on a bicycle and—you know how dreams are—people crash all around me, but nothing bad ever happens to me. I see strange, Hieronymus Bosch kinds of images every day. I saw a man with six bushel-sized bags of something stacked on the seat of his motor bike, him perched on the back edge of the seat, lying forward on the bags to reach the distant handle bars, feet sticking out behind like twin rudders as he zoomed through the traffic.

I saw six young men the size of jockeys erect a five-story brick and concrete building in three months, working in sandals without hardhats or gloves. They had no crane, no hoist, no scaffolding, and their only power tool was a Skilsaw. They didn't even have a tub to mix their cement in. One guy would dump a bag of dry cement on the sidewalk, make a depression in the center and pour a little water into the depression from a hose. Then he'd start moistening the cement powder from the inside to the outside, adding more water as necessary and being careful to maintain a donut shape so the water wouldn't escape. When the cement was the right consistency, he'd trowel it onto a big scrap of plywood and somebody else would carefully hoist it up to the top of the building with a rope. The young men lived on the construction site 24/7 and often worked past midnight, toiling by the light of a nearby streetlamp since their only worklight was a single 40-watt bulb.

As you can see, the dream is richly detailed and often fools me into thinking I'm awake. I know it's a dream, though, because a few details give it away. In the dream, Cynthia and I are divorced and Clark is married. Also, the U.S. President is John F. Kennedy—only in the dream he's African-American and has an African/Muslim name.