Bad Talking, All for Naught

Last night I kept waking up from a series of inter-related bad, bizarre dreams, causing me to have a bad morning that was climaxed when the real nightmare actually happened -- I dropped and broke a large, intricately-shaped piece of beautiful purple stained glass meant to be a petal for my "Iris Window," that had taken me a good long while to cut and grind till it fit just right.

The reason for all this is that for the last two weeks I've been struggling against a cold featuring a lot of sniffling and coughing.   So I had taken a couple of swigs of a cherry-flavored cough medicine called "Nighttime."   This helped with the coughing and all and also with my sleep, but as regards the latter, I think the effects went too far and therefore the nightmares.

Then, just a few minutes ago I was taking yet another nap when I had a dream that was quite different.

I was in some building built of both my high school and my college, except that it was really huge and I was trying to find my way out of it but couldn't because there were too many things going on in it.   Sometimes it was a barracks, sometimes it was a jail, sometimes it was a hospital, sometimes it was the Library of Congress. 

Finally I found a big room in which people were rehearsing a Christmas play, and just off of it was a smaller room in which I saw two guys sitting in the midst of some clutter, looking suspiciously as if they were engaged in a game of chess, and even using a chess clock!

I rolled over there and with the most supercilious look and tone I could muster, especially after the dismissive way they looked up at me, I said, "What are you guys doing?"

"What does it look like we're doing?" one answered.

"Looks like chess," I said, "though I can tell you don't know what you're doing."

I sat down while fully aware that all their attention had switched from the board to me.

I couldn't make out the position on the board because they were playing with a set of men that appeared to be a badly mismatched set of Christmas candles.

"Nice men," I said.   "Not the kind chess players use, but they look nice."   Actually I thought those chessmen were hideous.

Suddenly one guy jumped up and ran off as fast he could.

"I'll bet he won't be able to find a real set of chess men anywhere in this building," I told the second guy.   And then that guy, too, jumped up and ran off even faster.

And then, even though there was a third guy there who would have made an excellent gallery because he just knew that I was about to be punished badly for my impudence, I woke up, grinning to beat the band over all the "bad talking" of my long ago youth that I had done.

A second later it came to me, and I wanted to hit myself in the unconscious.

Drat!   I had wanted that dream to keep going, for a change!   But now, I lamented, those guys will come back with a nice set of Staunton style men, and I won't be there to see just what they knew about the game, especially if they didn't insist on playing speed chess.