Therefore:

Bernadette Peters, of all people, was sitting in my backyard attempting to teach me German. Evidently, it wasn’t going very well, since she soon resigned herself to transferring the lexicon directly into my mind a la The Matrix. She went about this by giving me a paintbrush covered with some viscous substance that looked absolutely appalling and telling me to smear it on my forehead until I was fluent. My dream-self started protesting at that point that I didn’t want to learn German at all and that I was certainly not going to make any sort of contact with the ominous paintbrush. She insisted that it was a perfectly legitimate teaching method, and eventually I agreed to try it as long as she tested the paintbrush mess first.

So she slapped a bit of the junk on her face, which promptly turned a luminescent green and fell off. Rather cleanly, in fact, like a mask, which landed face-up on the ground and proceeded to tell me to fetch a doctor. The body somehow disappeared, leaving me alone with the face, which screeched at me until I finally took action. This action did not come in the form of hysteria at having made Bernadette Peters lose her face, nor in the form of fainting or waking up, nor even in the form of actually fetching a doctor. Instead, I latched on to the first individual I came across and told him to get one. In response, he glanced at the face and flippantly remarked, “Aw, that’s nothing to worry about. It’s only Fos and nobody even cares about Fos.”

End part one of two.

From there, everything degenerated into a classic falling dream, though it was unique in that I was falling upward. Either that or I was upside down. At any rate, I was falling in some odd way while the annoying narrator who shows up so frequently in my dreams announced that I was on my way to heaven, where I would arrive in time to hear God give a sermon.

No, this does not metamorphose into one of those cathartic light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel dreams. Instead, I caught a glimpse of a podium that looked suspiciously like the one my class painted for my eleventh-grade English prof. If God was standing behind it, I couldn’t tell, and I was more interested in the podium anyway, for whatever reason. I did, however, catch a snatch of the “sermon,” which went as follows:

“Be not afraid, for as it saith within: ‘It is raining and my houseplant has wilted. Houseplant, we shall meet [again] in the afterlife.’”

End of dream.

That’s almost enough to restore my faith in the heavens. If God quotes Salatrel, how bad can things be up there?

Adieu.