I'd been doing research on the archetype of the Trickster figure, because I'm finishing up a research project on the Trickster as a form of covert rebellion against power inequalities, using the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Charles Chesnutt as a primary source.
So I was up late, working on the paper, and I fell asleep somewhere around 2:30 in the morning. At first, my dreams were fairly close to reality. (My R.A. sitting at my kitchen table singing Newsies with me, for instance, while doing homework. I actually thought that was happening.) That's when the Twilight Zone apparently decided to hijack my brain.
So here's the premise of the dream: my family and I were apparently some sort of law enforcement group that dealt primarily with something known as "non-human-citizens", and my dream showed us dealing with a few complaints by said entities.
The first was a rather disgruntled Sasquatch calling about trespassers in the woods. Don't ask me how he managed to call, because he had no phone. I think carrier pigeons may have been involved...Anyway, my dad gets out of the truck and is talking to him, and then everything got even weirder.
You know how sometimes in a dream, a sequence of events flashes by super quickly and you just pick up the gist of what's going on?
All I can remember is that there were several kinship groups of shapeshifter/people/animals all based off of the varying Trickster characters of folklore. That meant that there was a Raven culture, a Coyote culture, a Rabbit culture, and I think maybe Wisakedjak (anglicanized as "Whisky-Jack"), a trickster/transformer from the Cree culture. (I kid you not, folklorists literally call him a "transformer". That probably accounts for who else showed up in my dream, but more on that later.)
We were driving between these different groups, settling disputes, doing normal police-type things, I guess. I suppose that many Tricksters in a concentrated area isn't a good thing...there was some kind of brouhaha, but my dream didn't see fit to tell me what it was. That's when Optimus Prime showed up.
Yeah, you read that right. Optimus Prime.
I told you it was one of my weirdest dreams ever, didn't I?
He was apparently part of one of the groups, though he didn't count himself a Trickster. (I honestly can't see him as a Trickster at all. Too serious.) And he was concerned about whatever incident had riled everyone up. As the "non-human-citizens" unit, it was apparently my family's job to find a solution to everything, so (seeing as I was the one dreaming) the worst possible solution was found: I was going to get married off to someone from one of the groups. So in the dream, I'm sitting in the back of this pickup truck in the woods, cleaning a gun and grumbling to my brothers while Dad is discussing the issue with Optimus and somebody from the Raven group. The only thing that everyone could agree on, for some reason, was that under no circumstances was I to marry someone from the Raven Tricksters. No idea why, but everyone was opposed to that idea.
Then, as if we weren't far enough down the rabbit-hole already, our friendly neighborhood Autobot announces that he actually has an adopted son, "Purely ceremonial position. It was an effort on their part to make me feel more at home in their culture." And Dad's like, "Well what about him?" I'm still in the truck mouthing, "No!" but nobody sees this, evidently, and by the time I wake up, it has evidently been decided for me that I'm going to marry this guy, just so all the Tricksters will stop fighting.
So my two remaining questions when I woke up were these:
1. Why in the heck would me getting married to someone from one of the groups stop the fighting?
2. How in the world did Optimus Prime make it into my dream, and why did I keep seeing Kermit the Frog in the background?
No really, I kept catching these really quick glimpses of Kermit the Frog, but when I tried to focus on him, he was gone.
So. Weird.
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