I find I sometimes wake up in the morning a couple of hours before my alarm and then fall asleep again. It’s during that second period of slumber that I often have some of my more vivid (or at least, remembered) dreams.

I had a great one this morning, boy oh boy.

I dreamt I was William Shatner. I dreamt I was married to Yoko Ono, who seemed to think her husband was a bit of a frivolous person. I dreamt I was sleeping in a tent outside our house, and she was not.

I drempt that I was attacked by a bear.

Apparently, I (and by “I” I mean a middle-aged version of myself who once played Captain Kirk) was expecting such an attack, because I had rigged up a network of strings and tin-cans around the tent as a kind of alarm system. I had also taken my electric guitar out to the tent and plugged it in to an amp, planning to use it as a noise-maker to frighten off the marauding predator.

Unfortunately, my cunning plan came to naught, because the bear’s attack collapsed the tent and separated me from my guitar. I wrestled with the beast for a while, and eventually persuaded it to leave me alone by giving it some cigarettes.

The whole time I was quite calm, as if I knew I’d eventually get the bear to move along, thanks to my bribe of tobacco.

After this experience, the dream repeated itself several times. Each time, I was just as calm (detached, even), and each time I fought the bear off. The bear himself continued to shrink during each iteration, and by the end was the size of a house-cat.

At one point, he did manage to eat Yoko Ono.

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