Last night's dream was one of those dreams that twists and shifts into many different things. I was at a party thrown by an actor named Michael Pasimedes (I don't know anyone by this name in real life) and I went into a bedroom (not something I'm prone to doing at parties) because I needed something/to do something I couldn't find/do in the main area. A man enters and starts yelling at me that this is his house and what am I doing here and I struggle to explain and apologize but I'm not really sure what to say and I'm thrown off by the factbhes wearing a Spider-Man costume.
Things shift and I'm in a woman's apartment helping her reorganize and decorate it. I believe the apartment is in Manhattan and it's very large with a cityscape view, but all of the rooms are long and narrow with corners at odd angles and little nooks bumped out randomly in the walls. One of the things I'm helping her with is clearing out a roughly 8×10 "closet" to become a playroom/bedroom for her young son.
Suddenly, I'm at work and my coworkers are having some sort of celebratory lunch. My boss tells one of them "look you voted to lower the standards for this sort of thing so don't complain when you buy a rotisserie chicken and it's not 100% chicken!" The coworker offers me a plate of rotisserie chicken and, unsure what percent chicken it actually is, I say "I think I'll just grab something to drink" and walk into a bathroom where I open the cupboard under the sink to find beverages in cans and bottles. I'm looking for a particular flavor I prefer of sparking water but the drinks I find keep getting weirder and weirder. A few of them are supposed to taste like full meals lile that gum in Willy wonka and have ingredients like "2% deep burger extract." Someone knocks on the door wanting to use the bathroom so I just pick a silver can that looks plain and leave but when I take a sip the flavor is strange and wonderful. It's cold even though it wasn't refrigerated and it tastes mainly like cream soda but also minty and herbal with a strange almost unpleasant after taste that makes you want more. I look at the can and it says it's Quartz Crystal flavored and also that it's alcoholic. I'm horrified because somehow I've ended up drinking at work and I don't even drink when I'm not at work!
I'm looking for a place to dump the drink out even though I desperately want to finish ut when I realize I'm back in the apartment of the woman. The organizing and redecorating is nearly complete, I just need to move the spare bed into her bedroom because her son is little and likes to sleep in there with her. "We should really trade that in and get two smaller beds" she tells me. I ask why and she says it would be better to have one bed for each of the children. I'm confident that she's only mentioned one child up to this point but instead of arguing with her I acquire the beds and get the situated in the apartment. The woman facetimes her best friend to show off the improvements we've made and tells me to sit on the bed next to her son's so it's not empty. I knew she only had one kid.
Her best friend turns out to be Mandy Patinkin as he looked in the early 2000s show Dead Like Me, only Mandy is in some sort of dessert wilderness area doing "conservation efforts" which appear to consist of tearing up non-native plants and burying them in red sand. He tells me and the woman that what we've done to the apartment looks great and that the best thing we can do for the environment is to consider environmentalism our religion and preach about it.
On my way out of the apartment there's an indoor garden with some vines growing on trellises and some landscaping stones. The stones are primarily fools gold. Or perhaps real gold though that seems unlikely. I bend down and grab one to examine it before putting it back. Suddenly BP is there looking over my shoulder. "You shouldn't have done that" he says. "I put it back" I say defensively. "Doesn't matter, you shouldn't have done it," He replies. He sounds resigned rather than upset.
We walk together until we come across a large grey (aka dusty, faded black) velvet stage curtain blocking our path. We shrug, part the curtain, and continue. To the left there's a group of people on bleachers, to the right a man gesturing to a tangled pile of chairs and lecturing about design or something. We speed up to get out of the middle of the lecture and come to another curtain. Here there's a man sitting on the floor holding a toddler and a voice over a loud speaker talking about triage and how to properly manage infants in an emergency room setting. This time a curtain starts to drop from the ceiling just past where the man is sitting. I slide on my hip like a baseball player and make it just under the curtain. BP is left on the other side and although it's just a curtain I know that means I am alone. Here there is a woman talking to a small group of people sort of huddled around. She is saying something about how unfinished art can haunt you and how dying just before the curtains opened on opening night of what everyone predicted would be his finest work Michael Pasimedes (there's that name again) as one of the first victims of the pandemic created a ghost of a potential masterpiece and that ghost will outlive him. "I just saw Michael Pasimedes," I think, "he was hosting a party and wearing a Spider-Man costume and yelling at me for being in his room, he certainly hasn't been dead for 2 years!" But before I can tell anybody I wake up.