A Dream I Had

The other morning, sometime between pushing the snooze button and the alarm going off again, I had a dream that I thought I’d better write down.

The dream was a trailer for a movie starring Robin Williams as some sort of man of the cloth who has just started a new job teaching at a fancy East Coast boys’ school, loosely affiliated with whatever church he's in service of. I didn't catch his name, so I'll call him Bob.

The trailer opens in a beautiful New England Autumn with an upbeat tone as we are introduced to Bob and see the possibilities of his new position. But soon the mood turns somber and mysterious as we learn that Bob has a checkered past and may have a history of pedophilia, child porn, or something like that, it wasn’t entirely clear in the dream. Now that I’m awake I see the Monty Python-esque silliness of it all, but while I was asleep, the montage of concerned parents hiding behind bushes, peeping out of boxes, and peering in windows to watch Bob's every move for some sign, some piece of information that might reveal the secret was really quite powerful.

Things are not looking good for Bob, but then in a way that is common in dreams, but nearly inexplicable once you are awake, we learn that Bob is a former "neo-Anarchist" who, before his conversion, used violent means to promote his political agenda. The film’s real conflict centers around another neo-Anarchist (who bore an eerie resemblance to the biker in Raising Arizona) who is traveling toward the small New England town, bent on destruction. It is up to Bob to save the school and its students.

The last scene I saw before the alarm went off the second time showed Bob in the sun-drenched kitchen of his first floor apartment chatting with the elderly housekeeper when something breaks through the window and flies through the air and into Bob’s hands. The shot switches to Bob’s point of view as he looks down and sees that it is a hand grenade (although, strangely, I believe it was ticking). Then, from the housekeeper’s point of view we see Bob smile casually and toss the grenade over his shoulder, out an open window on the other side of the room and into a bush. It was clear that Bob had not lost the skills he developed in his youth and while I wish I could have seen the end of the trailer, I woke confident that the school was in good hands.