I don’t often re-live previous life experiences when I dream. That time is often reserved for the stupid kind of stuff everyone dreams that makes no sense, like trying to row your term paper across a Coke machine on a ceramic egg-timer, or endlessly feeling the hair on your washing machine drying in a polyester breeze the size of a basketball – you know, the kind of stuff that, if you ever confessed to a psychologist you’d be hidden away in some dank dungeon for the rest of eternity.

When I woke up this morning with that 70s classic Billy, Don’t Be A Hero, by those legendary rockers Bo Donaldson and The Heywoods in my head, it came to me that in my deepest REM sleep I must have been transported back to sitting in the dark cocktail bar at the Woo Loon Ming restaurant in beautiful North Billerica, MA last month, sipping a boat drink and trying to concentrate on some Jimmy Buffett island fiction over a TV tuned to one of those “infomercials” that you often find on cable TV in the mid-afternoons – in this case, one selling a 572 or thereabouts CD collection of 70’s music hits called “Greatest Hits of the Rockin’ Seventies”, or some dopey title like that.

In my dream (like that very day), I couldn’t help but notice between the repeated clips of such timeless classics like “Afternoon Delight” by The Starland Vocal Band, “Rock Me, Gently” by Andy Kim and “The Greatest American Hero” by Joey Scarbury – the musical giants of their day – that this infomercial was co-hosted by none other than the actor who played “Greg Brady” in “The Brady Bunch”, along with some giddy, Hollywood-type infochick dressed in the coolest 70s threads who’d giggle in agreement every time “Greg” would gush out enthusiastic selling points like: “Wow, they just don’t make music like that any more!”, and, “Isn’t it great to hear once more those great tunes we grew up with on AM radio!”.

Uh-huh.

Well, I didn’t think such a mundane experience could leave such an indelible mark on my subconscious, but it obviously must have, since while showering I found myself pondering the sociological significance of the chorus of another tune from that collection: “Cherokee Nation” by The Raiders (formerly, the 60’s band Paul Revere & The Raiders, no doubt by then sans Mr. Revere):

Cherokee people
Cherokee tribe
So proud to live
So proud to die

Stunning. Which then got me to wondering, why were they called Paul Revere & The Raiders in the first place? Paul Revere was never a raider. A rider definitely, but a raider? No. I still remember seeing those guys on that 60’s pop show “Where The Action Is”, playing on the beach in their Revolutionary War garb with that cheesy-sounding Farfisa organ. Heh.

By the time I started shaving, my head had started to clear, and I was thankful that this unwanted and uncharted trip back to my late teens was over. Imagine my horror, then, when all of a sudden, yet another tune popped out from somewhere between the corpus callosum and the cerebellum, a song whose lyrics I have no doubt are destined to be discovered by visitors from Enceladus centuries from now, scrawled on a tablet in the middle of some field: “Seasons In The Sun”, by Terry Jacks, containing this piece of musical Shakespeare:

We had joy we had fun
We had seasons in the sun
But the stars we could reach
Were just starfish on the beach

Yikes. By the time it came to feeding the rabbits, it was all over. It was time to hit road, battle the traffic, get to work and make some bread. Thankfully, the rest of the day passed uneventfully, and tonight, I’ll make sure the hot fudge sundaes and Italian deli sandwiches stay untouched in the fridge and look forward to a welcome return to my familiar bizzaro dreamland, where buffalo candles dance on top of mating treefrog enchiladas drinking paper lace.

Paper lace? Oh no, not THEM… not THAT song…

I heard my mama cry
I heard her pray the night Chicago died

Oh brother, it’s gonna be a long night…