Go Ask Adam

Dreams generate false profundity. From the moment you wake up, the conscious mind kills the epiphanies wrapped within. It tells you how silly the whole endeavor was, reminding you that Oliver, the talking carrot with the eye patch, isn't real and need not affect your normal routine. Aromatics don't save people...not from volcanoes, at least. Your day brain reminds you that it was all just for fun, and that you merely enjoy carrots. And pirates.

I had a dream about a drug den last night. I've never stepped foot in a place like this, but I've seen them in movies like City of God or TV shows like The Wire. Those are the highbrow examples, but it's basically the place where drug dealers and drug-users exchange drugs for drug money or possibly for more drugs. In my dream, it was a messy, dimly-lit room with some tough guys sitting around a table with money and drugs scattered about. I was the main tough guy. (Like in real life. Graaw.)

I should say that the drug in my dream was completely undefined; it was just capitol-D "Drug". I could make up a cutesy name for it, like "Sassleberry", but the drug itself was not the focus of the story. This dream was about loyalty, hierarchy, and - most importantly - the dumbest, simplest math you can imagine. And this spurious lesson in underworld finance is what made the dream so profound.

Let me explain.

The packages came in four sizes which had four corresponding values. The cost was $10,000 for the smallest amount of drugs, and so on up to $40,000 for the largest package. That was the granddaddy of the operation, representing the highest level of trust to any lieutenant that was worthy of moving that much product. In this workflow, drug packages were basically a high interest loan, so the more narcotics you were allowed to peddle at one time, the higher up you were recognized in the organization. In $10,000 increments. And only up to $40,000.

That was pretty much it. There may have been more to the dream, stuff about protecting the room, maybe keeping the right people out front. There didn't seem to be any concern at all about the police finding us. And I, or my character as it were, certainly didn't feel that I was "breaking bad" or anything. This was all very natural and normal. The whole game as far as I was concerned was that people, like drugs, fell into categories of $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000. As long as I followed that internal directive, everything else would be golden.

And then I woke up.

And I was like, "YES! That's how they're doing it!" It's at this point I'm like a cop that's been on this case for years trying to figure this shit out. As though this dream had suddenly provided a massive insight that filled in all these gaps that I could never piece together. "We fucking GOT THEM!" Now that I knew that drug dealers were working in $10,000 increments, this case was totally blown wide open. I needed to call the D.A., had to tell that dipshit to get warrants out on the street before those dirtbags found out what I knew. That's how it felt.

"IT'S FOUR LEVELS OF MONEY!!!"

Like I said at the top: false profundity. The feeling subsided. I should hope it goes without saying that, as weirdly excited I felt in that first moment after waking up, I don't believe any aspect of this dream, nor do I now find it particularly compelling.

Thank you for your time.

And here's the part, dear reader, where my words drift out into the world, beyond my eyes and yours, to someplace very different from the cozy surroundings where I type these words. It's there that my story about a dumb, inconsequential dream finds a grizzled, acerbic night owl scanning the internet for blood and dirt. Theirs is the hard, bitter face of a man or woman dirtied by the muck that lays underneath polite society. They reach my story's conclusion, lean back in a creaky chair to contemplate my unceremonious tale. Scowling, they look up to a photograph on the wall, perhaps a picture of a long-dead partner or something representing happier times, like a family fishing trip. The moment doesn't last. My words reemerge like bruises in the places that hurt the worst.

Our lone wolf, this harbinger of eternal remorse, ponders my drug den dream before their raspy voice cuts into the cold dark: "That Adam Fox has no idea how right he is..."

A siren wails in the distance, somewhere down below, deeper into the filthy city. Stumbling half-blind across the crosspatch room, the prudent curmudgeon grabs an ashy coat from the edge of a broken doorknob. Before marching out into the inky night, perhaps for the last time, they look again to the cracked, crooked monitor on their ancient desk.

"He's right. And he'd better be fucking careful."