Dream Session: Barfly from the Saturday Knights

Barfly, do you remember your dreams? Do you dream about edible floating cities of rap? Like gangster but with sprinkles?

Barfly: I don’t know about the sprinkles, but for over ten years I’ve suffered from a recurring dream: Being pursued by the Police. Often they capture me and incarcerate me. Sometimes not. The dream has never, ever been pleasant and it doesn’t go away but recently it took a turn for the hilarious.

Here’s the dream: I’m going about my business, whatever that may be (can’t really remember). A black and white rolls up and two cops get out of the car and approach me. They try to apprehend me but I don’t cooperate. I end up kicking their butts and running. Throughout the rest of the dream I’m evading one squad car after another and one foot chase after another until finally I run into this uniform cop who has this sort of elder statesmen, kind but authoritative air about him. He puts a hand on my shoulder and says, “Hold up player, what’s the hurry? Man, if you’ll just relax I can get you 29 days for the two counts of assault on an officer. Does that sound cool to you?”

“29 days? Seriously?” I say.

“Fo’shizzle Flizzle,” the disarmingly personable patrolman replies.

“Word. I can live with that. Let’s go,” I say. Then I turn around and see that the cop is Snoop Dogg. I woke up laughing my ass off. When Officer Calvin Broadus is on the beat, the streets of my dreams are safe. Sleep tight y’all.

Why do you think you have that recurring dream? Did cops mess with you?
I grew up down in LA like any other fuckup. I used to get in a little scrape with the law every now and then. It’s been a long long time since I misbehaved, but I still have dreams of screwing up and ruining everything I’ve worked for.

What do you think of Snoop? When you saw him in the cop suit, what did you think? And would it have been a Snoopified prison? Like a prison version of his Snoop DeVille Cadillac? Fur on the iron bars, wet bars, and jacuzzies.
Snoop had the two braids in his hair like the “Murder Was the Case” video and he was as skinny as always. He was alert (not stoned) and he had on a spotless, military creased, official LAPD uniform. It was weird. I don’t think he was taking me to a luxurious Snoopified jail but he was understanding enough to assure me that I’d do no more than twenty-nine days. If you assault a couple cops in real life, you get much more than twenty-nine days.

Let us analyze:
Barfly has police anxiety due to his past scrapes. That worry filters through into his dreams via images and scenes of running, altercation, and incarceration. Not surprisingly, Snoop, an LA rap authority, lives in Barfly’s subconscious. Snoop is an ally. Snoop knows the game. Snoop is rap law.

There’s a dream exercise you can do where you take anything in the dream, a person or a thing, and role play by becoming that thing. It breaks the dreamer out of their viewpoint by offering different perspective and slant.

I’ll be Officer Snoop in this dream: “Hey, there’s that Barfly cat. His flows have gotten so gold, they catch my attention. I gotta take him in.”

(New Saturday Knights out in June.)