Nakedness and Widely Grinning Beasties

Dream, Part I:

You know those dreams where you're naked and mortified and people are laughing and pointing? Well, that's not what my naked dream was like.

It went something like this: I'm at a recreation center for a swim, and in the locker room, I'm down to my birthday suit, and suddenly, my gym bag is gone, along with all of my clothes. So there I am, buck nekkid, and I grab a frisbee and a basketball to shield the private bits as I walk around the place looking for my clothes. Naturally, the place was a vast maze of hallways and lobbies, so this was no small search. There were a couple of interesting things about my naked quest for clothing:

1) Nobody seemed to give a second thought to the fact that there was a naked guy walking around. I remember thinking this should probably be embarrassing, but it wasn't. I wondered if I was comfortable with it because they were or vice versa. They acted as if this was a regular occurrence, which I concluded it could've been: people undoubtedly often set their clothes down never to find them again simply due to getting lost in the vast maze of a locker room.

2) In my wanderings, I saw the coolest new Olympic sport: padded obstacle water slide. There was a room that was just a huge padded, slanted floor, a giant water slide like something out of American Gladiators, complete with platforms and walls to bounce off of on your way down the "slide", not unlike a giant Plinko board but way cooler. The sport was apparently called Scarping, which I looked up and is apparently a real word.

In the end, I was saved when I was picked up outside by a copy of myself driving my car with a copy of my gym bag in the car. I wondered what I was going to do about having two copies of myself, but for the time, I was just happy to have clothes again.


Dream, Part II:

Next, I was somehow at the zoo with Greg, walking towards the lemurs section (hey, my dream zoo gets to have whatever sections I want), and a dark primate quickly monkeyed across the walkway in front of us. It was almost black, with a stout body and a very broad head and a mouth full of square teeth that traversed almost the entire width of it. It had big, coldly analytical eyes that evaluated us to determine its next move. I thought it was odd it was loose but immediately pulled out my camera and held it up to my eye to take a picture of this cool creature.

Apparently, this was a smart little monkey creature and had, in its time roaming freely, observed zoo visitor behavior to mimic it as needed. Naturally, said dark beasty had learned that when someone holds up a camera, you separate your lips and expose your closed-mouth teeth for them as widely as you can. So no sooner had I brought the camera to my face than he stopped, stood up straight on his hind legs, and briefly held a sterile wide-mouthed "smile" while I took a picture.

Of course I was amused and impressed by this behavior, but the amusement was quickly displaced by the unsettling realization that the monkey beast was analyzing the most stealthy and effective path to me from the side or back. Any time I turned towards it, it would quickly reassess the best way to get to me and make its move.

I didn't know what a dark grinning beasty does to zoo visitors if he reaches them, so I decided to keep him at bay and discovered the best way to do so was to keep taking pictures. Every time I'd lift the camera to my eye, it would stop its strategic maneuvering to dutifully stand and give me the obligatory "grin" in the most eerily bland way. It gave me the willies and made me laugh at the same time. So I just kept taking pictures to keep it posing over and over while I tried to think of another way to escape.

This is how the dream ended, with relief that I was no longer being pursued by a wide-mouthed grinning monkey-creature, no thanks to Greg. He had ditched me. Jerk.