Just a Flying Frog in Paris

The other night I took an unconscious adventure in Paris.  It was not the Paris I know, however; this Paris was crammed with towering, dusty skyscrapers and crumbling, gray industrial buildings instead of the charming and historical buildings and simple but elegant parks I’m used to. 

This was Paris, in the future.

Okay, I was never told that in my dream, but let’s just clamp on an environmental message to make things interesting.

Somewhere in the mess of city the itty-bitty Eiffel Tower was squished and hiding beneath the other buildings.  (For those of us who have seen the Eiffel Tower, we know that a good-sized building could fit underneath it.  But this is my dream, people. I can’t take responsibility for what my head does on its own.) My only guess is that the Arc de Triumph was now a Burger King.

Despite its drastic differences, Paris remained its crowded, touristy self even in my dream. Travelers with cameras hanging from their necks swarmed like flies to different sites around the city. I was annoyed to be among them.  Following one of the groups, I came to a new attraction called...

“What is this about?” I asked the person manning the attraction.

“It’s your opportunity to see what it feels like to push over Roman ruins!”

“What?”

“We had this attraction in Rome, but the real ones got to crumbly. So we moved here to Paris, where you can push over these replicas! Go ahead; give them a push.”

This is weird, I thought, I have to try it. The attraction was a series of Romanesque columns, about 36 of them, lined in a 4x6 square.  Fancy.

I gave it a timid push and, like giant dominoes, they crashed onto one another and all fell to the ground in a non-messy, plasticky heap.

Pretty dumb.

I looked around for the attraction attendant, but he was nowhere in sight. Umm…I have to stand these back up. I tried to lift some of them into their original positions, and even though they were not heavy at all, they were too cumbersome to align perfectly. I cautiously tiptoed away, hoping no one saw.

OH MY GOSH! ALL OF A SUDDEN I HAD TO GO SOMEWHERE REALLY FAST!!

(Don’t blame me for the choppy storyline. Blame my brain.)

There was no time to take the metro or a car.  No time! I needed something faster!

I needed…

…my helicopter.

(Cue the James Bond theme.)

Yes, my helicopter.  It hovered down, piloted by Christie, to where I was standing. I jumped in and took the wheel. (This helicopter had a wheel.)

We flew low, past the old dusty city. Everything was going well until the helicopter’s spool of string fell out of the side door. Apparently this helicopter was some sort of kite. I watched it drop, and drop, and unwind, and unwind. Reaching out to grab the string wouldn’t work; it would just keep unwinding.

Now some of you readers may not know that if you have a helicopter with a string, it can’t fly correctly unless the spool is in your control. So we were forced to land atop an old apartment building. Luckily for us, our helikite had an emergency setting that allowed us to bound from building to building—like a frog. An Amphibihelikite, if you will. So we leaped our way along, trying to get to that certain place we had to go. Boing, boing, boing.

Finally, someone on a roof caught the spool of string and began to wind it up, and in effect, bringing Christie, me, and our Amphibihelikite down. We landed safely on the roof.  Jumping out, we took the spool from this kind man’s hand an began to hop back in our flying frog/kite thing.

“I’ve been expecting you,” said the man on the roof in a croaky, deep voice. On the far side of the roof, a large glass door pssshhed open, steam rolling out from inside.

And then I woke up, fell back asleep, and had a dream about using the toilet in the middle of a crowded hallway.

Oh, my head.