For Thursday, March 12, 1998 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 730 words

Zinger

Saturday night was strange. I'm a dreamer. When I'm asleep I'm a dreamer, that is. So, Saturday night it came close to bedtime and I began wondering what was coming. You see, I had two big days ahead of me.

On Sunday I was scheduled to go rafting on a flooded and muddy Cache Creek, and on Monday I was scheduled to teach teachers technology during our annual Mentor Inservice. I'd be facing giant reversals, rivaling currents, and a lot of back-paddling. And then there's the river.

Just kidding. Both days were exhilarating and full of mystery. How would things go? Would I survive? Would I make the right moves? Would I fall out, wind up soaking wet? All those thoughts consumed me Saturday night while preparing for bed.

Would my dreams contain swirling waters and river symbolism, or would I have a school dream where I show up late and no one pays attention?

To end the mystery, I'll tell you. With my family, before turning in, we watched "Profiler," a somewhat hokey TV drama on late-night NBC. The FBI was tracking down a sniper who was picking off commuters and cops from ever-increasing distances.

In my dreams that night I was being hunted by a sniper. He kept picking off my friends and the people around me, and I spent the whole night leaping from tree to tree and ducking behind walls. There wasn't a river or a classroom in the whole array of surrealistic images, just a lot of zinging and dodging. Perhaps it was a WASC dream.

I do have weird dreams -- big-budget dreams. They play out like movie scripts rather than stage plays. The kaleidoscopic sets are enormous, the casts are huge, and I'm on the go all night long. Often I'm wandering through a never-ending house, or a strange city, or a vast wilderness.

People are everywhere. They do most of the talking. I'm like floating eyeballs and ears, soaking it all in. Seldom do I have much say in what happens next.

I'm never just sitting on the couch, or rocking on the front porch with a couple of cod fish under an orange sky. By morning, I'm ready to wake up and relax.

While I'm dreaming, the story-line is so HUGE and REAL. I'm THERE. It's the THING. I'll remember it always. Then I wake up and it vaporizes like a snowflake on a lamp.

It never ceases to amaze me that I'm always surprised.

The rafting was a gas. I dreaded going for a while, with all the storm clouds, cold breezes, and high water. The thought of donning a wet suit at dawn gave me the shivers. But I went. We drove along the river for miles to the put-in. The chocolate current rushed by us swiftly. It formed white caps and curls. High on a bridge, we stopped and scouted the biggest wave of them all: Mother -- a huge spring pair of Class IV reversal waves that would flip a boat for sure. I realized that in a few hours, I'd be down there, in her lap. Brrr.

Mentor Day was a splash. I was eager to go. Once a year, the district mentors put on this Information Fair. We bring together a team of talented trainers and guest speakers, then put teachers and administrators on the other side of the learning desks.

I leaned against the top-floor railing at dawn and scouted the sea of people as they trickled in. All day they undulated around campus, eating and learning. I eddied out in the computer lab all day. Around 30 new people poured in every two hours to absorb technology. We did some surfing. We went fishing. We took a few pictures. Saw some gophers.

At lunch the musical teachers banded together and stirred us up some rhythm and rock jam.

The rafting trip was wet without incident. We rushed headlong all day, feet up, then tested our oaring reflexes by squeezing past Mother with three quick pulls, two careful pushes past some bushes, five strong pulls, and a spin at the end.

The Mentor Day was rich and non-fattening. We spent months putting it together, pushing and pulling. At the end we offered prizes to win as our spin.

Isn't it funny that when dreaming even the most divergent juxtapositions seem similar and intertwined?