Rickrolled in Vegas

Hello, my friend.

Well here I am with my cup of coffee wanting to wake up. Kind of.

I’d had one of those mornings of very active REM state type of dreams. I’ve always been a person who dreams very vividly and today was just no exception.

And today I just happened to fly into Vegas.

So there I am in my dream coming out of the airport and I go, oh my gosh, where’s my suitcase? And I forgot my suitcase at home.

And so there I am in Vegas without clothes, without my contact lenses, without a passport, without anything except just my wallet in my pocket and I’m going, oh my gosh, what am I going to do?

So I say, well first I need a change of clothes.

And I look around and I see those traditional little souvenir shops and I walk in and then I come out after buying one of those, I guess, generic t-shirts with a little saying that says I Am a Virgin and a pair of shorts too.

And I’m walking down the street and I see a café.

I’m like, oh, that’s right. I’m supposed to meet a really good friend of mine in there.

And I walk in and I see my really good friend, who I’ve never even met in life, and he’s sitting there at the table and I sit there next to him and he says, “Johnny, I want you to meet my friend Rick.”

And I’m like, “Rick? Oh my gosh. I’m such a huge fan of yours. I’ve been listening to you for years now and I even do my painting and do other creative work listening to your music.”

And he just nodded and he says, “Thank you. That’s nice. That’s very nice.”

And he continued talking to my friend and I kind of felt a little bit awkward, a little bit nervous there.

I’m like, did I say something? Was I overly too much of a fan there?

And so I just got up and I walked out to the patio and there was a live concert there. There was a band that was playing and they started playing a song that seemed kind of familiar.

So I’m kind of moving to it and then they say, “Hey, come up to the stage and sing this.”

Not to me, but to my friend Rick. Or my friend’s friend.

And Rick’s like, “No, no, no, no. I’m just enjoying the music. You guys keep on playing it.”

And everybody’s encouraging and clapping and finally he says, “Okay.”

And he gets up on stage and he starts singing his Never Gonna Give You Up song and we’re all dancing and grooving to it.

And he finishes and he walks off stage and he comes over to me and says, “So did you like it?”

I’m like, loved it. Danced and everything.

And he says, “Good. Good.”

He says, “Did I come across that I didn’t want to go up there?”

I’m like, “Yeah. It looked like you just wanted to enjoy.”

And he says, “Oh, that was just an act. I really did want to get up there and sing, but you know, I had to play along like, no, no, no, I’m not going to steal somebody else’s spotlight.”

“And yet there I was.”

And so he says, “I’m glad I played it off.”

And I said, “You did a great job.”

And he says, “Good. Good.”

He says, “I’m hungry. What about you?”

And I said, “Sure. Yeah, I can eat.”

And so we turn around and somehow, as dreams do, I’m at some type of seaside restaurant in Marseille, France.

And I’m looking around this restaurant. It’s beautiful. It’s big windows. It’s nighttime. Odd, but still nighttime.

And I can see all the reflection of the cityscape on the water and the windows and I’m like, wow, this is gorgeous.

And I walk over to the table and it’s a huge table and right in the middle of the table there is a dolphin head on a plate.

I’m like, what is that? Oh my gosh.

And Rick looks at me, he smiles, he picks up the dolphin head and he starts chasing me with it.

And I’m screaming like a kid, terrified.

And I run around the corner of the restaurant until he backs me up against a corner and I’m like, “Stop Rick, please. I have a phobia about fish. I can’t see them. Or even if it’s tiny or large, I can’t see them. I can’t touch them. I can’t get near them. Please stop doing that.”

And he says, “Oh, sorry bloke.”

And he tossed the dolphin head on the floor and it bounced a couple of times and I realized it was a plastic dolphin head.

And so… ah yeah.

But still got my heart beating there.

And then I said, “Well let me go cool down and get this out of my system.”

And I leave the restaurant and I start walking down the street, which turns into an alleyway in the middle of the day.

I’m like, hey, this is cool.

And the alleyway leads to this plaza. This huge plaza with these beautiful buildings with all these tiles, colorful tiles, mosaics, and it looked like Turkey and Morocco or one of those places that I’ve never visited in the human awake moments.

And I sit there on a bench.

And Rick starts talking to me and I’m like, okay.

And we started having this wonderful conversation.

And it seemed like we were talking forever, laughing and… just this moment.

I don’t remember what we talked about, but I know that it was good.

And there came a moment when I started seeing these colorful mosaics on the building start to fade and they started turning black and white.

And I thought, oh no. I’m going to wake up any moment.

I was conscious of that.

Yeah, this is a dream.

So I didn’t want to alert Rick that I was dreaming.

So I said, “Hey Rick, I got to go.”

And he says, “Oh great. Let’s hang out some other time. I travel the world all the time so maybe we can meet up in Akron, Ohio.”

And I’m like, Akron, Ohio?

Sure. Sure, Rick. We’ll hang out there.

I said, “I’m going to go now.”

And I said bye.

And then I start to wake up and just feel… you know that feeling when you’re waking up?

And I’m like, was that… oh, this is… oh, it’s a different world.

I mean, it felt so real to me to be there. It felt so cool as well.

And so just contemplating on that in bed and going, interesting, with my mind, I thought that perhaps the dream would end with Rick saying something cheesy like, “All right. Never gonna say goodbye. See you later.”

Or something.

But no.

It fell flat.

And so now I sit here drinking my coffee feeling pleasure from this experience and a lot of PTSD from the fish dolphin head thing.

Because just between us, in real life I do have a fish phobia. I don’t know what it’s called, but I do.

But that’s a topic for another moment.

Right now I just wanted to share this one.

And now there’s no dream analysis here.

I don’t… it just happened.

And this is happening.

And so until the next moment.