Last night I dreamt I was on a clever new TV show: the kind with sassy kids who are smarter than heir parents and they talk to the camera and stuff.  I often blur those lines between TV and reality in my dreams.  I never see the cameras or crew or anything but I'll just realize at some point that I'm in a TV show.  (Remind me to tell you sometime about my recurring role on "Seinfeld".)  In this show, I had an older brother and a younger sister and my father was a fat drunk who didn't ever get out of the chair.

    My brother tore the screen door off the hinges and threw it in the yard.  I told him he was being unreasonable.  He swatted at a nearby wasp so it would fly into the house at me all angry.  I slammed the wooden door and locked my idiot brother outside.  Then I ran to the front door and locked it too but then a car pulled up into the driveway and an Asian family started getting out and I figured maybe they were here to see my mom or something so I unlocked the door.  (It all made sense at the time although neither this Asian family nor my idiot brother would appear again in this dream.  Nor would I actually see my mother.  My father was just sort of passively present as I walked through the living room to get to the door.  This dream and, subsequently the TV show, was really about me and my kid sister.)

    I went to the garage and got a bottle of Pepsi out of the fridge and I drank it while talking with my little sister (age 9 or so).  She and I shared a room for some reason.  I was like 17 and my brother was maybe 19.  (You'd think that I'd share a room with my brother but I guess that this was something the writers came up with to make the show more interesting or something.  I was clearly the main character of the show.  How dreadfully egocentric of me.)
    Me and my sister went outside and my Pepsi was almost gone and I saw these little brown things floating around in the bottle.  I looked closer and saw that they were little clams, you know, like the two shell hinged clams.  There were like ten of them floating around.  (Looking back, it reminds me of when we had an aquarium in the living room and we had snails in it.  They were these little brown spheres stuck to the side of the glass.  These clams reminded me of that except that they were floating freely in the bottle.)
    I got a little unnerved but not panicky.  I had an ice cube in my mouth from the Pepsi and I spit it out to make sure it was ice and not a clam.  It was ice.  (How there were ice cubes in my bottle of Pepsi I have no idea.)  It melted on the sidewalk but I felt something else in my mouth.  The next several minutes consisted of multiple angles of me spitting these tiny clams out of my mouth.  It was like in a cartoon where somebody eats bullets and spits them out.  (I'm pretty sure Popeye did that once.  That guy can do anything.)  I was spitting out dozens of these little clams.  They were sticking to my teeth like caramel candies and I had to pry them out with my fingers.  My little sister (I wish I knew her name;  She was really cool.) was watching and laughing and spitting along with me.  She didn't have any clams in her mouth though.  She was just imitating me.  We were clearly going to be very close on this show, both on screen and off.

    We lived in the suburbs near a park and could see the skyscrapers of the City in the distance.  (It doesn't matter which City it was.  I have a feeling it was Chicago but I really don't know or care.  It was the City and that's all that matters.)  I finally got all the clams out of my mouth (I really need to consult my Dreamer's Dictionary on this.) and we were heading back into the house when I noticed that my hands were turning green.  This is where I realized it was a TV show because I'm pretty sure I heard an announcer say "TUNE IN NEXT WEEK" when my hands turned green - so like the show was over and my green hands were a preview of next week's show.  They were green because of the clams somehow - really bright grassy green.  It looked really, really cool.

    "Look at this," I said to my sister but she ran away screaming.
    "Don't touch me!" she shouted and ran into the house.
    I chased after her yelling "Don't lock the door!" because I didn't want to be locked out and I knew that the other doors were already locked.  She slammed the door but I opened it so she hadn't lock me out.  That was when I knew that she was cool.  I went inside and she was hiding in the hallway.  "I'm not coming after you," I called, pretending not to know where she was.
    "Promise?"
    "Yes.  Come here and look at this.  My hands are green."  She came into our room and looked at my hands.  She said nothing.  She just looked at them.  Then I said "You need to leave for a minute or close your eyes or something because I need to change my clothes now and wash my hands."  But she wanted to watch the sunset instead.  I don't know what any of this means.  Things get really weird now.
    She wanted to watch the sunset so she said I should get dressed at midnight instead.  She pointed to the window overlooking the park and said "I need to watch the sunset because the prowlers swinging with the kids in the park reminds me of the City.  It's all I have left since we moved here."
    Sappy music started to play and I put my arm around her and told her that I missed the City too but mom's new job meant we had to move to the suburbs and that if watching the prowlers and the children swing together in the park as the sun went down was all she had, we could watch together.

    This was when I knew it was the series premiere.  (I wish I knew the name of the show or at least what night it was on.)  We stood in the window, me with my green hands and my sister who was suddenly wearing bunny pajamas, and watched children play on the slide and swing set in the park that was pretty much our backyard.  There were also three or four men in dark grey trenchcoats and fedora hats slowly swinging with the kids as the sun set behind the dim outlines of the City's skyscrapers where we used to live.  It was all at once creepy and beautiful and sad.

    And then I woke up wanting a kid sister.  I've always wanted a kid sister... for as long as I can remember.  I don't mean that toy (the female counterpart to "My Buddy") but a real live kid sister whom I could teach to read and to dream.
 

p.s. Here is what my Dreamer's Dictionary says about clams:  "Clams. See Oyster."  Drat.