Friday Fiction: Fiction of the Mind

 

1/24/25: Awake at 3:40 AM. I was having a dream: Colonel Potter had received a selection of little jars of different kinds of pickles; he didn’t care for them himself and was going to share them out. Winchester began bragging about how his mother was a judge at their local produce fair and how their family always had superior taste discrimination; he had used to help her. It all devolved into a pickle identifying contest between ‘me’ and him. Potter was judge (he knew what kind they were) and the best out of five won. There were some tense moments, but I was not good at it; Winchester beat me handily. On the last pickle I almost had it, it had a tang because (it turned out; Charles knew) it was made with apple vinegar, but I guessed “Polska Wyroby?” and bombed out. Winchester was quite smug about it.

For a while I was making it a habit of recording many of my dreams, but I have fallen out of the practice. This one seemed unusual enough for me to record in that it is almost like it could actually be one of the more light-hearted episodes of MASH. I haven't been watching the show any more than usual, but it's been running on MeTV in a four episode block daily. Also I had bought a little jar of 'hot' Whole Spiced Polish Style Dills that I had to have my nephew sample just to see how he'd react (he liked them). So there, perhaps, are the seeds of this dream. Who was 'I' in it? I seemed to be myself (it was certainly from my point of view) but if I were going to put it in a script 'I' would probably have been B. J. or Hawkeye.