Dream - Iced tea with Paul Newman

On Wednesday, October 29, 2008, I dreamed I was at Los Arcos Mall, a place that was torn down several years ago. While there, near the end of the dream, I had iced tea with Paul Newman.

In the dream, I was in the parking lot at Los Arcos Mall, on the side toward McDowell Road. I was talking to someone and looking toward the mall. A lot had happened before that that I don't remember. I then entered the mall. Going down the aisle I found that lots of stores were boarded up. Various little displays were set up in the aisle, generally offering various kinds of food, maybe sometimes selling it and sometimes giving it away. The aisle got to be more of a hallway size in places because of the boarding up that had happened, and the path through it was sometimes irregular.

I came to an area near the middle of the mall, close to where another aisle crossed this one. A very large squarish table had been set up, with a room constructed on the far corner at the side toward the middle of the aisle, and several people were around the table, widely spaced, eating some food. Some kind of presentation was being given, and I felt it was some kind of thing where something was being taught or promoted. A middle-aged woman was in control. She wanted me to stay and eat something with them.

I looked at her but didn't say anything. I kept on moving, still looking toward her part of the time, while she looked back still looking hopeful. The offer was somewhat attractive but I was unsure of the situation and didn't feel that I should.

The corner of the table toward me and on my right had a wooden keyboard with long light oak-colored keys. The keys were perhaps a foot long and tightly packed together, with the group of them perhaps a couple of feet across. I felt they were some type of musical instrument, perhaps something like a piano, though I didn't know if they sounded like one. I wanted to get past the table and to the other side of the aisle, and to save time I quickly walked over the corner of the table and across part of the keys. My feet were bare at the time. I think I was carrying my shoes in my hand, having for some reason taken them off earlier in the mall. I felt a little bad about getting my bare feet on things, but I didn't have any shoes on right now so there didn't seem to be any help for it.

A little past there I went through a blocked off area in the middle of the mall and found a large open area on the other side, to the right of where I had come from, where several tables had been set up and people were eating a holiday dinner. Some of the people were relatives and some were apparently friends of them, while others were evidently just other people. The tables were widely spaced and there seemed to be plenty of room left at them for more people. Some other tables to the left had food on them.

I was greeted happily, like they were expecting me, and taken to the tables where the food was, to get a plate filled for me. Some thick juicy slices were cut off the side of a very large, somewhat flattened and looking almost boneless turkey and made into a sandwich for me. Some other food was being put on a plate, too. I was given the sandwich and taken to a wooden booth to one side of the room.

The booth had big windows along the front and enough room to comfortably fit two people with plenty of space around them. The windows had a bench in front of them, attached to the booth like a broad shelf. Two tall stools were set in front of it. One stool was empty. On the far side of the booth and sitting on the other stool was Paul Newman, looking younger, like he was in his early sixties. I was surprised to see him, since he was dead. I guessed this a little was before he died. I wondered if I should tell him he was going to die soon, but I decided against it.

I bit into the sandwich and found that it was actually a ham and hash sandwich, with the ham in medium thin slices with black edges. I wondered about that and thought that I still had to get the rest of the food that they were putting on the plate for me, somewhere outside in the room. I hoped they were holding it for me.

The man who brought me in then brought a big bottle of iced tea, though it wasn't actually iced, just slightly cool. The bottle was heavy glass and contained maybe about a quart, maybe more. It was stuck in a holder on the wall on the other side of Paul Newman. The holder held it upright at a slight angle, and a long curved metal spout was stuck in the neck, which was slightly larger than normal, having maybe an inch and a quarter opening. The spout also seemed to be stuck right through a cork in the bottle. In spite of the spout being stuck in the top, a large glass was put underneath the bottle and somehow filled with iced tea coming out the bottom of the bottle. The glass was given to me and I drank some.

I told Paul Newman that I thought he had done a lot of things in his life, all the things he had done while making the movies. I was a little uncertain and thought that what I was saying sounded kind of lame, but I tried to say it as positively as I could. I felt I had to say something to him.

He looked a little amused and replied, in a somewhat hoarse but loud and firm voice, that he had done just about everything. Then he took the bottle away the holder and the spout, which stayed where it was, apparently attached somehow to the wall, and took a drink directly from the bottle through the large hole in the cork while looking out the window at the scene outside. At that point I was awakened by my mother.