In my first dream of the evening, I was on a vacation with Brother, Dad and Stepmom, and somehow we spent a decent amount of time looking for a liquor store.  I ended up with a backpack full of bottles, including a gigantic bottle of whiskey.  This is not, however, the dream I’m going to focus on in this story.  I did need to reference that tidbit, though, because it showed up in the dream I AM going to tell you about.

It started on my bike.  I was riding down a long hilly road that got progressively steeper and steeper as I got closer to the stop sign at the end of the hill, where the road made a ‘T’ intersection with another.  (If you happen to be familiar with the town of Yakima, Washington, it was that bit of 66th from the top of the hill down to Summitview, although it was much steeper in the dream.)  I was riding at full speed, and there were two other people riding near me on their own, a young guy and a young woman.  The woman was riding fast too, but not quite as fast as I was, so I passed her and gave her a smile as I did.  She put on a bit of speed and kept right up, though, and we both watched the guy, who was attempting a stunt.  At forty miles per hour, he lifted his feet onto the seat, let go of the handlebars, stood up to his full height and jumped off toward the side of the road.  He landed perfectly, like a gymnast dismounting from a high bar, and landed near the stop sign.  His bike went skittering off to the ditch on the opposite side of the road.  It was amazing; a perfectly executed stunt.

“Oh, nice!” I yelled, as the woman and I pulled up and stopped at the sign.  “I’ve never seen anything like that before!”

The dream’s location changed, and the three of us (along with many others) were walking in the hallway of a college building.  I walked between them and said, “Isn’t that a great hill?  What were you guys out there for?  The high speed [to the woman], and that stunt [to the guy]?”  They each said something funny in response, and while I can’t remember the exact wording, each answer had something to do with waiting until the last minute to get to Professor [wordplay on the professor’s name, which had something to do with physics]’s class.  We went our own ways, and I told them I’d see them around.

Then the dream changed, and I was in the hotel room that Brother and I were sharing.  There were two beds in the room, and he was up earlier than I was, rummaging through my backpack (that was full of the liquor we’d bought in my previous dream).  He pulled out each of the bottles and inspected it carefuly, as if to check the ingredients for a recipe he was concocting in his head. He had set a glass of red wine on the bedside table.  I rolled over and looked at the clock.  It was 1:51 in the afternoon.   I groaned and rolled back.  “If that wine is meant for me, it’s too early,” I said.  “It’ll just be sitting there for hours.”  He disappeared into the other room for a minute, then reappeared with a second glass of wine that he placed nearer to me.  Clearly, he intended to drink the wine in addition to whatever he was about to create.  “What are you making?” I asked, rolling over to watch what he was doing.

“Blemmys.”

“What the heck is a ‘blemmy’?”

“See for yourself.”  He held out a bag and poured a small amount of light, airy candy that looked like unpopped popcorn and miniature lemon slices into my hand.  He made a comic gesture of raising his own hand to his mouth, to show that he expected me to do the same.  The candy crackled a bit in my hand, and exploded like Pop Rocks the second I put it in my mouth.  It was a delicious combination of blueberry and lemon; hence the name of the drink.  He mixed blueberry vodka with a slosh from the giant whiskey bottle, then added a bit of the lemony candy stuff.  It fizzed as if it was boiling over, but he took a sip and smiled.

I rolled over and attempted to go back to sleep, which is when Mom walked into the room (not Stepmom, with whom we were on vacation), saw the liquor and wine flowing, and was horrified.  She walked right past Brother to the bed in which I was turned away from the mixological chemistry experiments.  A long-time teetotaler, she saw the wine glass on my bedside table (which she had no way of knowing was untouched), and assumed I was drunkenly passing out.

“Will you look at yourself?” she scorned.  “It’s not even two o’clock in the afternoon!”

I still had the covers pulled over my head, and while remaining rolled over, I reached a hand out to point at Brother.  “His idea,” I groaned.  “I had nothing to do with this.”  She stormed out of the room, without a word to Brother.  I got myself vertical, climbed out of bed, and threw on a pair of jeans from my nearby suitcase.   My friend John walked in the room a couple of minutes later, and Brother offered him a drink, which he gladly accepted, but hesitated slightly before sipping, when he saw the fizz.

“That’s delicious,” John said.  “What is it?”

“Blemmy,” Brother and I said, in perfect unison.

“Do you have anything inimitable to say about it?” I asked John.

“Yes, actually,” John replied.  “I’ve learned that ‘inimitable’ and ‘imitable’ have the exact same meaning.”

“Now, see, there you go,” I said, laughing.  “That’s just the kind of thing I was hoping you’d say.”