The other night I dreamt that I was on a yacht race to Hawaii. I was sailing with about eight other guys on a big white racing sailboat. The mast was not tall like the ones I am familiar with during waking hours. “The mast has to be short,” explained one of the crewmates, an overweight tall guy wearing white shorts, a white shirt, and a white cap. “So we can get under the bridges.” I had never experienced sailing under bridges on the way to Hawaii, but then I had never sailed to Hawaii. It was all new to me. The helmsman drove the boat from a large wheel, of which there were two, one on each side. The crew usually sits, during the waking hours that I have crewed on such yachts, on the high side of the deck to counteract the force of the sails and flatten the boat out against the wind as best as their weight will accomplish. But we sat down in the cabin, on the low side, in order to add weight to the tender side of the yacht and cause it to tip far over in order for the mast to be close to the water and for it to clear the bridges as we coasted along.
This was not normal. There really should not be any bridges on the way to Hawaii. But this was a dream. Stuff happens differently in a dream. The usual becomes unusual. And the unusual becomes accepted.
The best I could figure was that we had not started from the usual place where such yachts set off to Hawaii every two years from, on a race called the “TransPac.” We had started our journey somewhere in Anaheim, a landlocked city with some flood control channels that I supposed we would sail through, and that we would not run aground in, as this was a dream, and that issue would somehow be factored in.
I deduced we were in Anaheim because we had to sail through a lake at Disneyland, which is in Anaheim. The park police were perturbed that we were sailing through the park, and under their bridge, and past their yellow submarines. We had set our spinnaker, a big, billowy sail used to carry the boat fast when it sailed with the wind and had just cleared the bridge when the helmsman called everyone on deck. The boat stood up straight as we clamored above, no longer adding out weight to the tender side. “We got a problem,” he said calmly. We all looked at where his finger pointed to see the spinnaker dangling from the bridge we had just passed under. A park police boat came up to us and told us we could not stop there. The policemen on the boat did not seem to see the spinnaker hanging a few hundred feet away, full of wind and taught to its lines that were caught on the railing of the bridge.
“We will have to dress up as characters and sneak up there and get it,” said the helmsman. And then he added, “And I mean by ‘sneak,’ we have to dance.” The dancing was how we were going to blend in.
I got to be Donald Duck. The big guy got to be Goofy. The helmsman stayed on the yacht, steering it in circles, evading the park police as they steered in circles. And the rest of the crew got to be Mickey, and Sheriff Woody, and Pluto, and Captain Hook, and Peter Pan and Buzz Lightyear. We got that spinnaker. And then we set sail, heeled over far and hard, the mast nearly dragging in the water, once again on our way to Hawaii.