By TLC and WHOM?

This is weird.

Yesterday afternoon, I decided not to go to the health club but do do something far more salubrious--take a nap.  Sleep is good for you, you know?  Better, even, than riding a bicycle-to-nowhere out at the health club.  (Or so my Lazy Self convinced my Industrious Self yesterday afternoon.)

I fell asleep immediately--something at which I'm quite skilled--and soon found myself in one of those dreams that feature geography and people who have no business whatsoever being together. And in this dream ...

First, some background.  I've been reading a good little book called How to Think Like a Neandertal.  Two scholars have some fun making inferences from the data we do have about those folks about the things we don't know (are you confused? I am).  Anyway, one of the very interesting sections deals with the dreams of Neandertals.  Did they dream?  If so, what about?

The authors then pause to talk about dreams and identify four of the generic human dreams that have been recorded everywhere.  Falling (especially just as you are about to drift into sleep), being chased, being naked (in an inappropriate place), being unprepared (a test you didn't know about; I still dream about finding myself backstage about to go on in a play whose lines I don't know).

I offer a fifth: Being in some weird-ass place that sort of looks familiar and is populated by people from all parts of your life--and some creepy strangers, too.

Okay, so yesterday afternoon, sound asleep in my bed, teddy bear nearby for protection (this is not funny but necessary), I was transported to the Hiram High School building--sort of.  That building was razed some time ago.  Dreams don't care.  But this version of it was a bit more complicated--labyrinthine hallways and dungeons and all kinds of stuff that I'm pretty sure wasn't really there.

There is some kind of reunion going on there.  Not my class.  I apparently have provided some kind of service for these people because they have invited me.  (What did I do?  Who are they?  No idea.)

At some point an African American man (who is he? no clue) says to me, I remember a TLC and Willie Misby song.

And then some lighthouse-keeper part of my brain said Wake up--and I did.

But I was deeply troubled.  Here's the sum of what I know about TLC: Their lyrics were a running gag in the recent film The Other Guys.  That's it.  I know nothing else about them.  I couldn't hum a tune, name a title--nuttin!  All I know is what I saw in that film.

Next: Willie Misby?  Who the hell is that?

I've known very few people named Willie, none named Misby.  Google doesn't even like the name Misby: When I type Willie Misby in the search window, I get the following:

Did you mean:

willie mosby

willie tasby

willie mosley

willie mabry

Willie Tasby I know.  He was a bad outfielder for the Tribe in 1962 and 63 (I was at Hiram High School for some of that!), but as far as I know, he does not write songs with TLC.

So what does all of this mean?  Nothing.  Other than the obvious--the human mind is a most unusual place, part dictionary, part Oz, part camera, part digital recorder, part garbage pail, part porn theater, part mirror, part haunted house, part blender--a Cuisinart of experience.