Despite having an imagination that might be described as "pretty wild," I usually have very tame dreams involving me worrying about missing Sunday mass, or forgetting to clean my apartment. I once dreamed I fell off an ocean-liner, and there was another one that looked sort of like an animated Leonardo da Vinci sketch, but those are the exceptions.

Oh yeah, and then there was the one where I accidentally walked in on anti-Pope Gregory XVII's funeral (they were wearing, for some reason, red vestments), and I was afraid I'd be excommunicated if I didn't leave. Or the time I dreamed I went to Notre Dame's on-campus basilica, and the Pope was visiting and instead of the choir, there were circus people on stilts. They were singing this very elaborate Kyrie which turned into the Sign of Peace, or maybe vice versa. (I think a couple of priests were in there somewhere in the dream attempting to conduct the Quadripartite Absolution from the Requiem Mass on a large black rug). And bishops in blue copes and matching mitres.

All right, so I have really weird dreams.

Anyway, my father had a pretty crazy dream the other night, which tops all of these. He dreamed he was serving (a presumably Tridentine) Mass in a cassock and surplice (thou art an altar boy forever, I suppose) and he was going to bicycle down to meet me for lunch at the Borders Bookstore Cafe. Anyway, so he finishes Mass and he's bicycling and he realizes he's still in his altar boy outfit. He thinks about stopping but he figures, hey, it's sort of European, maybe people will like it, and so he doesn't bother to change. But he gets to the cafe, and he discovers he's still wearing the surplice, but the cassock is missing. This worries him greatly, until I appear and inform him it was a dissolving cassock.

It's times like these I'm glad neither of us takes Carl Jung seriously.