My Favorite Dream
This is the story of my favorite dream of all time:
I’m on the street on an overcast day. It’s not a street I recognize. I’m my typical “dream self” of that time, a smooth, idealized body, long hair, but with soft, clear skin. I’m wearing “cool” clothes like a jean jacket and nice sneakers. In this dream, this is not a gendered body, it’s a perfectly neat androgynous package, like a cute, soft anime character. I don’t think of it that way, it just “is.” I exist without thinking about how I look.
Two people approach me. They vaguely seem like college classmates, but not specific ones. Amalgamations of different people I had a few conversations with until they trailed off, like so many did. But in this dream, that doesn’t matter. They’ve come bearing exciting, if bizarre, news:
My two not-quite college classmates say, breathless, that Jesse Ventura — wrestler, actor, former Minnesota governor, famed conspiracy theorist, and much more — has made a bizarre and shocking announcement via press release: his entire life and career, from the WWE, to Hollywood, to Minnesota, to bleating about JFK with Oliver Stone’s son on a deep cable network, has been an elaborate, ongoing, interlocking piece of performance art. The project, he says, has run its course.
I struggle to comprehend this information. Surely, you can’t mean what you’re saying, I ask the not-quite girl from my freshman dorm with the long black hair who liked my sneakers. You must mean that James Adomian, the comedian, is doing his famous impression of Ventura. It’s some kind of act he’s doing, that must be what you mean. An in-character tour, maybe.
No, the not-quite classmate with the red glasses and the 1980s leftist beard, tells me. It’s really him. The real Jesse Ventura is saying, everything I have done in my public life has been part of an act. And now the time has come to reflect on that, and live life, publicly, as an artist. As himself. He’ll be writing books on it for years, putting his life into radical new context. People are already calling him the heir to Andy Kaufman or Marina Abramovich. He’s transitioning to becoming a public intellectual who now has seen the full scope of humanity from so many points of view.
All of it? It’s all an act? I keep thinking. When he pushed for unionization among WWE wrestlers, was that just the “character”? Did he really believe in it? Is there a difference? Even if it’s an act, perhaps it’s a brilliant one. He played a character who played a character and so on and so forth. We all contain infinite regressions of ourselves. We radiate masks and disguises, one on top of the other.
Well, he’s going to speak tonight, says not-quite classmate #1. Right here in Minneapolis and I got tickets. Apparently, in this dream, I was in Minneapolis. That might explain why Ventura was such a whirlwind topic. Should we go? We should go. I would really like to see what he has to say.
We go. We sit down in an auditorium that is unmistakably the auditorium from my elementary and middle school, made bigger. I remember the chipping white paint and the brown subway seats that folded down. I remember so well the red curtain, the wooden stage where we’d go into the gray Starlab tent and see projections of constellations, so close to the edge that you could only walk on one side. And I remember the little tunnel from the first floor, where you could make your way up to the very slim and cramped backstage. Jesse Ventura never spoke there.
We are sitting in anticipation. There is a single microphone in the middle of the stage when the curtain opens. In near-silence, only the sounds of his shoe soles, we all see a very skinny Black man with a thin, John Water-style mustache, walk on the stage. He walks deliberately and slowly and his face has no expression. He’s impeccably dressed, but in a relatable way. Somehow, I can sense that he’s personally picked out and bought every piece he has on.
He approaches the microphone, clears his throat, and opens his eyes. He’s wearing round glasses with thin frames. He doesn’t look like anyone I can remember seeing, specifically. He’s handsome in a stately older gentleman way, but, somehow, he looks noticeably younger than Ventura. But somehow, I, and the entire audience, know, intuitively, instinctively, joyously: this is the artist formerly known as Jesse Ventura. Here he is. Our bard of the bizarre in the flesh and here to explain his great work, his opus mundi, to a sea of admirers and disciplines.
The audience, with no hesitation, erupts into applause. The most outrageous, raucous, wild applause you can imagine. A wave of joy splashes over us and a standing ovation soon follows. Mr. Once-Was-Ventura doesn’t make a sound. In fact, I can’t even see him, floating in the little brown plastic subway seat and overwhelmed by tall standing adults all around me. I laugh. And I laugh so much that the standing ovation bounces me up like I’m on a trampoline, but I never come down. I float on and on, faster and faster, into the bright white light, laughter and joy and applause and love accelerating me back to the Big Bang.
That’s when I woke up. I laughed in real life. The raucous, manic dream applause rings in my head and I laugh so much I squeeze tears from my eyes. Even though I’m back in my real body, the one that’s not so smooth and unblemished, I feel the joy, the ease, the amazement, the art. I think it was a Sunday. I woke up and watched TV as I normally did on a Sunday in those days. The day after my favorite dream was just another day that I’ve already forgotten.
© Jessica Umbra, 2025
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