Neurons at night

Sometimes, maybe often, our dreams don't mean anything, and yet can be so odd or have such timing as to stay with us.

I don't know who the woman was on the other side of the "court;" it didn't appear to be anyone I know in real life.  I'm not sure what was at stake to seem so critical, or why the invitation to hit a few tennis balls to settle it - yes, I conceded, I'd played a little when I was younger - made sense.  Suddenly, we weren't on the tennis court we'd just been sitting by, but we were in a department store. Instead of a standard net, there were a pair of six-foot high screened panels, separated by a couple feet, that I had to serve over.  I double faulted when the second bottle of nail polish (?) I hit didn't clear the second fence.  In another of those dreamish inconguities, this serve was from the ad court, yet made the score love-15. I walked through the "door" cut into the panels to inspect the obstacle I was serving over the top of.  I won the next two points, so was up 30-15 (having just won a service point from the deuce side, as was proper), and starting to feel confident.  Now having just served a tennis ball, I walked through the fences to inspect which line of linoleum floor tiles my second serve bounced on. A group of customers verified it had landed wide, so I was down 30-40 (again having served from the correct side), and was beginning to feel more than slightly nervous about losing whatever was at stake.  I began to hear gently increasing, soothing and familiar strain of music through the PA speakers in the ceiling, and realized it was a little brighter in the room.

The daily alarm on my cell phone was going off.

I'll never know what was going to come next.