Imaginary Keith pops from a dream, his eyes darting.  He takes in the room’s sounds then slides out of bed, hoping to get as far away from it as possible.  Some dreams are better run from, even in waking life.

“You okay?” I ask.  I’d watched as Imaginary Keith tried to stop the water from leaking out of the pressurized tank.  I’d watched as he’d realized there was nothing he could do.  Watched, over his shoulder, as the water level dropped in the clear plastic tank, the largest of the tanks, installed near the bottom of the stadium bleachers.  I’d watched as the last of the water sprayed out, soaking Imaginary Keith, and he looked up, frightened of what was next.  I’d watched as the stadium seats, literally thousands of them all perched above my friend, ten stories high, began to slowly sway back and forth, now that the weight of the water was gone from their base.  And then I’d watched in horror, right along with him, as the entire stadium leaned out once too far and began it’s fall to the ground, taking with it the thousands of people who would surely be killed.  And I’d watched, in the dream, as Imaginary Keith, stunned and unbelieving, simply stepped off of the bleachers in an unconscious act of self-preservation.

And then the entire bleachers hit the ground and the thousands of people were dead, and I watched as Imaginary Keith slowly sat down, his back to a wall, staring at nothing as he tried to understand what had just happened.

“You okay?” I ask again.  He dresses quickly.  He is trying to get away.

“Yea, sure.  Why,” he says, avoiding eye contact.

“I saw what happened.  It wasn’t your fault.  Besides, what kind of dream has water ballast engineering holding up an entire stadium?  That’s just foolish.”

“Did you see the last part?  When people started asking me what had happened.  When they started saying that I caused it.  Did you see that part?”

“Yes.” Some mornings I wish I wouldn’t watch his dreams.  Some mornings I wish I would just be more like Imaginary Keith, getting dressed quickly and walking away, hoping to forget.

“It’s not about the falling or the blame,” he says.  “It’s not about looking up and seeing 5000 doomed people silhouetted against a perfectly blue sky.  It’s about the questions.  It’s about the people and their questions.  It’s about people only looking for the answers that they want to hear.”

I’m not sure what to say.

“I just can’t answer anyone’s questions,” he says.  “I’ll never have the answers they expect to hear.”

Last night I had a dream that I was talking to someone like mad, paying no attention to anything but the sound of my own voice.  I don’t remember what I was saying, but I do remember that it suddenly dawned on me that the person was actually trying to get away, dangling half in and half out of their doorway, trying not to be rude.

I couldn’t believe it.  It’s not like me to talk on and on.  As a matter of fact, I’m usually the one in the doorway, trying to get away.

In the dream I just stopped talking, turned, and walked away, not stopping until I was back in the real world, awake and quiet, confident in my silence that I wasn’t bothering a single soul.

It took two years, but Imaginary Keith finally had a sex dream.  I watched it unfold last night, prepared to shield my eyes in case it became too embarrassing.  In the morning, Imaginary Keith woke up, obviously excited.

“I had a sex dream last night.  The first in a long time.”

“I know.  I saw the whole thing.”

“You did?  That’s gross.  You’re too young, you should have looked away.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, it was about me and two women.  I’ve never had a dream like that before.”

“Obviously a dream based on pure imagination.”

“It was great.”

“Great?  Are you forgetting that I saw the whole thing?”

“Oh yea, right.  Well, it could have been great.  It was almost great.  I mean, it started out great, let’s put it that way.”

“For crying out loud, I saw you complaining in the dream.  You blew the whole thing.”

“Well geez.  That one woman was gripping and grabbing too tight.  It hurt.  She ruined everything.”

“It’s your dream.  You ruined it.  You know, I’ve never known anyone who complained about sex in their dreams.  What’s wrong with you?”

“Ummm, I don’t know.  Out of practice?”

“I think you better stick with nightmares.  You’re much better at them.”

It’s not just the days that are filled with unexpected twists.  It seems that the nights are full of surprises as well.  It seems that Imaginary Keith is more complicated under the hood then I originally imagined, but more on that in a minute.

First up, the daily report.  And like any good news program, we kick it right off with a taste of bad news.  In the business world, it seems that there has been a great seed mix-up, unleashing a whole string of events.  One of our customer’s lawns, newly installed by us this summer, has come up spotty and ugly, infiltrated by some broad-leafed grass blade that is just bold enough to cause me both grief and economic set-back.  So seed has been shipped off for purity tests and Imaginary Keith will be rerouted this afternoon to console a worried customer and make an assessment of the situation.

Warranty work looms on our horizon - the bane of any small business’ existence.  But it’s always something, and you eventually become callous enough to take the constant hammering.

And in an unusual turn of events, my accountant has decided that she will make a guest appearance right here in my home / office tomorrow morning at 11:00, so that she can personally see to it that everything is shipshape on my computer.  This was decided just moments ago through a flurry of emails.

The whole thing has caught me a tiny bit off guard.  First off, I don’t ever recall my accountant ever volunteering to make house calls in the past.  I agree our copies of the software may be slightly different versions and that a disk can’t simply be burned and passed along, but in the past, I have always just been handed a list of line items to enter into the accounting myself.  To say the very least, this house call business has me a tiny bit suspicious.  What is she up to?  I can’t help but wonder just which of my bottom lines I’m paying top dollar to have watched.

But that’s not the biggest surprise.  The big surprise came last night, when I checked in on Imaginary Keith, still fast asleep in bed.  I’ll tell you what, if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes I wouldn’t have believed it myself.  I thought he was incapable of such an act.  I sat there for a moment, watching him in astonishment.  I thought he’d given that up years ago.

Can you believe it?  Imaginary Keith, the man we have all come to know and love, was lying there in bed . . . are you ready for this . . . . lying in his dreams.  Lying!  And not little tiny white lies, but big bold-faced whoppers.  One right after another.

From what I could gather, he was having some sort of dream about owning an old convertible Cadillac, which he never has, and that some people had snuck up while he was away and were stripping the car off all its valuable parts.  And in the dream, Imaginary Keith has caught the people in the act.  I walked in and saw the dream just as Imaginary Keith lets the air out of the thieves truck tires, so they can’t escape, and has gone to fetch a park ranger to help with the arrest.

I know, a park ranger makes no sense at all.  I couldn’t figure that one out either.

But then somehow the park ranger is going to arrest these people, and the scene moves somehow from the side of the Cadillac and into this large, underground house along a coast somewhere, and there are no longer just two or three people to arrest, but a whole household of young couples, all in their mid-twenties.  And there are children running all over the place, and everyone is discussing who will go to what jail and how they will get there and who will look after the children when they are away.  Someone gives Imaginary Keith a tour of the house and he becomes so caught up in the architecture that, for a moment or two, he forgets all about the arrests and the fact that everyone is about to be shipped off.

And then suddenly Imaginary Keith is sitting down in this soft, comfortable chair, talking with the young couples, and I see him begin to lie.  He starts telling them about a trip he’d just recently made to Seattle, and how the car broke down on the way and they had so much trouble.  And he tells them some stories about when he was twenty, and about some of the trouble he got into.  And he laughs about how the Cadillac isn’t really a Cadillac at all, but one of those fiberglass kits that you build and put over the top of an old Volkswagon.  And he just keeps talking and talking until everyone in the room is smiling and not thinking at all about going off to jail.

As I stood there in the room, watching Imaginary Keith dream, I knew that these were all lies.  I knew that none of it was true, but that didn’t bother me much because, after all, Imaginary Keith was dreaming.  No one has any control over things when they’re dreaming, I thought.

But that’s when I caught something familiar in the corner of my friend’s eye.  Something that I’d seen before, but just never in a dream.  That’s when I saw the thing that surprised me so much.  Imaginary Keith was lying, but he knew he was lying.  Even as he dreamed, telling all of those stories about cars breaking down and trips to Seattle, he knew that not a single bit of it was true, and yet he just went on talking and smiling like it was all the truth.  He didn’t even flinch, telling all those untrue stories.  As a matter of fact, he seemed to grow braver and braver the more he lied, as if the lies themselves released in him some sort of hidden strength.  I watched as the twenty year olds in the dream bought into everything my friend said, accepting everything without question.  I watched them laugh and become friends, forgetting all about their earlier troubles.  I watched the little children come up, one after another, and stand in front of Imaginary Keith, waiting for a turn to sit in his lap and listen to the lies.

But finally I had to turn and leave the room, because like it or not, I couldn’t take it any more.  As much as I hate a liar, especially someone who seems to have perfected the art of lying in his own dreams, I found myself being drawn in.  I couldn’t help it.  I found myself leaning over, looking past the lies and into those laughing faces.  I found myself becoming lost in something not true, and knew that if I didn’t leave the room quick, I too would somehow end up forgetting everything.