my day with ryan reynolds

No, I didn’t actually spend a day with Ryan Reynolds. (Insert my cousin screaming, “I love Ryan Reynolds!” in the background here.) But I did dream about spending a day with him—I mean an actual dream, not a “Wouldn’t it be nice if Ryan Reynolds fell in love with me?” fantasy.

While I used to have crazy dreams all the time (like the time someone was trying to turn me into a statue by forcing me to eat crunchy Cheetos or the time there was a bucking bronco competition in our college cafeteria), I normally don’t have them any more … or at least I don’t remember them!

Here are the factors that I believe led to this dream (which I’ll soon get around to sharing with you):

• A conversation about X-Men Origins: Wolverine (specifically concerning Deadpool) at dinner.
• A less than ideal hotel room, which made me insanely uncomfortable as I attempted to go to sleep. (Seriously, never ever stay at the Travelodge in Davenport, Iowa. It was, without a doubt, the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed at.)
• Spinach. (I don’t know if spinach is known to cause weird dreams, but I ate a large amount of it in my yummy Panera lemon chicken orzo soup a couple hours before bed … and I never eat any green stuff! So let me blame it on the spinach, okay?)

So, here goes …

I went to the mall (already this dream is quite abnormal, as I usually try to avoid the mall), where I ran into Anna, an acquaintance. She looked about eight months pregnant, and after we watched a man try to sell a very large pin art toy (so large you could do an impression of your entire body), she said she needed to get off her feet and wondered if I’d like to get a pedicure with her. We went into a nearby nail salon, but they didn’t have two open chairs, so she got her toes done while I sat on an ottoman by her feet. I glanced down the row of chairs and saw Tonya, one of my coworkers. I waved at her, but as soon as I did, I realized it wasn’t really Tonya. I was embarrassed to have been waving at a stranger, but she didn’t even notice me. The guy in the chair next to her did, though, and he waved back. He was wearing a very obviously fake blonde moustache, but I knew who he was immediately, and without thinking, I blurted out, “That’s Ryan Reynolds!” He tried to hide by pretending to look around for “himself,” but then his moustache slid down his face so it was covering his mouth at an angle, and other people started recognizing him.

Suddenly, Ryan, a crowd of girls, my sister Val, and I were in this giant old gymnasium where some old professor was giving a history lecture—but no one was listening because all the girls wanted their pictures taken with Ryan. Finally, I worked up the nerve to ask for a picture, and I handed my camera to some girl, but she couldn’t figure out how to work my simple point-and-shoot camera. She took a bunch of horrible pictures, and then I spotted Ryan Stauffer, one of my college classmates. (I guess this was just a “Ryan” kind of dream!) I asked him to take the picture of me, Ryan Reynolds, and Val, and while he was getting the camera ready, I suddenly told everyone to go to Kickstarter and support Ryan Stauffer’s movie, Murder! A Love Story. I was quite pleased when Ryan Reynolds said it sounded cool and he’d definitely look it up. Then his manager made him leave, and I shared my caramel corn (huh?) with Mr. P (the shop teacher from my high school) and his wife. Then Val and I had to hurry to catch our boat (again, huh?), but what I really wanted to do was look at the pictures. I never got a chance before I woke up.

So why did I remember it? Because when I woke up at 5:45 a.m., I thought, “If I don’t write this down, I’m going to forget it.” And then I got out of bed, grabbed a notebook, and started writing. In the dark. But almost everything is legible!

(FYI--Ryan Stauffer really is making a movie. While the Kickstarter funding project failed, you can still check out info on Murder! A Love Story at its website and on Ryan's site. It's going to be filmed in my old dorm!)