A Tom Waits Dream

I had a dream about Tom Waits except he was­n’t real­ly Tom Waits as these things go.

It was this real small venue in an upper room of some bohemi­an cof­fee house There were maybe eigh­teen peo­ple in this room. It has two round tables a couch and a sort of ledge run­ning around three walls and peo­ple sort of sat on it. Tom Waits was this slight­ly pudgy guy who seemed pret­ty self-con­scious about his music and he was singing a song called ‘Zom­bie’ that every­one joined in singing with except me. Since I was sit­ting right next to him, after the song con­clud­ed he asked me some­thing to which my reply was ‘Yeah, I’m not that famil­iar with your stuff, but I know I like your stuff more before you got all [and here I did the grav­el­ly Tom Waits imper­son­ation].’ He got a sort of sad look on his face and then things shift­ed as they tend to do in dreams and my chair was sud­den­ly much more com­fort­able and the fat guy who was Tom Waits but did­n’t look like Tom Waits was sit­ting on the ledge play­ing some song that every­one was singing to. Then he was just strum­ming on a gui­tar and I start­ed to go to sleep in my dream. I don’t often remem­ber going to sleep in my dreams and I won­der if many of my dreams end by me falling asleep. In this case I did­n’t actu­al­ly fall asleep, because my dream woke me back up because some girl on the couch actu­al­ly was asleep. Tom Waits was going to play a trick on her so he got up real qui­et­ly to go scare her but she woke up. Through­out the dream I kept get­ting this feel­ing that Tom Waits need­ed a hug. I woke up and it was 4:06 so I went back to sleep.