I Hope to Reconcile With Grape Juice and 7-Up

I had a dream. I have heard it is a tedious thing to have dreams recounted with the expectation they might somehow entertain a person who was not in my head to get the full effect of the unreality-bizarreness of it.

I will share it anyway.

First - this disclaimer - I do not drink beer.

The dream is this:

I am apparently a university student living in a dorm/apartment with two women from my current ward; my relief society president (RSP) who is just a few years younger than me, and my newly called girls camp director who is just a few years older than me.

We are going to eat...off paper plates...on the floor....in a bedroom.

RSP brings her food in and realizes she has nothing to drink. NOTHING. A moment later, after an apparent desperate search of the apartment she comes in with one of those tall cans of Miller Light. As it turns out, I had nothing to drink either. NOTHING. So, when she abandoned a third of her can of Miller Light on the floor and went off to do other post eating things I apparently decided my thirst merited quenching with the dregs of her beer.

I drank. Deeply.

The rest of the dream is me spitting ceaselessly into a garden-size garbage can in someone's garage.

End of dream.

My experience with alcohol is limited, which is to say, I have never tasted any, in all its spectrum of backwoods-toothless-moonshine, to swirl-in-the-goblet-utter-gentility. I've smelled it, I cook with it, but never put it to the lip.

I went to a party once in Boston during my nanny days when a few young fellows insisted relentlessly that I accept the beer they were so generously offering me. After similarly relentless refusals on my part I decided to get them off my back.

University students are poor. Especially students who bring their families into multigenerational debt to attend Boston University. Supplying beer for a Friday night party is no small sacrifice.

I finally accepted the can of beer. In one motion I took the can, stuck my hand out the open window and slowly poured the entire contents down the maze of mortar between the exterior bricks of their brownstone apartment building. No one ever offered me a beer again. They didn't fancy watching their liquid gold end up on the sidewalk without ingesting it first and heaving it up later.

So why was I drinking beer in my dream?

I think it had to do with two things.

One: I drank my own version of "mixed drink" before bed that night. Matt and I both had a tall glass of grape juice and 7-Up.

Two: This is normally a favorite of mine, but I drank it on a pregnant stomach, and... I didn't puke, but my olfactory everything gets really worked over when I'm pregnant. So, what is normally a treat left me with a taste in my mouth so terrible that my brain could only process it by equating it with what I consider one of the worst smells I can imagine...beer.

This leaves the question of why my head chose my dear friend and Relief Society President as the source of the beer. Better left un-pondered, I'm sure. She is above reproach, and I will happily leave her there.