I dreamed I was in a small room in a rather scuzzy apartment in Venice, Italy. I've never been to Venice. I didn't see anything of Venice in the first part of the dream except for this small apartment. The windows were open but it was pitch black outside, and though there were a few bright streetlights outside, from inside the apartment they didn't illuminate anything, except the outside of the building we were in, if you leaned out the window. We were several stories up and there were wrought-iron terraces outside below the windows. You could climb from terrace to terrace, from one apartment or story to another, but that was a little bit risky.
The room was a mess, with dirty laundry all over the floor and the furniture. A lot of the dirty laundry was men's briefs which looked as if they had once been white, but gradually turned grey from insufficient washing. The apartment seemed to belong to someone who was and wasn't Don Cheadle. People kept coming and going but it seemed to be his apartment. He was and wasn't Cheadle, who in real life is thin and a bit on the short side, and black, and often seems quite fastidious about his appearance. In the dream he was white, several inches over 6 feet tall and very muscular, with unruly black hair and a dark 5 o'clock shadow, and a stain on the chest of his no-longer-entirely-white T-shirt. He seemed to be a slob, especially if this was his apartment, and his appearance matched that of the room.
He and I and the other people in the room all were wearing jeans and T-shirts and sneakers. Some people also wore jackets made of blue denim or black leather, but I was uncomfortably warm in my T-shirt, and it surprised me that anyone would keep a jacket on in that place. Gradually I began to notice that most of the people coming into and going from the room were rather unkempt, and I began to wonder whether most of these people might have something against me. At the very least, I started to feel that I was standing out from the crowd just a bit simply because all of my clothes were clean, and I hadn't been wearing any of them for more than 12 hours.
Someone who both was and wasn't Kristen Bell was in the room briefly at the beginning of the dream. Irl Ms Bell is petite and blonde, but in the dream she was medium-height, brunette and pleasantly curvy, and although casually dressed like everyone else, not a slob.
Most of the dream consisted of Non-Cheadle and I struggling over a phone in the room, a phone attached by a cord to a wall outlet. The receiver was about the size of a hardcover book and contained a digital display which would have seemed pretty fancy in the 1990's. I wanted to have a long, careful look at the dozen or so lines of data on that display. Non-Cheadle wasn't using the phone, but he kept taking it away from me. Our behavior over the phone was getting rougher, including more and more shoving and elbowing.
Non-Cheadle said that he would let me look over the phone for as long as I wanted, after he got a call he was expecting. But when he said that, he had a malicious grin on his face, which made me think that he was keeping the phone away from me for no other reason than that I wanted to see it. I didn't want to believe this. I wanted to give non-Cheadle the benefit of the doubt.
On the other hand, the reason I wanted to see it was vague in my mind. I was confused and unclear about my own motivations. I thought maybe I just wanted to pick a fight with non-Cheadle, and was using the phone as an excuse to do so. I wasn't sure whether the animosity between us had something to do with non-Bell.
Finally the phone rang, non-Cheadle spoke on it briefly, muffling his mouth with his hands so I couldn't make out what he was saying, and after a short while he hung up and tossed the phone to me, but he had erased all of the data from the display, and he laughed at me. I lunged at him and wrestled him to the ground, but several people managed to pull us apart after a while. I didn't care anymore about what data had been on the phone, or why the two of us were fighting, I just wanted to attack him, if not physically then verbally or some other way. (Irl it's been almost 40 years since I've been in a fight.) He had some blood trickling out of a corner of his mouth, and he looked as if he felt the same way about me.
I decided that this conflict was doing no-one any good. I went out the window and climbed down from terrace to terrace. As soon as I was outside the air was much fresher, and I started to let the anger go, and I felt much better. I reminded myself that I was in Venice for the very first time, and I felt that I ought to be able to just leave that dingy apartment behind and find something much more pleasant out in the city, some people with whom I would enjoy passing the time. It was very dark outside. When I got to street level I could just barely see that the street was roughly paved with cobblestones. Then I woke up.
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