Sometime during the 2017-18 MLB offseason I had a dream in which the Dodgers won the World Series. I’m a Dodgers fan, so I daydream about the Dodgers winning the World Series all the time, which means it isn’t surprising that the idea should find its way into my actual dreams. Weird thing about this dream, though - the year, with the very weird specificity that dreams sometimes conjure, was 2020. Why my dreamscape should place the event at least two years in the future is a mystery only my subconscious can explain.
This doesn’t sound like much on paper - like most human beings I dream about stupid bullshit all the time. Nonsense and absurdity reign in dreamland. It’s like that Mitch Hedberg joke about how one minute you’re there sleeping comfortably in bed and the next you’re building a go-cart with your ex-landlord.
Still, this Dodgers in 2020 dream felt different. It had a vividness that I can’t really explain, and I don’t think it had anything to do with my weird propensity to eat huge handfuls of Raisin Bran before bed. I think it was early morning and I was probably in that weird state between deep sleep and waking, so the dream seemed very real. It was almost like a lucid dream in that I think I may have known within the dream that I was actually asleep and dreaming. Everything seemed extra-real, like watching some kind of inter-dimensional high-definition TV.
What happened in the dream was pretty simple. The Dodgers get the last out of the 2020 World Series and a celebration ensues. Maybe the pitcher on the mound getting that last out was Kershaw or Jansen, and curse my subconscious for blurring this particular detail, but I have the inclination that it was neither. Perhaps it was a pitcher that at the time I would have been unaware would be a Dodger in 2020. So this might be your chance to redeem yourself, Joe Kelly.
I’m not claiming to be any kind of psychic - if I was I’d be out there getting paid for predicting elections and winning lotteries and such. But here’s where things get really weird; in my dream, as the Dodgers are winning, I am aware within the dream that the circumstance of this game happening is not altogether normal. There’s a kind of weariness, or wariness. A general unease. The crowd is sparse and the celebration is very muted. Instead of jumping all over each other like euphoric Little Leaguers, the players are merely smiling, laughing, nodding, waving.
Then the real kicker. Faulty subconscious and all I do remember this detail. As a banner is unfurled declaring the Dodgers 2020 champs, the tv broadcaster declares “An appropriately strange ending to an incredibly strange season.” Yeah, I’m paraphrasing, it was a dream after all, so he probably said something more like “An appropriately blargh enema to an incrobulable strange bacon,” but I got the gist of it, and that’s what counts.
So, yeah. Two years ago I dreamed about a situation roughly similar to the one likely to be happening in October, give or take a few details, and if steady player health allows. I’ll work on dreaming up a cure for coronavirus but in the meantime I’m just happy to watch baseball and hope the part about the Dodgers comes true. And not just because I’m a Dodgers fan (though, yeah, that too) but because look, I mean, Clayton Kershaw is not only one of the two or three best pitchers of his generation but he is one of baseball’s notorious good guys. He deserves a ring like Chewbacca deserves a medal. And doesn’t our beleaguered nation deserve an image as heartening and inspiring as Kershaw - family man, philanthropist, hardest of hard workers, general paragon of American virtue - lifting the World Series trophy above his head?
Yeah, it does.
