Where'd you get your information from, huh? You think that you can front when revelation comes?

You often hear people talk about how they have a problem that, try as they might, they just can't seem to come up with a solution for. You know, like ending their sentences with prepositions. Sometimes it will take weeks, and still no solution, and then suddenly their answer will come to them in a dream. A revelation, if you will (or even if you won't). Well, I don't have much experience with that, but it did happen for me once in my life. I'll relate the tale to you now.

When my ex-wife and I were newlyweds, our "job" was to keep watch over a marina that closed down for the winter. After all, there's not much point to keeping a marina open when the lake it sits on completely freezes over. The marina owner let us live in a trailer that overlooked the marina for free, so long as we established a presence at the place. Basically, anytime we saw somebody out on the docks, we had to go down and talk to them, or at least let them see that we were around. That way the owner didn't have to worry as much about anything getting stolen or vandalized.

However, the only people we ever saw was the occasional weekend ice fisherman, so as you can imagine, things got a little boring. Especially considering the fact that we only got two TV channels: The Sci-Fi channel, and whatever the owner of the marina left his satellite dish on (usually the Playboy channel). So, for our first Christmas, we bought ourselves a Super Nintendo game system and a couple of games. We spent a good portion of our day playing Super Mario World:



Some of the game's levels were more difficult than others, but there was one in particular that I just could not beat. It was a fortress, and I could get to the end of it, but the very last thing to kill off was a spinning wheel full of fire breathing rhinoceri:



Sure, it doesn't look like much. You just run under the wheel, and bounce the rhinos off their perches by jumping up and hitting them from underneath, right? Well, that worked for the first one or two, but then the floor Mario is standing on began to slowly fall apart and fall into the fire below. Try as I might, I just could not knock them off fast enough to avoid falling into the flames myself. I don't know how much time I spent trying to figure a way to beat the level the first time I encountered, but if there was a way to beat it, it was clearly beyond me. After many futile efforts, I gave up for the night and went to bed.

That's when it happened. In the wee hours of the morning, the answer came to me in a dream. To knock the last rhinos off, I would have to jump on the wheel itself, dodge fireballs while waiting for it to rotate, and then jump and knock them off once I was underneath them:



I awoke, and immediately went and turned on the game to give it a try. It worked. And there you have the story of the only time in my life that I've had a revelation in a dream. Too bad it couldn't have been for something important.