Allison Vlish Meets the Grink

An imaginary love, a viral tweet, and a head full of lost ideas

A few months ago, I had an incredibly vivid dream during a nap. Since my sleep schedule has more or less corrected itself over the last couple years, I’ve had more of these, as I reacquaint myself with that deep restorative REM sleep. They’ve become commonplace enough that when I wake up, I don’t worry as much about retaining information from them. I tend to let them go on purpose, and they dissipate within moments, like smoke in a breeze.

But this one was jarring. I experienced love at first sight with a woman at an event of some kind. She fell for me, too — it was instant and obvious. There was blushing, hair flicking, lip biting, exaggerated laughing at mild jokes – all the symptoms were there. I was at this event with my entire family, who were elsewhere on the premises, and within seconds I was trying to figure out just how I was gonna throw it all away and run off with the real soulmate the universe had just presented me.

She made the move to ask me if I wanted to go out for a drink downtown. I snuck a peek at a clipboard on her desk and saw that her name was Allison Vlish. She was the most captivating human being I had ever seen. I was in a vortex of terror and possibility. At some point we parted company, I was alone in a massive crowd outside, and I had absolutely no idea what to do next.

It was one of those dreams so intense that I woke up and spent at least a minute in this world thinking what I’d just experienced had actually happened. In the transition back to actual reality, I wrote her name down, because I thought maybe I was remembering someone from my past. After all, whose subconscious just invents a person and does that to the rest of its stupid brain?

Unless I met an Allison Vlish who has since dropped completely off the grid, I made her up entirely. Google tells me there was, like, one Vlish family in the entire United States a hundred years ago. So much for that.

I don’t even remember what she looked like now, or what the event was (it seemed to be on a college campus, or something like one; I met her in the foyer of an old stone building, like a church or a library). Nearly all the details are gone. I might not have retained any of it if I hadn’t written her name down. I remember that feeling, and how weird and exciting and terrifying and amorphous it was.

For the record, I’m glad it didn’t really happen, before you ask.

I had a vague idea to turn my Allison Vlish experience into a video game, something involving different and conflicting time streams and parallel worlds, but the last thing my to-do list needs is another project idea. Allison and her beguiling whatever-it-was largely faded into my memory until today.

Completely unrelated to all that is one of my favorite online things, a social media convention that somehow hasn’t been overdone to death like so many other memes and jokes. I refer here to the viral tweet that introduced the world to The Grink:

Ever since reading this tweet, “was The Grink there?” has become the most well-worn catchphrase in my internal monologue. I say it to myself to answer just about any question, for no reason at all. If you’ve told me the opening line to a story in a real-life conversation in the last few years, know that whatever I replied to you aloud, I probably thought was The Grink there? in my head.

Tonight, while making dinner, I had an idea for this column. I was glad, because I didn’t want to put another fiction excerpt up till Wednesday, and I had an uneventful weekend working and puttering around the house, so I hadn’t been sure of what to talk about for this missive. I mulled over whatever it was, did some dishes, fixed a couple plates, came upstairs to jot it down and it was gone. Totally forgotten.

This happens to everyone, of course (Garrison Keillor wrote an amazing piece years ago about losing a notebook on a family trip and instantly anointing that lost work the best writing he’d ever done). Sometimes even jotting down an amazing shower idea or post-nap brainstorm doesn’t translate to paper or the screen, and the magic curdles before the thought can be solidified.

Other times, you’re so sure of its mojo that you spit in God’s eye and don’t even bother to write it down, certain it’s burned its Pulitzer-worthy bones into your cerebral cortex through sheer force of brilliance alone. That usually works out exactly like it did this time.

I started thinking about a repository for all those ideas, an ethereal library of the best and/or most batshit things one’s brain couldn’t keep hold of, stored in a cloister accessible only in dreams, or perhaps under the influence of the right cocktail of hallucinogens. Out of nowhere, in the same tone my inner voice always uses for The Grink, my monkey brain sneered:

Was Allison Vlish there?

The whole thing came together in my head instantly. The august building in which I met my dream paramour was the archive where all my amazing lost ideas go when they leave this plane. She must be their curator. Or is she their protector? Is she protecting them from me? Me from them? Is she my nemesis and the unrequited love of my life, the one who gets me like no other and must therefore shield me from my own distempered genius?

You can have thoughts like this without eating a single nibble of an edible. Did you know that?

My last nap, after a morning spent fruitlessly looking for a misfiled item for a big order, yielded a work dream where I hunted for CDs again — reliving the frustration of lost inventory on yet another plane of consciousness. It reminded me of the dreams I had for years after the last time I waited a table – my bed was in the breakroom of a restaurant, I had side work to do, people were being sat in my section, silverware needed rolled, and I found myself immobile beneath my blankets, unable to cope with being in the weeds.

I’m about to post this and go to bed. If I remember tonight’s dream, I’m not sure if I’d rather see the same stacks of physical media I’ll be dealing with in daylight, or my own private Grink, breaking my heart with the arch of an eyebrow as she locks a file cabinet full of whatever much more lucid thing I could have written about in this space.