I had a dream this morning in which I was hanging out at a hotel with the Jonas Brothers and the guys from Entourage, two sets of people I’d never want anything to do with in real life. (While I do watch the Entourage TV show, they’re far too self-absorbed to be trusted, and as for the Jonas Brothers, they seem nice enough, but they also seem rock lite, and little more than today’s edition of the Monkees.) Anyway, after awhile in the hotel bar, someone gets the idea to hop in a limo and drive around the city.

Once we do, the city which passes by outside our windows could be any big, generic megalopolis, so I can’t tell you exactly where we were. But eventually we pass one of those upscale gentlemens clubs the Entourage guys love to frequent on their show. Out front, half-naked woman covered with leopard spots and wearing cat-like face make-up are doing gymnastics to attract attention. The car is stopped, and Vince and the guys vanish inside.

I’m left with the Jonas Brothers, and they look at each other as if to say, “Uh-oh, we can’t get caught here,” out of fear that it would ruin their squeaky clean tweener image. They look back and forth from each other to the woman again, over and over, and then they, too, leap out of the car and disappear inside the club, leaving me alone in the back of a stretch limo. After a moment, I decide to head inside to track down my companions.

Once through the door, however, I’m inside a Chinese restaurant, wondering where the strip club went. It’s packed, and as I eyeball the tables, none of the guys are visible. I talk to the owner, who is standing there ready to seat me, and ask about my friends. She tells me that I want to go downstairs, and points back to the entrance, and sure enough, there’s a stairway there which hadn’t been there when I’d entered, heading down. It looks normal enough, but when I start going toward whatever’s in the basement, the steps are so far apart that I have to climb and leap from one to the next.

Once downstairs, I do find the guys, seated around a big table. (I don’t see any of the women who’d enticed the guys inside, though; by the looks of it, we might as well just be in another restaurant, though a far more upscale one.) Seated with the group is someone new.

I’m surprised to see that it’s Paul Kupperberg, whom I first met when I was a comics fan in the ’70s, and who I last saw at a SFWA Meet the Editors party what had to be at least a decade ago. Today (in real life) he’s become a big mover and shaker both in comics and with his media tie-in novels. He leaps up, and we hug. I make some stupid comment like, “I knew if I was ever going to run into you again, it would be in a strip club,” which really had no meaning to any of our behaviors or personalities, but was just my dream attempt at teasing banter. I woke as we were catching up.

I can understand why Paul might have entered my dream, as he commented here recently. And I can see where the Jonas Brothers came from, as while I was in Florida this weekend watching after my father, and was feeling down, I listened to Louis Prima to cheer myself up (who can remain depressed after listening to Louis Prima?), which led me to a YouTube video of the Jonas Brothers butchering a Prima standard. But as for the Entourage boys, I have no idea how they got there.