Not the weirdest, I have too many and they are all bonkers, but one of the more “cohesive” and memorable ones I had was… 15-20 years ago.

I was Rick Mercier (this is all gonna be very Canadian brace yourselves) and I was interviewing Guy Lelibre or whatever the Cirque du Soleil guy’s name is. I was meeting him downtown so he could show my their newest greatest marvel, they were raising their tent using the CN tower as the centre pole.

As we watched in awe all these carneys working diligently, he asked me to grab onto this section of the tent. It had the texture of dryer hose, like a midweight plastic bag with thin wire ribbing. We grabbed on tightly and all of a sudden we were being pulled up hundreds of feet as we rode the tent up to the top, with tons of other Carneys in pairs doing the same as us. As we got near the top Guy pulled a release and the section of the tent we were on separated from the main tent and became/secretly already was a hang glider, and we started sailing east out over the beaches area.

All the other teams were hang gliding with us, soaring along the shore of the lake, looking for a place to land safely. As Guy steered us down and we landed I caught the eye of the Tin Man (from Wizard of Oz) and I thought “this is ridiculous, I’ve only met that guy one other time and it was also while I was hang gliding and landed near him! I’ll have to go explain myself!”

So we landed, and there was a small interlude where I was me and not Rick Mercer and I found a group doing yoga and one of them was a coworker, and she bought a sandwich to give to a homeless person, but this person wasn’t Toronto homeless* they were Sarah McLachlan singing about you starving in a third world homeless and I just felt so bad to have been hang gliding.

Then I realized we were pretty far from the core and the grand opening was approaching fast and I started searching for Guy. I found him and was like “how will we get back in time?!” And he smiled like Willy Wonka and looked over the horizon, where dozens of white horses**, all without saddles but wearing the feather hat thing, came galloping towards us.

They all split into pairs and peeled away to each of their respective Carney hang gliding construction team members, and without stopping we did the thing where you grab the horse as it’s running by and suddenly are riding. And with that, Guy, me (Rick Mercier) and the rest of the team galloped back towards the CN tower, which was now a giant tent, to witness the grand opening just in the nick of time! Fin

I will have outted myself with that post, as I share that dream whenever someone asks this type of question.

*Homelessness is a serious problem. I don’t mean to be insensitive, I’m trying to use few words to express an idea.

**Cirque du Soleil does not use animals, it’s kinda their whole thing, so this is the least realistic part of the dream but I like to think they are just union horse labour from the local RCMP/Toronto Police stables, or maybe the Medieval Times Horses trying to earn some extra cash…