Poker dreaming again

A couple of nights ago I found myself playing hold'em in a most unusual setting. It was me against a whole bleacher full of other players, maybe 40 or 50 of them. I was standing on the ground facing them, while they were all seated. As if that weren't weird enough, we were playing not with cards, but with feathers. This was new to me, and I wasn't quite sure what to do with them. I was given two beautiful, large, black feathers, each of which had a single crimson marking near its base. I thought perhaps this meant they were aces. My father was directing the whole affair, so I asked him, and he confirmed my suspicion.

My first problem was what to do with the feathers physically. I mean, these things were about 18 inches long. I wasn't sure if everybody else could already see what I had. For lack of a better way of concealing my hand, I stuck them in my back pocket.

OK, so I've got two aces. But what to do about the betting? Somebody in the bleachers had already raised to $10 (this must have been a $1-$2 game), and about 10 people behind had called. It was my turn. I had no idea how to do bet-sizing when there this many people already in the pot, and 40 or 50 more yet to act. (I don't think it occurred to me to wonder how there were enough cards to go around. Maybe feather decks have more than 52 in them.) I raised to $40, but I had a feeling that that wasn't really enough, under the circumstances.

The next player to act was a man I knew from church all the years I was growing up--Sherman Brown--who is the most anti-gambling person I've ever known. He wouldn't even allow a deck of cards to be in his home, and took every available opportunity to advise other church members to follow the same practice. So it was a high degree of cognitive dissonance to find myself playing poker against him.

Maybe that was what made me realize that this was too strange to be real (as if the bleachers and feathers and Dad running things were perfectly normal), because that's when I woke up.