…with Gary Moss

At first, you might think that you are going insane, but you will know that you are on the right path to becoming a scrabble aficionado when you find yourself dreaming about words.

I recall the first time that it happened to me. I had been playing club scrabble, very seriously, for about 6 months. I had been frantically studying, several hours each week, trying to become good enough to beat some of the heavy hitters at the Livonia, Michigan club. My biggest stumbling block was not knowing any of the strange words that THEY played. Once, at club, I had the tiles: ‘A’ ‘E’ ‘I’ ‘L’ ‘N’ ‘O’ ‘S’ When I rearranged them and played ’sealion’, I was quickly challenged off the board. (I could swear that ’sealion was a real word. I remembered seeing the ’sealion’ exhibit the last time I had visited Sea World.) At the end of the game THEY told me that the legal word on that rack was ‘nerolis’. Who knew?

So on this night I was in the most comfortable state of sleep. The dream was about me involved in a scrabble game. My opponent had just played a word ‘aboiteau’, and I thought that he were just funning with me. I yelled, “CHALLENGE!” My yell was so loud that it woke me from my sound sleep. I woke up, very disoriented. Unlike other times, the dream was vivid in my mind. I turned on the lamp on my bedside table, got my bearings, and headed straight for my scrabble dictionary. Whereas most of my dreams fade away as my head gets farther from my pillow, this time it was firmly planted in my memory. I located the OWL and frantically thumbed through the dictionary until I found the entry: ‘aboiteau’. Then I remembered that one of the club gurus, Rodney, had played that word against me at club last week; I didn’t challenge it, assuming that it was acceptable, but I had never done my homework and looked it up after the game, to validate its correctness. Now I knew.

I wrote down the word, certain that I wouldn’t remember a thing about this event or the dream when I awoke, later in the morning.

But I did remember, a few hours later. When I shared my tale with other players in the days and weeks to come, I learned that I was not the only person who dreams about words. Actually, it is fairly common among scrabble players.

Since that time I have always kept a pad of paper, pen, and a scrabble dictionary on my bedside table, right next to the lamp.