I don’t know about you, but I have some weird dreams. I’m talking about the sleeping kind, not the career ambition kind.

Quite often my dreams are very real, but with a twist. Sometimes they mirror real life. Once I had the same dream 44 times in a night, but that was while I was in Peru and in the throes of altitude sickness.

There is this one dream that I have where the University of Guelph informs me I am two credits short of my degree. This is followed by a ridiculous goose chase where I hunt all over campus for some information about the two courses. The only certainty is that the final exams for each are to be written within days and I don’t know the course code, the prof, or the textbook.

Yes, that is odd. My confession to all of you is that I have had this dream for years and really, would it matter one bit that the 10” x 14” piece of paper in the corner in my office suddenly vanished?

Every year a few weeks before the Forum, I have a similar dream. Only this one has a couple of twists.

In one, I sleep through the first day of the Forum. Given my social habits, this one probably doesn’t seem that far fetched. But what is odd is that nobody knows what room I am in to come wake me up. In fact my room, in the dream, feels somewhat like a submerged marine chamber. I feel like I am floating around it weightlessly, while every word I mutter has a decidedly David Hasselhoff-like quality to it. To understand the effect, try uttering these words form the bottom of your intestines while you keep your lips in a jellyfish like formation: “Get. Out. Of. The. Water.” Say it again – “Get. Out. Of. The. Water.”

As my nostrils fill with brine and the countdown to the Forum begins, my staff huddle and determine their game plan. Should they announce that aliens captured Mark? Should they pretend this was all planned and I am making a royal appearance at some mysterious moment? Perhaps rising from beneath the stage like a 70s electro pop star?

Or should they send out a search party… preferably starting with all the Starbucks that are ten-minute walk form the hotel? Or better yet, the last three bars where I was seen doing trays of Jägerbombs?

It wouldn’t be long before Justin from my team would brush off his Leafs gear and take center stage. He would probably introduce a panel of Trojan team members who would issue a courteous apology and then move onto the meat of the conference.

Speaker after speaker; like Andrew Shibata from RBC and Shari Willerton from the Shaw Festival or Chuck Philips from Cocoon Branding; could weave me into their speech, “So did you hear the one about the fat bald guy who missed his most important event of the year?”

Arrogantly I would be hoping that this would happen in every speech that day. Why else would Chris Armstrong, Rick Burton, and Colin Campbell talk about the value of endorsers in sponsorships if they couldn’t make some crack about, “make sure he shows up for the photo shoot!”

Or Dave Thomas, who is going to expertly talk about social media, should clearly tweet about the missing conference chairperson.

And if Adam Garone is going to enthrall and inspire you with his tale on how he created Movember, then surely he must reflect on how much the campaign will miss my Ted Lange impersonation this fall.

But this probably won’t happen. The Forum will role along without me, while I drown in my own ego. Trapped in some Neverland hoping that J.M. Barrie will at least write me into the sequel.

Of course, the alternative to all this self-pity while the rest of you enjoy the Forum, is to tell you about the other panic dream I have. In that one, I take the stage to open the conference having forgotten something very important. My pants… and my gitch!

While it wouldn’t take long for the Sûreté du Québec to take me away on trumped up charges (if you get my drift), I am comforted by the knowledge that I would probably get off (no pun attempted here folks), for lack of evidence.

I didn’t pretend to know who Brian McKeever is, until recently.

In fact, my exposure to Paralympians really only began a few years ago when we started planning to have the 2010 Canadian Sponsorship Forum in Whistler, during the Games. Read the rest of this entry »