In which I join Zach Braff's writing group.

Zach Braff is an engaging young actor. I've enjoyed his joyful goofiness on the television series Scrubs, and found his Garden State movie reasonably entertaining. Other than that, I've never given him a second thought.

Until last night, when I was forced to consider The Braff in a new light. You see, he invited me to enjoy his weekly writing group, which meets on the back patio of a semi-seedy coffee house in L.A. Except in this dream, he wasn't actually Zach Braff, per se - just some random guy who took an inexplicable liking to me and invited me to join his group.

Now, I don't usually remember my dreams, and the ones I do remember are rarely peopled with celebrity cameos. (Although I remain traumatized by a semi-romantic dream I had many years ago featuring - and, with all due respect, *gag* - Neil Diamond. Further proof that we are not, indeed, the casting directors for our own dreams.) So when someone completely off-the-wall, from an entirely different generation, practically from another planet - say, a Zach Braff - shows up in one of my dreams, I can't help but think it means something. Perhaps even something... astrological.

So I look him up on IMDB and find that The Braff is an Aries, and writes his own screenplays. And immediately, his guest appearance in my dream makes sense. My fifth house (creativity) is ruled by Aries, and I'm currently having a devil of a time with this book project. This isn't the first time a younger man with an Aries infuence in his chart has appeared to help me jump-start my creative career when I've hit a wall. True, these creative interventions don't usually take place on the astral plane or whatever, but hey - you take what you can get.

But the thing is, I didn't know Braff was an Aries. Maybe I read something, somewhere, about how we writes his own movies, but I have no conscious memory of it. How in the world did my subconscious manage to Google a database containing the millions of people and faces and images collected throughout my lifetime... and deliver up a Zach Braff search result? It's mystifying. And what was Dream Braff trying to tell me - to join a writing group? Drink more coffee? Cast Natalie Portman in my next dream?

I haven't got a clue. Maybe he'll tell me next week, when we go pick up our dry cleaning together.