You might say the idea for this post came to me in a dream

The other day someone told me, or maybe I read, that the only thing people like less than hearing about other people’s problems is hearing about other people’s dreams. I can’t imagine why this is the case—after all, my dreams are endlessly exciting! As you will see here (sort of).*

Once I had a class where we had to keep a dream journal. It turns out that a large number of people don’t remember any of their dreams ever. I am not one of those perhaps-lucky souls. My memorable dreams range from the appalling-yet-hilarious** to the mundane*** to the plain bizarre,**** yet most of them are governed by an ineluctable sort of logic.

A friend of mine has the best dreams, some of which I’ve been known to relate to others, despite the opening sentence’s sentiment. She has dreamed that I was the king of a desert island in a teacup (okay, maybe retelling that one is a bit self-serving), and that she took the π train to 98.6th Street. Another friend of mine dreamt (and if she’s reading this, she will argue that “dreamt” is not in fact the only word in the English language that ends in “mt,” even though it is) of a cheese platter covered in quotations like, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It was called a Socracheese.

My favorite type of dream is the one where I’m flying. No airplane or wings or anything like that; I just jump as if the earth’s gone trampoline, and soon I go higher and higher with each successive leap, until I’m suspended in flight. Sometimes this dream happens in a hallway and sometimes out over by LaGuardia; sometimes it’s in an imaginary Arctic you can only reach by skinny ice-caked highway.

This morning just before waking I met a new yet strangely familiar dreamscape. I was reading through my email (you’d think I would be able to escape this compulsion in my sleep, but no) when suddenly I was barraged by a bunch of instant messages. One of them, from a former boss of mine, was apparently about favorable press his company had recently received. I tried to read what he wrote but it piled up too quickly. R—, I typed, you’re writing too fast for me to keep up. Then my attention was diverted by another message, from a dear friend I have not heard from in some time. He sent a link to a video clip of Muppets in an airplane. A gleeful shout emanated from the kamikaze Muppets just before I woke up: “The plane’s crashing! You’re going to liiiiiiive!” I can think of no better benediction for waking.


*By all means, feel free to comment with some dreams of your own, if you’ve got any, good, bad, or ugly. Fair’s fair.

**In this case, a self-parody of my desire to minimize conflict: in the dream, a friend tried to stab me. Change of scene: suddenly, I’m instant messaging with him and the thought runs through my head, “You just tried to stab me and now you’re pretending everything’s okay. I don’t want to fight with you, but this feels pretty awkward.”

***My mother informed me that my new boss is unmarried (which is not true, as verified by a quick google search after waking).

****A giant dog ran up to me and I kept calling it a bear. I woke up to my cat running over my face, hitting the headboard, and skittering off in fantastic pinball fashion.