Dream a Little Dream

Many people with many more degrees and many more star charts on their walls than I have undertaken the abstract subject of dreams. Look, let me say this right up front - I don't put much stock in dream interpretation. Sure, there are easy bridges to make such as, if you had a dream about eating chocolate pudding from the head of Sherlock Holmes, you are obsessed with death. Dreamt about balancing a marshmallow deck chair on the tip of your nose? Death. Had a dream about snapping into a cyanide capsule as you kick away the ladder and swing in a noose while Satan pumps round after round of armor-piercing bullets into your swinging body? Well, actually, that's not about death, it's about sexual anxiety in group situations, but more on that another time.

When I was a kid, I was terrorized by nightmares. It wasn't even funny. It was vivid, raw and disturbing. They were kinds of dreams that would make Norman Bates wake up and cry "Mommy!" Then, poof! They were gone. No more monsters chasing me, no more scary dreams, not even an off-camera grunt. Almost overnight, I became immune to all of it. Dreams starting taking on more of an idyllic tilt. Of course, as I grew older, reveries of scoring the winning goal in the Stanley Cup finals, morphing into all-powerful beasts, and discovering large sacks of money were replaced with dreams of naked girls, opulent homes, and large sacks of money. Even more so, they constituted the backbone of my daydreams, but that's another story for another audience.

Now, I'm going to back up and tell you that I lied. I DO still have dreams with horrific monsters in them, but, I know it's only a dream, so I simply make myself bigger than the monster and knock the snot out of them. No more running down that long hallway that stretches farther with each step and no more dead-legging where I can't run anymore (that's only in real life). Now? Well, nowadays I can glide along like I'm skating on a thick crust of tiramisu, lift off the ground as easily as a birthday balloon, and change locations more quickly than a fast-forwarded version of a montage of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" episodes. Dreams of falling have been replaced with dreams of gliding down softly and nonchalantly before cruising into my next adventure. What can I say - I'm at peace with my dreams.

Now, if you are a so-called normal person, you've had the naked dream, or at least the underwear dream. Those are the dreams where you are in a public setting either bare-ass naked or in your underwear, and you're terrified. Me? Not a chance. Hey, I'm no bronze Adonis, nor am I a reincarnation of John Holmes, but in my dreams, I'm strutting like Tony Manero in the opening credits of Saturday Night Fever, with my junk out there catching the breeze. Some of you have even had the toilet dream. What's the toilet dream? Glad you asked. It's the dream where you are sitting (usually naked) on the toilet, and it ain't a result of drinking too much water, if you catch my drift. The thing is, you're doing it in such private confines as a busy train station, the mezzanine of baseball stadium between innings, or by the cash registers of Macy's on Black Friday. This can really test your mettle, and it's not considered a weakness to wake up to re-calibrate yourself and fall back asleep into another dream. With any luck, you'll forget about it by the time you wake up.

I've also found myself experiencing repeats in my dreams. Sometimes a dream will get under way and I'll think to myself, "Oh, I know how this one goes." Then I'll kick back and enjoy it, shouting at the "screen" to "not go in there!" or, "oh, yeah, this is where that chick gets naked" - I love those dreams most of all. I do dream in color, and some jokes that I remember from my dreams are actually funny when I repeat them to myself after I'm awake, so I wonder on which side of the line of consciousness I belong. Personally, I think I belong on the side of the gorgeous naked girl dream that repeats over and over and over again. No need telling me what THAT dream means...

Last I heard, it was about death.