these dreams go on when i close my eyes! Every second of the night!

Dreams are pretty weird. They seem important but in fact there’s nothing so dull as listening to another person’s dream. A particularly weird dream is impossible to not relay to your friends but they don’t care. No one cares about other people’s dreams even in the slightest, and that’s because dreams, while vividly real (truly, a dream is EVERY bit as much of a brain’s ‘reality’ as any waking life, except for the lack of consequences) are real ONLY in the realm of one brain. To all other brains it’s just a bunch of completely meaningless bullshit.

Yeah, there are people, psychiatrists, therapists and irritating hippy types mostly, who claim that they can interpret dreams, to which I reply: no, you can’t. Dreams may have a meaning but to interpret them as symbolic of anything universal (as in, Oh, you’re dreaming about your teeth falling out? That’s really about money) is a bunch of bullshit. There’s no way that different brains operate under the same umbrella of esoteric symbolism. That’s a pretty asinine thought. When you consider that one person could look at a steaming pile of shit covered in bloody vomit and want to barf and cry and another person could look at the same pile of bloody bile-poo and get a glass-cutting boner, it becomes pretty crystal clear that brains function in completely unique ways and that there’s absolutely no way that something like subconscious symbolic imagery could possibly have any sort of universal semblance. I mean, fuck, just the idea of actually losing your teeth means different things to different people. For some, it’s primarily a vanity issue, for others it’s a health issue, for others it’s more of a practical irritation and so on. So how come suddenly when we’re asleep, losing teeth suddenly always means the same thing? It’s fucking dumb.

Now, I’m not suggesting that dreams are completely meaningless, just that blanket interpretations (like books called “What do your Dreams Mean”) are the domain of the very dumbest of dummies. But sure, there’s gotta be a connection between me having very stressful dream situations and my life being stressful. There’s gotta be SOME meaning in the dream where I’m banging a woman with a beautiful body and the face of my oldest friend Chris with an Abe Lincoln beard (this is, unfortunately, a real dream I had). The dreams where I write songs and then remember the songs when I wake up (they’re usually terrible) have to have some sort of relation to my life and my general interest in writing music. It’s not just complete random garbage. But it’s not cut and dry either. And as such, it’s pretty hard to be interested in listening to anyone talking about their dreams, unless it’s a dream about them fucking or getting fucked by something really weird, but usually people keep those to themselves.

The one place where I kind of think that dreams become interesting is when they’re recurring dreams. This is kind of a wild phenomenon that’s a little more transcontinental than the one-offs. I have a few recurring dreams. The first one is where I’m incredibly good at jumping. I can jump like princess toadstool in super Mario 2 where once I reach the apex of my jump I can hover for a while. As I jump farther and farther and higher and higher, it eventually becomes a lot like flying, although it’s always based in jumping and never soaring. Pretty fascinating, right?

I also have a recurring dream where I’m perched somewhere that’s really high and precarious. I start out feeling confident that I can go wherever it is and do whatever I’m supposed to do, but once I get out there I’m paralyzed by fear and I end up just crouching, completely white knuckling the shit out of whatever I’m on, frozen and terrified until I wake up. This dream blows. I have one other recurring dream that involves me descending down stairs into underground windowless rooms. Each room is just covered in unpainted white drywall and has a stairwell going up and going down. Once I get to about the tenth level down, I realize that the walls are covered in roaches. The roaches are huge and some of them can fly. I wig out (because I’m no good with roaches) and run back up the stairs only to realize that the room above is even MORE roach infested. Usually at this point I start freaking out so badly that I wake up.

Those are my recurring dreams. Now that I see them written down I’m gonna have to go back and say, nope, Beex, you’re wrong. Recurring dreams are no more interesting than one offs. It’s all gibberish.

On that note, get back to work, slackers! Dreams are for suckers. You’ve been warned.