Last night’s dream was a grand humiliation.
I had been recruited for membership in a think tank, despite my protestations that I wasn’t really an expert in anything. The reply was that they put together a combination of savants and ordinary people, including some like me who they felt fit in the middle, just to produce the conversations that they felt produced results. The non-experts were there, essentially, as agitators.
In the dream I had been a member of the same think tank one year earlier, but was let go without explanation after only one day, without explanation, by request of some of the savants: paranoia-inducing circumstances, to be sure. But my name came up again and so I showed up again, desperate to please.
All was fine until my bathroom break, at which point I suffered a vivid septic accident, highly specific in description, that rendered me a noxious spectacle to those around me. Out of decency to the reader I won’t describe exactly what happened, a physical thing that can really happen to innocent people who aren’t pigs. Suffice it to say that it was a bathroom fail, that resulted in me catastrophically soiling myself, and looking like an idiot.
And here I was trying to make an impression around these world-class savants!
When I woke, I grumbled: clearly this is an epic anxiety dream.
It is the kind of dream that makes you feel bad about yourself just for having it, if that’s what you think of yourself.
But then the other shoe dropped.
I realized:
Yes, Adam, you have social anxieties.
But that is not what’s happening here.
You see, I have plenty of dreams about bad things happening at the worst possible moment. Discount the dreams that are just disconnected imagery, the ones that are whirls of absurdity, the ones that are tied in to life memories and the many I have reported here that end in definable punchlines however tortured — and almost all of my remembered dreams are of bad things happening at the worst possible moment.
I dream about packing for a trip and constantly having to return home because there’s always one thing left behind.
I dream of trying to find where I left my car, and escalating barriers keeping me from even getting to the right neighborhood.
I had one memorable dream, once, about my car breaking down on the railroad crossing, the barriers coming down, and the horn of the oncoming train scaring me silly — only to confirm that no train was coming down the tracks in either direction. That’s strange! Then I look down the road I’m on and seeing a huge freight train, unaccountably traveling the roadway instead of the track, barreling down on me in defiance of all physics. That one was like a Don Martin cartoon.
I once had a dream in which I went to the beach, laid out a towel to lie on, got all comfy, closed my eyes, and scowled as what appeared to be a cloud passed in front of the sun I craved. At which point I was flattened by an inexplicable falling cow. That one was like an animated Far Side.
What was happening, with these dreams and that think tank dream?
Well, maybe anxiety did enter into the premise, setting me up for some kind of fall, but the punchline was wrought by something else, a reflex I have nurtured my entire life.
That reflex is what I do every time I sit in front of my keyboard.
Okay, I think: what is the worst possible thing that can happen at this particular moment?
That is the reflex of a storyteller.
And it does not deactivate just because I’m unconscious.
Leave a Reply