A Dream
Most people’s dreams are simple, or maybe they’re complicated but the
person can’t rember or describe all the complexity.
My dreams are complicated, vivid, detailed, and I must say, well
directed. For instance. I woke up this morning having dreamed the
following:
First, I was in a movie theater. The movie on the screen was me playing
Playstation. The game ended, and everyone left the theater, except for
the creepy game show host from ‘The Weakest Link.’ She was chatting
amicably with a future contestant who was sitting next to her. They
laughed about some joke she made. She saw me staring at her, and I almost
said, “Hey, you really *are* human!” but thought, ‘Uh, of COURSE she’s
human. Of COURSE it’s a show.’ I gathered my stuff and left.
I went out of the theater into the mall where it was located. Malls
figure prominently in my dreams, because they’re supposed to be something
they can’t possibly be. No mall is the community it wants people to
believe it is. But this is the context for the second phase of the dream.
There was a rather large cardboard box with people inside it, though I
couldn’t see them. For some reason I understood that I was supposed to
pull the box toward the mall exit, so I did. I said, “Are you all ready?”
and muted voices from inside the box said, “Yeah, let’s go!” Once we got
to the mall door, some very poor men came and started picking through the
box. The people had become stuff. Stuff you’d find at thrift stores, or
estate sales. Their leader stopped them, loaded the box into a truck, and
we all drove over to the other side of the mall parking lot.
Once there, we walked into a barn-like warehouse, with dirt floor and
stalls. The stalls had shelves, upon which were piled all kinds of stuff
similar to the stuff in the box I’d pulled out of the mall. Every window
in the building had a sort of cross made out of two pieces of 2×4 hanging
down from the top of the sill, like a rear-view mirror in a an car
windshield. On the horizontal part was a picture of death, reminiscent of
those devotional pictures you see of Amachi and figures like her. Death
in the rear-view mirror.
There were children in the barn/warehouse. They were very happy to see
the group’s leader, and some were happy to see me. Mostly, however, they
were sucking on candy suckers. It was these children’s job to sort
through all the Stuff. The leader was motivating them by handing out the
suckers. The children and some of the other adults, in a subtle and swift
play of nonverbal communication, convinced the leader to give me a
sucker, too, which he did. Thus, I was expected to start sorting.
As I started to move towards what I presumed to be the sorting table, I
caught a glimpse out of one of the back-facing windows. Outside was a
beautiful huge back yard, with thick green grass ringed by dense thicket
and live oaks. There were more tables arranged around the edge of the
yard, at least a hundred. Each table had a huge pile of more thrift store
stuff on it. Hanging by a string from the trees above each table was a
sucker, each bright red.
The leader had a very complicated system for sorting the stuff, according
to type of object, age, quality, rarity, sentimental value, and on and on
and on. There was a huge table partitioned into slots for all of these
different classifications. He was obsessed about sorting all this stuff
correctly. I gazed out a window, but my eyes were caught up in the
deathly rear-view mirror.
And then the third phase of the dream began.
My dream became a cross-cultural training video, for Italians. The point
of the video was to teach Italians what they needed to know about
American culture. However, the video was created by American advertising
execs, whose only real experience with American culture is to have
created the more inspid parts of it (because that’s what ad execs do).
Now, I wish I could remember more about it, because it was really funny.
One of the problems with having complicated dreams is that the specifics
get washed out of memory rather quickly. But I remember the beginning of
it. It went like this:
A man in a gray business suit is at the top of a playground slide. For
some reason, the bottom of the slide forms into a pool of water, about
four feet across. The man, who has the most intense fake smile you can
imagine, the kind of smile that borders on self-parody, speaks:
“Eagerness! Anticipation!” He slides down the slide, issuing the most
artificial “Wheeeee!” you’ve ever heard, which somehow manages to give
away the actor’s Italian accent. He splashes into the water and comes up
drenched. His face nearly fills the ‘screen,’ and water is dripping off
his nose and chin. He says, “Enjoyment!” He cocks his head to the side a
little bit, grows his fake smile to be even wider, and says,
“SATISFACTION!”
