“…and then a whole bunch of us were gathered in what looked like a laundry room and it was weird, but I could stand up on my own, without a walker or a wheelchair. And my sister was standing next to me, but she wasn’t really my sister. She kind of looked like that girl from The White Lotus. The one who was dating the scruffy-looking guy that wants to kill the hotel owner’s husband. Aimee Lou Wood. But it wasn’t Aimee Lou Wood.”
Uh huh.
“And what was that guy’s name? The one with the real-life line of sunglasses he uses GoDaddy Airo to build a website for?”
I don’t know.
“I’d never heard of him or seen him in anything. Walter! I’m pretty sure his name is Walter.”
Oh, do you mean Walton? Walton Goggins? The one with Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses…
“…yah!… that’s him. Never heard of him before White Lotus. So anyway, then someone makes an announcement, and, this is weird, but… ”
Please no. Nothing could interest me less. Really. Just stop.
“…they said it was ‘Gene Hartman’ but I knew it was Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, even though it looked like Gene Hackman, the guy found dead with his wife in New Mexico. And he was dressed all Don Johnson in Miami Vice; talk about the eighties! He was in a white suit, lime green neon shirt, with a big hoop earring. And he was wearing mascara.”
Why is this happening to me? I can’t even –
Ever have someone tell you about a dream they had? It’s, in a word, painful. And yet, why is it that knowing this I inflict my dreams on others? I’ll admit that I’m a repeat offender in this regard. It’s like a drug high (so I’ve been told) or a really good drunk without the social stigma or consequences. Why wouldn’t I want to recount the craziest, most nonsensical mind-altering experience of my day in which I defied every single natural law in a consciousness where there was no time or space and I experienced a wildly free state of awareness?
I find dreams, as a phenomenon, to be absolutely fascinating. Really! I have no definitive insight into what they are and, while Freud may have proposed some theories, neither does anyone else. Conventional wisdom would dictate that one’s dreams are not a subject that is suitable for polite conversation. Writing for the New Yorker’s website in 2018, Dan Piepenbring began a review of Insomniac Dreams, a book about Nabokov’s relationship with his dreams, by offering an apology for the topic: “Dreams are boring. On the list of tedious conversation topics, they fall somewhere between the five-day forecast and golf.” And podcaster Sarah Koenig devoted an episode of This American Life to laying out the seven topics that interesting people should never talk about – dreams came in at number four, right behind menstruation. In the Guardian, one of my favorite television screenwriters, Charlie Brooker (of Black Mirror fame), claimed that listening to other people’s dreams made him dream “of a future in which the anecdote has finished and their face has stopped talking and their body’s gone away.”
One of Freud’s most enduring, yet least supported, theories is that most dreams express an unconscious sexual wish. Typical! If he’s not telling you to blame your mother for every little thing “wrong” with you, then the fact that your neighbor was in your dream last night wearing nothing but a trench coat made out of spaghetti is somehow about your penis, it’s about their penis, or it’s about penises in general. And for the record I would just like to take a moment here to state that my neighbor is a 90 year-old woman who is hard of hearing and confined to a wheelchair; I have no idea how she feels about pasta… or penises. For my part, I like both. Do with that what you will.
Research has shown that sharing dreams can have beneficial effects. In one study, the personal insight of college students was measured after they had spent a full 45 minute session sharing and “interpreting” either a dream or a significant real-life experience with a group of their fellow students. The researchers found that the sessions involving dreams proved to be more helpful in deriving useful insight.
There is anecdotal evidence supporting the sharing of dreams as well. In Dreaming in Auschwitz by Wojciech Owczarski, former concentration camp prisoners recounted how dreams were a source of distraction from the barbaric, inhumane environment they found themselves in, and the dreaming mind became a kind of much-needed entertainment. “Every morning we would start the day by sharing and interpreting the dreams we had during the night,” one Auschwitz survivor recalled; the act of sharing dreams became an exercise in community-building: where the Nazis had replaced inmates’ names with numbers in an effort to dehumanize them, a prisoner could reassert his or her humanity by sharing a dream or offering an interpretation of one.
Owczarski wrote:
The interpersonal dimension of interpreting dreams in Auschwitz was connected with the inmates’ need for capturing others’ attention. When a prisoner shared an interesting dream, he or she became, at least for a while, important for his or her interlocutor . . . The meaning of a dream was not as important as the sheer fact of talking about it. Sharing dreams was therefore a kind of mutual help, aimed at increasing the inmates’ self-esteem.
I’ve certainly never experienced something like being imprisoned in a concentration camp (although, there are days when assisted living feels like…) but sometimes I think the whole “sharing of dreams” thing stems from how impersonal many, if not most, conversations are these days. Listening is a lost art. In conversations today, most people aren’t listening to your story, fact, or observation, inasmuch as they’re preparing their response. I don’t exempt myself from that. I’m as guilty of that as the next person. But there is no response to someone telling you their dream. And I think we crave being heard. When a friend of mine recently told me she dreamed she was a California Raisin riding the Pacific Park ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier, what could I do but listen?
So put me down for being in favor of sharing dreams, no matter how whacky, or boring. It beats talking about the weather.