Here’s a Public Service Announcement for you. It’s harsh, but it needs to be said: Your dreams are deathly boring to everyone else.*
Now, I know this is hard to believe. As Ed Tom Bell put it in “No Country for Old Men”, when asked if his dreams were interesting: “They always is to the party concerned.” Your dreams are cooked up by your own brain, and therefore freighted with resonant imagery and associations that make them uniquely pleasing to that brain. Everyone else, lacking your peculiar neurological wiring, will wonder what the hell you’re talking about.
Example
Consider this:
A few weeks ago I had a dream. I was back in college, running around trying to find the lecture hall where my final was being administered. The final started was to begin in 15 minutes, and, of course, I hadn’t studied for it. (You might be able to deduce something about my diligence as a student from this detail.) I finally found someone who could direct me to the proper lecture hall. It turned out the final was being held in a lecture hall off-campus. In fact, pretty far away. In Antarctica.
PSA
When I woke up from this dream I laughed out loud. I thought it was one of the funniest stories I’d every heard. As you can see, however, it loses a little something in the telling.
Let this post serve as a warning: Don’t inflict your dreams on others.
Footnote
[*] Yes, there may be an exception every now and then. But, unless you’re a professional humorist, author, or storyteller, or otherwise gifted with an unusual knack for entertaining others, you oughtn’t assume that that really cool dream you had last night is one of them.
