Remember when the movie Inception came out? From what I remember, most everyone raved about the film because of its deep dive into the world of the dream, including myself. Then, just like anything else, burying the movie because of its “fake deepness” seemingly became “the cool thing to do.” I’ll never understand why it became cool to denigrate something so polarizing and mysterious such as the phenomena of the dream. You don’t have to like the movie or anything, but criticizing a work of art that is trying to conceptualize something we don’t understand seems counterproductive. Maybe the people who didn’t care for the movie aren’t particularly vivid dreamers. Who knows? I always have been and still am. There have been dreams of mine that appear to have either been warning signs, depictions of the past, or even accurate predictions of the future. Nightmares from my childhood have plagued me even to this day. My own personal experiences, as well as listening to similar experiences from others, have led me to deem it inconceivable how one could prescribe zero meaning or significance to that of the dream. With that said, it is just a belief of mine as I have not a clue if they have meaning or not. Here is one thing I know for sure, or at least I think I know for sure: Dreams are definitely not random.
In the search to find what significance dreams may have, I have been reading Symbols of Transformation by Carl Jung. Admittedly, I can hardly comprehend anything in the book. I keep reading, though, because, by all accounts, Jung is a genius and the book is so detailed that the probability that I take away nothing isn’t very feasible. What I’ve managed to gather so far, at least what I think I’ve gathered, is that 1) Dreams are more than just our libido running rampant, as Freud apparently suggested, and 2) Our mind, body, and spirit are supposed to remain in balance with one another, and when one of those falls behind or is too far ahead (or the others need to catch up), the dream will do its best to convey that to you, and 3) if you have a dream about a moth burning its wings on the light, that means your passionate desire for someone or something will inevitably, no pun, burn you in the end. Love something too much; it will kill you. Something like that. I’m more than likely dead wrong about the latter two of those three, which is how most of my parlays pan out, but those are my best guesses.
Let’s do this. I’ll tell you about the dream that inspired this piece. When I woke up from this dream, I wrote down every single detail that I could possibly remember. Here it goes: I was at work, and I thought that I would order Pizza Hut where a girl, for anonymity’s sake we will call her Ashley (“she don’t got a name so for now we’ll call her Ashley.” See: Joe Budden – Exxes.), worked as a delivery driver. I’ve known Ashley for a while now, and there was a time when I fancied the idea of getting to know Ashley more, but nothing materialized. On this day in the dream, it was Ashley’s birthday. Perhaps, that’s why I wanted to order pizza, so I could see her on her birthday and give her a huge tip. Wink, wink. Just kidding. A small number of the females that I encounter receive a very small amount of gratuity. Anyway, when I called Pizza Hut, Ashley did not answer. I had to ask for her, and when I did, I was placed on speakerphone for all of her coworkers to hear me wish her a happy birthday. But this moment of being placed on speakerphone also called for a joke. “Hey, did you ever take that molly (ecstasy) that I gave you?” Nobody heard, so I had to repeat myself. Ashley and her coworkers eventually heard the odd joke, and it sounded like she thought it was funny. Strange as the joke was, a success, nonetheless. I remember the exact order I placed. Two medium pizzas and two orders of wings. A “taco” pizza, a barbecue chicken pizza, an order of buffalo, and barbecue wings. You might say those details are irrelevant, but there is a local pizza place here that sells a “taco pizza,” so even if it is on the irrelevant side of the spectrum, it is not as irrelevant as once perceived. After placing my order, I was in a rush to leave work and get home so that nobody would intercept the delivery. I was obsessively peering out the window, looking for a car to pull up, and when one finally did, I was no longer at work but at my grandma’s house. Most of my family was there. Maybe I was excited to introduce Ashley to the family. It was indeed Ashley who knocked on the door to deliver the food. Although she presented herself extremely well, she didn’t look great. She had a brown leather jacket on, and I believe brown leather boots to match, but I’m not exactly sure of the latter. Her attire was impressive, but she appeared to be in great distress. As I invited her in, I used something on her that I recently read that said, “hugs aren’t hugs unless they last ten seconds.” During this ten-second hug, I was quite a bit “handsy.” Part of me was joking; part of me was serious. That’s kind of the whole point of the ten-second hug gimmick. Even though there was an apparent enjoyment of my handsy-ness, I could still sense that Ashley was a nervous wreck, to the point where I brought her outside the house, as I assumed being inside was the cause. As we went outside, I discovered the source of her extreme anxiety. Standing outside were three combative-looking black men (I’m just describing the dream as it was), one of them dressed the way a pimp would dress, and the other two were seemingly his henchmen. Ashley, still in distress, referred to the man as her boyfriend, and I never saw Ashley or the boyfriend after that. They vanished, but the henchmen hung around to interrogate me. Thankfully, these henchmen gave me a bit of leeway during the interrogation process. You would suspect that they wouldn’t have, but rather just kick my ass (or worse) and get it over with. One of the henchmen was more understanding than the other. A classic good cop, bad cop scenario. The “good cop” asked me directly if I knew that Ashley had a boyfriend. Well, here’s the thing, I did know she had a boyfriend. But this may have been a life-or-death situation, so I lied. Bad cop did not believe me, and he was correct in his disbelief. Bad cop wanted my head on a stake. Good cop took me aside and sat me down to have a discussion. I started telling the good (well, good to me) henchman about all the good things that I had been doing. I told him I had eleven months sober and other things that would suggest that I would never do such a thing as hit on a woman who I knew was in a relationship. He was becoming more and more convinced of my bullshit, while bad cop (who wasn’t hearing any of the discussion between good cop and me) still wanted me dead. Around this time, when the tensions appeared to be dissipating, my family started looking out the window and saw that I was in dire straits. My Pop had pulled up in a white suburban with my little brother, who suffers from autism, in the passenger seat. I reckon it should be noted that my Grandparents own a white suburban. However, Pop drove off rather quickly, only to return a few moments later. This time with weaponry. Not a gun or a knife, but with what I can only describe as a leaf blower on steroids, hurling dangerous projectiles in any and every direction. This allowed me to escape the vicinity of the henchmen, run up a small hill, and join most of my family on the deck of the house. An important distinction to make in this dream was that when I was at work, ordering pizza, and being “held captive,” it was clearly nighttime. When I reconvened with my family on the deck, it was instantly daylight. Someone from my family pulled out a superpowered hose and aimed it at the goons who were still vaguely in sight. In sight no more after they were washed away. A few members of my family discussed filing a lawsuit against them. At the end of the dream, I can remember a group of random people walking along my Grandparents’ extended driveway, who were being sprayed with the hose but with vastly reduced power. They seemed to be having fun. One of the people in the group was a woman named Tracy, the mother of Will, who I used to work with at an old job as manager of, ironically, a pizza place. I wake up.
We are just going to attribute no meaning to all of that whatsoever, eh? I don’t know what the hell it means, but I know that it isn’t nothing. For me, the event that stands out the most is the lie, self-evidently out of necessity. What does that signify? Is there something that I am lying about in order to protect myself from someone or something? Is it necessary to lie about it? Are there any lies that are necessary to tell? Am I convincing anybody (good cop) that I am better than I am by way of a lie? What about Ashley? Is there someone whom I’ve brought relative joy to but has, in turn, caused them severe distress? If so, do I need to be more mindful of my actions that are the cause of this stressful joy? Is there someone or something that is causing me joyful stress? Is that what the ecstasy joke represented, that I am causing or being caused that? What about Ashley not looking as great as I had suspected but still dressed impressively? Is bad cop representative of somebody out there who, rightfully, wants to take my head off? What about the transition from night to day, coinciding with my family’s rescue of me? And, what about the pizza imagery? Do I miss my old job at the pizza place more than I think, or do I see similarities between that job and the one I have now, as shown by ordering pizza while I was at my current place of employment? The underlying theme, I believe, is that there are consequences to my actions, regardless of whether people respond to them positively or not. It’s either that or this (or both): Bringing somebody happiness, joy, or making them feel good doesn’t mean that’s good just because *I* was or am the one that caused or is causing it. But, again, I don’t know. All that I know for certain is that while many details of the dream, not just this dream but any dream, appear random, there is absolutely nothing random about the dream at all.
It dawns on me that this “genre,” so to speak, deserves a part two, or three, or four. There are a plethora of dreams that I would like to explore in great detail, particularly the persistent dreams of the supernatural, “drinking dreams,” and the dreams of my trials and tribulations with The Undertaker. The wrestler, not the grim reaper, although quite possibly the same representation. I don’t suppose any of you would like to decipher the more fun, wet ones. I’ll keep those to myself. Keep coming back. We need each other.
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