The Doors

I think that most of us can agree that listening to other people talk about their dreams can be pretty boring. I would be the first to say that I’m not interested in your particular phantasms, I don’t care if you were having sex in front of your gym class, wading knee deep through a sea of kittens and grape jelly, or eating a talking pastry it’s just not going to be that interesting to me. Likewise I don’t expect you to be that interested when I talk about my brother giving me a sandwich with a live snake in it. Why are these fantastic and intense ventures into unfettered imagination so uninteresting? There are two reasons, memory failure and narrative dysfunction. I’ll address memory first. A well told story is filled with little details that highlight the absurdity, accentuate the crisis, and in general help bring the story to life. Those details are absent from our recollections of dreams. These details are absent because within the dream they are transient. Even as we experience the dream the landscape shifts, characters drop in and out, and our own emotional state slides through the full gambit. Now the second reason that second hand dreams make bad stories would be that dreams, like life, don’t follow a rational narrative pattern. They are turbulent, anarchic, and nearly impossible to interpret in a fully satisfactory manner either literally or figuratively. The memory problem and the narrative problem tends to reduce even the best storytellers to “and then, and then” narratives. So, without further ado, let me tell you about the dream I had last night.

I was in a place where travel between worlds could be achieved by simply walking through the right door. At some point while I was traveling through these doors I made a wrong turn and found myself stranded on a world that consisted of small floating islands. The island I was on was covered in short grass and no wider than I can stretch my arms. Some distance away I could see another island, bigger and with great chunky rocks on its coast. Atop this island I could see people moving about. I guided my island toward it and reached the big island in short order. I climbed over the rocks and met the inhabitants of the island. There was a young woman with a round face and broad shoulders who worked there as a diving instructor. She was wearing a heavy sweater and long skirt. Sitting behind her was a pale, slender man with a scraggily beard. In his lap was a book by Douglas Adams. Apart from the two of them was a man who looked like Che Guevara wearing a yellow t-shirt. The woman assumes I am there for a diving lesson. To start the lesson she holds my head under water for some time. I can feel the water rush around my face and past my ears, but I am unconcerned. She lets me up and begins a lecture on the various teaching techniques that she knows, but before too long she begins to weep. I try to comfort her, but she seems inconsolable, she feels ugly and unwanted. I tell her it is not so and she seems to feel better, but just then the man with the book wants to talk about Douglas Adams. I am not interested and I tell him to get lost. He fades away. I turn back toward the woman and she leaps from the edge of the island, it is not a dive. The water is turbulent and I wait with Che for her to surface. She does not. I ask Che if he knows how I can leave this place. He does and we find ourselves in a stairwell. Che leads me up the stairs toward a door. We reach the landing and Che disappears leaving only his yellow shirt. I go through the door. I am in high school and poorly dressed. Another student makes fun of me and I throw him into a locker. I am impossibly strong and the other students leave me be. I don’t want to be in high school so I walk back through the door. My phone rings, a middle aged German woman tells me I’m missing a piano lesson. I tell her that I will be there as soon as possible. I go through the doors again, this time it leads to the back end of a Costco store. I exit the store and look up at the sky; the stars tell me that I’ve come home.

And that dear reader is why you don’t tell people about your dreams. If you have read this far I applaud your mental fortitude and I would ask that you would do your Jungian best to tell me what this is all about.