Nightmare On My Street

I have a book called “100 Dreams Interpreted”. Before you go all judgmental, I also have a book called “100 Great Operas”.

Now you can go all judgmental.

Both books were gifts, separated by a couple of decades. The opera book was enormously helpful in teaching me to enjoy opera (which, in the end, I really did, just not enough to go on my own dime now.)

The dream interpretation book, however, was only, purely and completely silly. Don’t tell the person who proselytized it to me in the 80s, but it was.

Crawl with me out onto an ideological limb here: I don’t think dreams mean a damn thing.

I think dreams are random images vomited out by our unconscious minds like Dorothy’s house from the tornado.

Really, I do. And I can prove it.

Hot weather gives me nightmares. So do so many other things that I can’t make a joke here because I’m paralyzed by choice, but hot weather is one of them. My nightmares are the same as yours, surrealistic, often disturbing and largely ridiculous.

Last night’s was a doozy, with extra dollops of ridiculous and disturbing.

When I woke up, I remembered that I have that dream interpretation book around here somewhere. I also remembered the dream quite clearly.

But…

Instead of looking for the book to pathologize the Inner Meaning Of It All…

I let out a small sigh of relief that it meant nothing and went to brush my teeth, thus proving that I don’t believe in it. So if it turns out that dreams really do have a scrap of import and/or portent, don’t tell me.

That’d be a spoiler in case I ever read the book.