Dream Police
Posted on | May 31, 2004 at 11:41 am | 4 Comments
I think someone famous once said something like “Your dreams are interesting only to yourself”. I generally agree and try to live by this motto. Even though I have extremely odd dreams, I tend to keep them to myself aside from an occasional one or two sentence summation to good friends. However, I had a dream this morning that I want to mention here, just because it points out the unfathomable way (to me) my mind works… “read more” if you care…
In this dream, I had somehow been invited to attend some kind of weird performance art thing at a coffee bar or something in Hollywood. Apparently this was a regular weekly thing where celebrities mingled with normal people and they all performed mixtures of song and poetry. One of my friends dragged me there, but I don’t remember who. Janeane Garofalo was there, sitting in the corner and strumming a mandolin. A red dress-wearing blonde woman who looked like Heather Grahame or Mena Suvari (but whom my dreamself knew to be some other actress with a weird name that I can’t remember) started playing the guitar and singing a simple melody, while various other people added percussion and piano. I think the lyrics were even displayed using an overhead projector.
At one point, she stopped singing but kept playing as people from the audience took over the singing, obviously making up their own verses. One of these people was Bill Murray, though he suddenly morphed into Ben Affleck or someone else. My dreamself was admiring the lyrics these people were coming up with on the spot, even though it knew some of them sounded trite and too off-the-cuff. But I remember actually taking in the words they were saying and cogitating on them – some of them seemed pretty deep at the time.
Suddenly we were all outside in a big parking lot or something, yet the singing was still going on. The torch passed to a tall guy with frizzy hair and glasses, and his lyrics were all about how the other people’s lyrics were dumb (possibly echoing my dreamself). While he was singing, a woman tapped him on the shoulder and said “Your father-in-law’s on the phone; I think it’s an emergency”. He kept singing but was obviously winding down. He walked toward me and my dreamself started to realize with horror that this wasn’t just a spectator event, that it was a tag-team type thing, and the person singing choose the next person to sing, and that person had to do it.
So I stood up and tried to sing, but I could only do one long sustained note (no words) at first. I couldn’t think of anyway to add onto with the others were singing about, but eventually I managed to eke out something about not knowing what to sing. The venue had morphed again – this time it was some sort of big office hallway with wood paneling walls, and there were far fewer people there. The blonde woman who had started the song was still there, sitting on a folding chair, but wearing a white dress instead of a red one. As I made eye contact with her, she yawned and rolled her eyes. My dreamself agreed with her, since what I was singing sounded very bad and boring to me also. This shocked me awake, though I then had that melody in my head for like an hour.
Okay, so here’s what I don’t understand. All of the people who sang before me did a lot better at coming up with improvised words than I did when it was finally my turn. And yet, when you get right down to it, since this was my dream, all those words the other people were singing actually came from me in the first place. Why was my dreamself so much worse at the improvisation than the dream “avatars”? Had my mind just run out of things to say by that point? Were the words the other people singing not as good as I thought they were? Or does my deep-seated insecurity spread even into my dream life?
See, this is why one should never talk about one’s dreams…
Latre.
Comments
4 Responses to “Dream Police”
June 2nd, 2004 @ 10:21 am
:O
hmmmmmm…dr freud would have a field day witch’ ya’!!!
we’ll discuss saturday!! you ARE going out with us sat arent you? its rays bday…….(sigh)
June 3rd, 2004 @ 11:00 pm
The fact that your dream doesn’t really sound all that strange to me probably tells me a lot about myself! Can’t help you with the insecurity question, though!!
June 14th, 2004 @ 7:03 am
My question is, does everyone have dreams with people that morph into other people and locations that morph to other locations?
My dreams do that quite a bit.
June 14th, 2004 @ 7:51 am
Dennis, I think that’s a pretty common thing to happen in dreams. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t that way for most people. After all, dreams are just your subconscious randomly flipping through events and people in your mind and plopping them out in different combinations.