The jury is still out on the meaning of dreams, I think. I don’t really pay much attention to anything besides Ohio State football and what day of the week it is, and the latter is just so I know not to get up early on weekends and go to work. I’m overstating my inattention to life just a bit, but for the longest time, I didn’t really give a crap about dreams and their meanings because I didn’t really remember any. A Google search on dream quotes gave me this little gem from Gao Xingjian, “Dreams are more real than reality itself, they're closer to the self,” and I must say that he’s full of shit, based on the ones I can remember. However, some dreams worked their way into my memory as, well, memories. So maybe he’s not that far off the mark.
You know, I wasn’t sure how I was going to use that quote, but it seems to fit, so far.
Anyway, I’m not sure when I stopped remembering most of my dreams. Until recently, I might have remembered one or two every eight-and-a-half months. It was very rare. Some are fun, like swimming with whales around the Great Barrier Reef. I have no idea how I held my breath for so long. And some are disturbing, like dreaming I was being electrocuted by some stupid-ass torturer guy. My jaw hurt when I woke up because the ‘lectricity made me clench my jaw, a lot. I don’t dream like that very often, I think. Most of the time, the dreams are just weird.
From sometime in my childhood through a couple years ago, I would often wake up right after a dream and think, “THAT was weird. There’s no way I’m not going remember that.” I’d go back to sleep, but in the morning I could only remember thinking that and nothing about the dream.
I do remember a nightmare from my early childhood in Defiance, Ohio. I remember not liking the bridges on Clinton Street. I dreamed that they were built like a wooden roller coaster. Frankenstein and Dracula would climb up the side of the bridge and try to get in the family station wagon as we crossed. That would send little Teddy to my parents’ room. And you know, thinking of that dream still gives me chills. Can you imagine a bridge made like a wooden roller coaster? That won’t support automobile traffic!
I recently dreamt that I was some kind of union steward living in the barracks again. The barracks weren’t populated only by people I knew in the army. There were current co-workers, family members, and a younger Bill Fagerbakke from when he was Dauber Dybinski on the series Coach. The barracks were older, open-bay buildings and not the newer, dormitory buildings that I spent my regular army career living in, so there were essentially 30 of us sharing a room. There was a big fuss about the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and when Dauber married a guy who was in my platoon at Fort Riley in 1991, the shit was about to hit the fan. I facilitated the arrangement that it was okay for the two of them to be bunk buddies, but they couldn’t, you know, share a bunk. We determined that it would just be awkward for the two of them to touch each other’s wangs and have gay sex in a room they shared with 30 other people. And that was fair.
I don’t always, or even often, have gay sex as a subject in my dreams, but I’m second-guessing my inclusion of it in this post already. I just wanted to give an example of how bizarre my dreams can be.
But hey, I was going to talk about remembering my dreams as memories, wasn’t I. Anyway, there are times when something will come up in a conversation, and I’ll remember something that happened in a dream. For instance, someone at work might mention having dinner with his mom over the weekend, and I’ll remember that my mom brought me a chicken sandwich from Burger King the other day. Of course, she didn’t bring me a chicken sandwich from Burger King the other day because she lives in North Carolina, and I live in Maine. So, instead of having the shared experience of recently dining with our moms, I just smile and ask him what they ate. Then I think about chicken sandwiches for a while and decide to call my mom soon.
When I was little, I dreamt once that my sister had brought me to her friend’s house, and he’d tied me to a tree in the front yard and held a knife to my throat while he had a pleasant conversation with her. This is probably the earliest example of a dream that I remembered as memory. For many years I’d remember this happening and wonder what the Hell had happened. I wasn’t really terrified or traumatized by the memory, just confused. I never told anyone about this until recently when I was telling my girlfriend Stephanie about my dream/memory stuff. Suddenly it hit me; one of the most confusing-and-oddly-not-terrifying memories from my childhood had been a friggin’ dream, man. Go figure.
The funniest example of this is a conversation I had with my college roommate, Aaron. He delivered pizzas for Spanky’s in Bangor, and although he was pretty liberal, he told me that sometimes he’d listen to Rush Limbaugh in his car to get an idea of how conservatives think. (This isn’t the dream yet.) He talked about Rush having a good point one time—still not the dream—when he was talking about how offensive television and the media had become. I had to agree with him, and Rush for that matter, because I had watched an episode of Seinfeld that had Jerry telling Kramer he was, “Fucking nuts.” And I had watched SportsCenter with Rich Eisen commenting on how Mark McGuire was simply ”Beating the shit out of the ball. He can just fucking hit it.” I told Aaron that it was true. The networks would air just about anything, and then I caught myself. How hilarious, I had agreed with Rush Limbaugh about something. See what not remembering your dreams can make happen?
Although I remember a lot of my dreams now, I still have to catch myself. I’ll ask Stephanie if I had told her about something or if I’d only dreamt telling her about it. If she says I hadn’t told her, I’ll then remember that after telling her, we both turned into wild dogs and scampered through the war-ravaged ruins of New York City. And while dreams may be more real than I could possibly imagine, I’m going to continue to be vigilant about keeping dreams and reality in separate realms.
I’ve decided to keep the quote in my intro.
