Sunday, December 29, 2019

Ambiguous anxiety

Had a dream the other night where I was talking to someone, making jokes and references that, as they came out of my mouth, I knew wouldn't be appreciated. Somehow I could detect the other person's negative reaction afterwards, as well. This sounds like a stress dream comedians might have. I'm not a stand-up, though. And in the dream I wasn't onstage.

In any case, I didn't really mind my bladder interrupting this one.

2 comments:

susan said...

There's nothing our subconscious minds have more fun doing than making occasional gambits into ambiguity. Did you ever read Letham's Motherless Brooklyn? It's a scary thing to imagine having no control over one's speech.

I used to remember my dreams, but for the last few years it's rare for me to have any recall no matter whether one woke me up not during the night. The funny ones long ago were when I dreamed of toilets being in public spaces like restaurants. Those signalled it was time to wake up to take care of business.

Ben said...

I did read Motherless Brooklyn, and enjoyed it a lot. Yeah, Lionel Essrog just has the concept of "no self control" wired into his nervous system, which is a lot to deal with. Haven't seen the movie, but I still think it's a mistake to change the setting to the 1950's.

It's always been the exception rather than the rule for me to remember anything about them. Some people I know seem to hold onto more of them. Of course you can also wind up filling in a lot of the blanks when you're awake. Toilets popping up in your dreams sound like they function as ad breaks.