excerpt from Theeeeese Dreeeeeeeams something something when I something something. every something of the something

"last night is all a blur to me. I can't remember anything but I vaguely recall being alone"

Good morning lovely friends, various strangers and sworn enemies. Welcome to another Bad Sandwich Chronicles Beyond Thunderdome where, for the price of a single GOOD sandwich a month, you can read vastly more of this quality content than the freeloaders get. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing. It helps me out more than you know. Anyway, let’s get to it.

I have often said that there is literally nothing less interesting than someone else’s dreams (actual sleep dreams, not aspirations). If you’re telling me about your dreams, chances are I’m zoning out and kind of judging you.

There are, in my thinking, two exceptions to this: sex dreams about the person you’re talking to and recurring dreams. The first one is obvious, everyone wants to hear about that kinda thing…well, no. I’m wrong about that. Let me start over.

Take 2: There are, in my thinking, two exceptions to this: sex dreams about the person you’re talking to IF you know that person finds you interesting/attractive and you’re not generally a creep (otherwise you really have to keep that shit to yourself).

Everyone likes someone they like dreaming about them in this way and it’s a real harmless way to feel desirable even if that’s not what’s actually at the root of the dream…anyway, this is ALL stuff we’re gonna get into below, so there ya go. That’s that one. What about the recurring ones?

Recurring dreams are interesting to me because for a while I didn't believe they really existed. I thought it was like, the dream was exactly the same every time, like it is in movies, where every beat is identical to how it was last time, but now that I’m older and I’ve had a bunch of recurring dreams, I get it. It’s not like that. It’s more like themes recur but the dreams themselves are different. Kinda like the Fast and Furious franchise. They’re all different movies, but also they’re all the same movie.

With that said, here are the dreams that recur for me. This should be interesting, right? Please tell me what your recurring dreams are in the comments.

Okay, let’s get to it. First up:

teeth stuff

You know this one. In this dream, your teeth are falling out or your teeth are already gone or you’ve got some missing teeth and one that’s really long or a bunch are crazy loose and it’s terrifying. I feel like this is the most common recurring dream that western society has (besides falling, of course).

But what does it mean?

So glad you asked. To digress for a moment before tackling that question, there are people on this earth who are turned on by getting shit upon. There are people on this earth deathly afraid of pickles. Some folks marry their cars. Some spend their entire lives in abject denial of what their body wants them to do (head down to the glory hole and get to sucking, mostly) and nobody at ALL is normal. No matter what you may think.

Some people need religion and some people want to skin strangers and turn said skin into masks or lampshades or steering wheel covers, and lots of those people are the same people, and you’re telling me that there’s a universal meaning behind a dream when someone’s teeth fall out? Puh Leeeease.

The meaning behind your teeth falling out, from all the ‘dream literature’ I’ve read (patently moronic shit, to be clear) suggests that it’s always in some way about money, but that’s some “do you have someone from your family with an S in your name who may be trying to contact you?” medium to the dead kind of shit. It’s so goddamn common that anyone at all can be like “oh, yeah, money is on my mind. That makes sense. It’s like you’re looking right into my (stupid) soul!”

That shit is lazy and there’s no way it’s true.

A dream, I hope I don’t need to tell you, is entirely a product of your own mind, and as we discussed a few paragraphs ago, those can be wildly different. If you’re telling me that a lifelong, non flinching cosplayer who identifies as a skin eating Mongolian hordesman in suburban Sandusky Ohio and Kelly Ripa have dreams that mean the same things, then I’m gonna go ahead and say that you’re fucking dumb too. There’s just no way that’s even remotely accurate.

The world, and indeed, her partner, life, these beauties are many splendored flowers. Let us try to understand what we can (dreams, I insist, are not one of those things), and not just cast blanket generalizations because the cool girl from eleventh grade bought us a thing of tarot cards back in the day and said that death dreams are all about the Violent Femmes first album or whatever the fuck she said. Death, she is a nuanced flower. Dreams, they are her handmaids. We should stop being cocky enough to think that we get them.

Anyway, this dream for me is mostly loose teeth, a new huge very bad tooth and/or teeth falling out and me trying to put them back in. I think it’s about money. What do you guys think?

Sheesh.

Moving on.

The one where you can’t really move easily

I have this one all the time. I am trying to run but my running sucks. I don’t know how else to say it because it’s a dream and I don’t wanna sound like the kind of asshole who describes dreams but it’s like I run and I can go forward, but only like so much. I’m in muck, maybe? It doesn’t seem like Im trapped or I’m frozen. It seems like my legs just don’t do the thing where they hit the ground and, using my feet, push the ground i’m on behind me therefore propelling me forward quite the way that they usually do when I’m not in this dream.

Often in this dream I’m racing TO DO something not racing FROM something, but I’ll let the dream whisperers figure that shit out. I’m guessing it has a lot to do with the fact that dreams are capricious and mean nothing but hey, what the fuck do I know?

This dream often ends with me waking up fairly tired. This one is semi common.

Roaches

I hate roaches. I’m not an enemy of the insect or the arachnid families as a rule. I like them just fine, but this one, maybe it’s my mother’s disdain for the shelled, diseased hobo of bugs, or maybe it’s just that I’m her son so I genetically hate them too, but whatever it is has left me absolutely disgusted by roaches.

The worst nightmare I’ve ever had involved me drywalling down this dungeon thing….it was one white room, white stairs down, one white room, white stairs down etc for seven floors (I don’t know how I remember that) and when I got to the seventh floor I noticed a roach and I lost it. I started running up the stairs and by the time I got to the fifth subfloor or whatever, the roaches were popping off the white drywall, and they were as big as loaves of sourdough bread and they were flying. It was, not to put too fine a point on this, a nightmare.

Since then, I’ve had various dreams where I’m surrounded by roaches coming at me in enclosed spaces, in situations where there is no way that they’re not gonna end up all over me. Much like the dream where you fall, I wake up before they get to me, but I don’t wake up happy at all.

Roaches are fucking disgusting.

Hey, speaking of the falling dream…

Tiny space, frozen in fear very high above the ground

This is far, far, far and away the dream I have the most often. (deep menacing voice) It went like this:

I’m on some precipice. It can be a balustrade or a tiny outcropping or a piece of molding on an old building or a windowsill or a small rock bridge or just a pole or something, and i’m up high and I’m frightened and I’m terrified and I’m paralyzed and I’m trying to move just little bits so I can get somewhere but (this is gonna sound punk as shit) I aint getting nowhere. No matter what I do I’m just terrified and stuck in this position that I never really wanted to be in.

We all know the falling dream. It usually happens right as you’re nodding off and you jerk yourself awake because it’s terrifying. I used to have that. Now I have this. This is like agonizing hours (probably like 3 minutes in real terms) of me trying as hard as I can to clutch to something that can possibly help me not plummet to my death.

I edge along like a fucking caterpillar and then at some point it gets really tenuous (it’s windy, i’m clinging to the pole from underneath etc) and it’s slow going and as I begin to go into complete panic mode I wake up drenched in sweat and my wife says “you drink too much. Look how sweaty you are” and I think “probably both of these are true but I promise in this case they’re unrelated” and then I can’t sleep at all.

This is my least favorite dream for sure and I just know that now that I’ve delved into it this deeply I’m gonna have it in the next three days, which, cool. Never let it be said that I didn’t do nothin for y'all .

Moving on…

Sex dreams 

These are always awesome until they’re not. Like, if you have a dream where suddenly, for example, you’re a straight guy sucking a bunch of dicks or something like that. That can be disturbing. I consider myself….

well that’s the end of the free excerpt, folks. Thanks for coming and consider subscribing or leaving a comment, eh? I appreciate it more than I can say.