To dream, perchance to freak out

By Todd Stadler · Wednesday, December 3, 2008 11:56pm

I want to tell you about a weird dream I had last night. Also, I want to (posthumously) congratulate James Michener. But more on that second part in a second.

Oh, I know what you're thinking. "Another blog entry about a dream? That's lazy blogging! As little as this guy writes on his blog, you'd think he could bother to write something original with his conscious mind without resorting to the inchoate promptings of his subconscious like a hack."

Okay, maybe I don't know what you're thinking, but if that is what you're thinking, then I think you have unresolved issues to work out, and maybe need to take some time off from reading this blog.

Thankfully, at the rate at which I write things here, you can still read all my entries as I write them and yet take time off from reading this blog. So everybody wins.

But back to my dream. Like roughly ninety percent of dreams I remember, it had me in some educational setting — in this case, high school — and freaking out.

This dream pattern often manifests itself when I am freaking out about something in real life, usually a long-term worry. When I first woke up, I couldn't imagine what my brain was all concerned about, since I felt relatively calm.

Now, of course, I understand that I was freaked out about not having posted much on my blog recently. And thus this entry — my dream practically commanded me to write it.

I mean, either that, or my brain was working out its stress regarding work, or hunting for a house, or the baby that's due in April. But I'm pretty sure it was blog-related.

Anyhow, time was that such dreams were consistently set in college, with my not having studied for some final. These dreams were examples of my brain's laziness — rather than come up with the usual wacky dream fare, it conveniently used real memories (of my actually not having studied in any of several classes in college) as dream shorthand for being unprepared and stressed in general.

At some point, I tired of this dream cliche and experimented with conscious programming of my subconscious — a blowhard way of saying that I actually tried telling my brain (ignoring for now the question of who the pronoun "I" refers to, given that it would seem to be the body containing, and including, the brain) that I was tired of these dreams of college finals.

Whether or not as a result of this attempted programming, I started having fewer college anxiety dreams and ... more dreams about being in high school, running late to some marching band performance. My brain, the lazy writer.

But back to this morning's dream. There I am, running late for some marching band performance. I'm scrambling as best I can, but I can't gain traction, and I'm barely moving forward. I truly detest this when it happens in my dreams. I'm using every muscle in my body to somehow grab onto something, just in an attempt to walk, or at least propel myself a little bit.

And as I'm slowly moving past the ... dorm rooms? hotel rooms? ... of my fellow marching band members, I see their doors are open, and inside one, clear as day, is a copy of James Michener's Texas. What?

Now, you might think that, since I went to high school in Texas, this is my brain's extremely lame way of establishing setting, but clearly my brain isn't interested in such things (again, was I in a hotel or a dorm room — not that we had dorms in college — and if the former, why not show a copy of, say, Arthur Hailey's Hotel lying around, except for the obvious reason that I'd never heard of that book until I looked it up just now?).

No, this was clearly the first successful test of Amazon's new advertising program. They query your brain for basic dream theme phrases, and then product-place their wares throughout your subconscious landscape. So congratulations, James Michener, on being the author of the first book successfully advertised that way. I hope it was worth it, you posthumous sellout. I'm just glad they didn't try to work in High School Musical.