Golf courses and built-in bookshelves

In high school my friends and I used to obsess over dreams. We kept dream journals, crouched against bookshelves in The Tattered Cover and flipped through guides on dream symbolism and psychological meaning. We talked about making short films of the more bizarre dreams, and having the weirdest and most vivid dreams was something of a badge of honor. I listened carefully when my friends recounted theirs to me, trying to pick up bits of their subconscious, looking for unwitting revelations about their true intentions and feelings.

I also think I used to actually have interesting dreams. These days it’s pretty much, see a car crash on television, dream about a car crash; see Apprentices losing diamonds, dream about Apprentices losing diamonds. My dream repertoire has been reduced to a network television lineup. Sometimes it’s a little more complex and I’ll dream about blog friends I’ve never met, or just dream about blogging. Someday these will probably be verifiable DSM-VII symptoms of TOO MUCH MEDIA. Which wouldn’t be so bad if the treatment involved mandatory vacationing to whatever sprawling beach was currently being advertised on rush hour subway car signs.

All that said, before going to sleep, J and I will sometimes give each other something to dream about. Usually they are simply objects or locations that the other person has to work into their dream somehow (our success rate for actually doing so is hovering around 3%). What’s funny about this is that your tendency, as you’re drifting off to sleep yourself, is to name an object or location that would fit into your own current almost-dream state, so the other person’s suggestion almost always seems ridiculous. I usually go for suggestions involving brightly colored things, like wagons or balloons, whereas J tends to go for more mechanical or abstract things. Last night he gave me “built-in bookshelves.” This morning:

Me: What was up with “built-in bookshelves?” You can’t dream of built-in bookshelves.
J: Sure you can. Did you dream of them?
Me: No, of course not. How is that supposed to fit into your dream? It’s not tangible enough.
J: Sure it is! You’re always giving me some weird location or something.
Me: Like what? What’d I give you last night?
J: A golf course.
Me: But that’s easy! A golf course could be where the dream takes place, or it could be outside the window, or on television, or anything. Built-in bookcases is a hard thing to focus on. Did you dream about a golf course?
J: No.

Maybe we’d have better luck picking things from recent reality TV shows.

--------