I don't know what it is.


It could be Spring.


It could be airborne hallucinogens from my nemeseses, the flowering trees…


I could just be me.

'In general,' I commented to Elektra the other day, 'I don't approve of this over-emphasis on directed dreaming.'

Elektra, being Elektra, didn't ask what brought this on, merely replied, 'Um.'

'Now I can understand,' I persisted, 'that directed dreaming is a useful technique when you're plagued by recurrent nightmares, or dreams about defending your thesis in the nude, or whatever. It's good to get that sort of thing out of the way.'

Elektra commented, 'Um.' I went on.

'But directed dreaming misses the real purpose of dreaming – just like all that competitive dreaming they keep doing on the h2g2 journals, you know, where they try to see who has the most detail, or the weirdest premise, or who met the most famous person while asleep…' I glanced at Elektra, who said nothing. Thus encouraged, I warmed to my topic. 'The real purpose of the dream, it seems to me, is to let your unconscious mind tell you what it's thinking. Not to collect hypnagogic autographs. How can it do that if you keep kibitzing?'

At this point, Elektra had had enough, and changed the subject to 'What do you want for supper?' I knew why.

She was afraid I'd remind her of the 'dream contest' we had a few decades ago. I probably would have, too.

I was in graduate school, and Elektra, being smarter, was already finished and working for NASA – well, a NASA-related outfit, they were doing funny things with computers and information. Not those kinds of computers, the kind that had a mainframe somewhere and spewed out thousands of pages of nonsense from a teletype if you weren't very careful what you said to it. Anyway, we had access, not to google, which wasn't even a gleam in anybody's eye at the time, but to libraries full of paper books, and back then, we could even read them without getting eyestrain. Being nerds, we tended to spend a lot of time in libraries, and if we had a problem, we'd try to solve it by reading a book (or ten).

This is not the cleverest approach in the world, but I suspect it is common among h2g2ers.

Now, it might have been the strain of teaching for the first time, or it might have been culture shock from returning to the US from Germany (what are all these big cars for?), or it might just have been general nuttiness, but I'd been having odd dreams, and I wondered (out loud, that was the mistake) what brought them on. This, of course, sent Elektra running to her favourite answer place over behind the Cathedral of Learning, and she returned with a treasure trove of knowledge. There were books on dream interpretation: Freudian, Jungian, Reichian, Gestalt, et cetera, et cetera. We read them all, I kid you not.

That was when it started to get interesting.

It was Elektra's fault at first. Over morning coffee, she announced: 'I had a dream. Tell me what kind it was.' Okay, I ventured, I'll bite.

Elektra's dream:

I was walking down Ellsworth Avenue, past some nice houses. One of the houses had two round topiary bushes, one on either side of the door. The door opened, and a snake came out. The snake was yellow and green checks.

I put on my tinfoil hat – then I decided it was too early in the morning, and took it off again. I chuckled, 'Aside from the fact that I know you hate snakes and love topiary bushes…that was obviously the most Freudian dream I've ever heard.' Then I ducked.

The rest of the day passed with Elektra's being mad at her unconscious, on account of its hitherto-unsuspected naughtiness, and protesting that 'yours is probably just as bad'. After work/school, we indulged in Elektra's current favourite television show, The Prisoner, starring her not-so-secret heartthrob, Patrick McGoohan. (The fact that she was mad in love with a serious-looking and very tall Irishman rankled somewhat.) Night fell, as it is prone to do, even in Pittsburgh, and we went off into the land of slumber. Morning found me laughing myself awake.

Elektra was understandably cross about this – she suspected (correctly) that somnolent one-upsmanship had taken place.. 'Tell, ' she demanded. So I did.

I seemed to be watching an old black-and-white noir film. It looked like the shabby office the detective always has. The door opened, and Patrick McGoohan came in. He was wearing a trench coat, no surprise there. He opened the trench coat, reached into the inner pocket, and held out a budgie…yellow and green. As I woke up, I heard a voiceover: 'A bird in the hand is worth a snake in the topiary bush.

When the pillow fight was over (guess who won??), we decided that neither Jung nor Reich would have been prepared for dreams with puns in. I settled on calling them 'Goth dreams'.

While Elektra may have been wise to forestall further discussion of dream theory, she was already too late. As we have discovered, talking about the durn things tends to make them happen. The Germans call this 'painting the devil on the wall'. So I should not have been surprised when I woke up this morning – but I was. I never learn.

This is the dream I had to tell Elektra:

I was driving to a new job. You were in the passenger seat. The funny thing was, this job was on another planet, and we'd started driving on Earth. I remarked on how clever they were, giving us an attachment to use in the car that allowed the interior to maintain a pressurized atmosphere. The only thing that worried me was the possibility of running out of gas between planets. Fortunately, when we arrived, I still had half a tank left.



When we arrived, we went into a sort of habitat. It was medium-dreary, cheap office furniture, cheap kitchen stuff, etc. The people who worked there were mostly young, attractive, and kind of vacant-eyed. They were friendly enough, but you could tell you weren't going to have very stimulating conversations with them, which was a shame, since you couldn't go outside without a spacesuit, and the place didn't have many people in it.



One young woman was rummaging through a pile of papers, trying to find my documentation. Then she issued me a 'uniform' shirt which turned out to be an unattractive acrylic jumper, white, with blue threads. I noticed that all of the staff had these jumpers, only in completely different patterns, rather random-looking. There were also knit caps, all shapes, sizes, and colours.



The young woman got us trays of food, and then proceeded to go over protocols with me while we ate. In shifting her papers around, she managed to put my cap on my peas – twice. I gave up eating at that point.

Just before I woke up, I was about to find a spacesuit and go outside. I was wondering what colour they'd make that.

Elektra found this one highly enlightening, but has refused to share what she thought it meant.

I think it means I should remember to gas up the SUV in anticipation of job interviews.

After all, you never know...

Dmitri Gheorgheni

11.04.11 Front Page

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