You May Say I'm a Dreamer

I have heard many opinions that NOBODY wants to hear about anyone else’s dreams; that dreams are boring to everyone except the dreamer. But I usually get favorable responses to the dreams I share. Are people just being polite?? You have to tell me these things, friends! Just be honest. I can take it. If you loathe hearing about dreams, it’s OK! Bye! I’ll just see you next week.

Or not.

I lost my first subscriber a couple of weeks ago. NGL, it stung a little bit. But I’m still alive.

Last week I wrote about my “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” weekend in San Francisco and mentioned a recurring dream about being in college. In my dream, I don’t understand ANY of the material presented in my calculus lecture and JUST find out that I have missed six weeks’ worth of homework assignments!

Several of you mentioned that you have a similar dream! A couple of you dream that you forget to attend classes ALTOGETHER UNTIL FINALS! Dude. That’s stressful! But since we are all going to get F’s, at least you didn’t waste your damn time going to lecture and freaking out over homework and feeling totally stupid. Just completely bailing until finals is probably the better way to go.

Another recurring dream shows up when I’m extremely tired and probably sleeping very soundly, but I need to pee. I dream about the most horrifying public restrooms imaginable. They are vast with at least a hundred stalls. The stalls don’t line up in a row but rather wind around in a maze, impossible to check in any organized manner. I tiptoe across the flooded tile floor, peeking into soiled and splattered stalls, sometimes checking the same stall several times because I’m wandering in a loop. No matter how I try to steel myself, I can’t bring myself to enter into any stall because of various levels of nasty overflow. Once I figure out that I’m dreaming, I can kind of wake myself, kind of like Tris from Divergent. 

“This isn’t real.”

Now, I used to have big problems with public restrooms. My mom tells me a story of when I was a little kid on a car trip. I used to sit in the front seat on the arm rest of our Buick. No seatbelts, no problem! I needed to go potty, so my parents stopped at the only place available in that rural area, a rest stop with an outhouse. I took one look at the facilities and said, "Suan le, suan le," which is Chinese for, "Forget it." This is probably because, at three years old, I lacked the vocabulary for "Aw, HAIL no!" My public restroom phobia subsided somewhat during pregnancy, but I can still hold it like a boss. 

My oldest son was kind of like that when he was little. Like me, he has a really sensitive sense of smell and an enormous bladder. He frequently refused to go into a public restroom, so I regularly traveled with Ziplocs. Pro-tip: Always use quart-sized freezer bags....because the sandwich bags WILL LEAK.

Most kindergarten boys are ridiculously sloppy penis-handlers, so the boy’s bathroom would typically have pee sprayed everywhere. What a literal nightmare! Alex would have to pee so badly that he could not learn his kindergarten things. His teacher was kind enough to allow him to use the adult's bathroom, otherwise he just wouldn't go.

This is in contrast to my second son who was captivated by poop. He found all the dog poops at the park and would squat down to inspect them. DON’T PUT YOUR FACE SO CLOSE! He wanted to tour EVERY SINGLE PUBLIC RESTROOM and try them all out. It was a hard call to know if he really needed to go. 

One day when he was in second grade, I got a call from the school office to come pick him up because he had an "accident." Unlike Alex's kindergarten teacher, Chris's teacher was a meanie, so I imagine she wouldn't let him go when he needed to. When I walked into the office, the whole joint smelled like poop. And there was my sweet boy just sitting in a chair (in his poop) reading a book, happy as a clam. God bless elementary school office staff who regularly go way above and beyond the call of DOODIE.

When my house or life is too messy, I have this dream that rats are in my room. There are laundry lines or streamers strung up on my ceiling like a party and the rats run and jump across like Cirque du Soleil as I am paralyzed with fear in my bed.

I know exactly where this dream comes from. When I was about five years old, my family visited the Malaysian village where my dad grew up. I’m talking dirt floors and washing laundry in the river. My grandma used to scold me when I complained about laundry. Because when she had small children, she not only had to scrub all the damned laundry by hand, but she had to watch her children extra carefully because sometimes crocodiles come out of the river and eat them. Dayum, Grandma.

Yeah, this was that kind of place. I don’t remember much about that trip except for cold showers in communal bathing rooms and the questionable sleeping arrangements. My brother and I were small enough to sleep with my mom on the same bed in a tiny bedroom with some kind of fire in the center to keep mosquitoes away. There were rats running along the rafters above our heads, so I wanted to use the blanket. But it was HOT AF and the blanket was CERTAINLY woven out of HAY it was so scratchy! Thinking back on this night, where was my dad? I have no idea how my mom survived this trip.

Another recurring dream is easily explainable: Bees swarm suddenly around me then fly into my pants. It is very terrifying, but usually happens shortly before I fart myself awake. 

Here are a couple of other recent memorable dreams:

The stash of earplugs that I keep on my nightstand were actually siu mai, the delicious Chinese dumplings usually made of pork or shrimp. When Albert started snoring, I reached for a siu mai, rolled it between my thumb and forefinger, stuck it in my ear, and went back to sleep.

I was getting dressed in the gym locker room. Women have said a lot of weird things to me in that locker room, but this night, a woman looked at me and said, “You should REALLY consider some underpants that are a little more…..substantial.”

I was at a store where the cashier was blind. A person in front of me tried to trick her by giving her a five and telling her it was a ten, but she could tell he was lying just by rubbing the bill! When my turn came to pay, I handed her all the bills from my wallet and she told me exactly which denomination each of them was. I woke up completely amazed!

Most mornings I tell Albert, “Oh, I had a crazy dream!” I don’t remember the details of many of them, but the dreams establish feelings of delight or curiosity or intrigue that linger. I wonder what it means sometimes and where these crazy ideas are generated.

I’d love to hear about your craziest dreams!

Thanks for reading!
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