Dream on If only my subconscious were trying to tell me something important BY ALAN OLIFSON

I knew it was bad when I had this conversation:

"Hey, Greg, when you came over to watch Lost the other day, you left your red sweatshirt."

"Alan, I didn’t come over to watch Lost."

"Oh, right, I guess that was a dream."

I always wanted to live my dreams; I just imagined I’d do it by striving for higher levels of self-realization, not by browbeating my subconscious into submission with the blunt end of the daily grind. I used to dream of fame, fortune, and my second-grade teacher, Ms. Chumely, turning into a clown. Now I’m dreaming of picking up after my friends. Great. If Dr. Martin Luther King had had dreams like mine, his famous speech would have culminated in, "I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia — I’ll lose my wallet. Or did that actually happen last Thursday?"

I’m not sure when I started confusing my dreams with mundane memories, but it can’t be a promising turn of events. I’m already bad with names; now I’m becoming bad with reality? Who knows how many of my random memories are actually dream remnants. Did Michelle really tell me about having bad Mexican food with Jeff? Did Mark and I talk about going to a basketball game? Did I go to a circus at my parents’ house and ride an elephant that was also my next-door neighbor?

It wasn’t always like this. I used to have great dreams, all the standards: running but not going anywhere, falling indefinitely, Tina Andrews in her gym uniform. The kind of dreams you could interpret. My subconscious would spin complex yarns of deception and joy while I drooled peacefully on my pillow. But what’s there to interpret now? At best you could glean what kind of food I’ve been craving.

I want to have biblical dreams. Those people knew how live it up while they slept. Revelations? Now there’s a friggin’ dream. We’re talking lambs and dragons and women wearing the sun and fire shooting out of people’s eyes. I wake up from my piss-ant dreams thinking, "Hey, Lisa, did we go over that report last week?" John of Ephesus woke up thinking, "Hey, Lisa, didn’t I see you sitting on a seven-headed, 10-horned beast drinking from a golden goblet filled with the filth of your own fornication?" That, my friends, is how you fucking dream.

Even the Old Testament dreams, while perhaps lacking in sexual imagery, were good, solid, interpretable dreams. Take the Pharaoh from the story of Joseph. He dreamt that, while standing beside the Nile, seven fat, healthy cows came walking up out of the river and started grazing. Then seven gaunt, ugly cows came out of the river and devoured the fat cows. The fat cows, Joseph correctly intuited, represented seven years of plenty. The gaunt cows, seven years of drought.

I want dreams like that. Dreams that matter. Dreams about the big issues. But instead, my mind has created a dream world that runs parallel to reality. A world where I just do the same shit I do in the real world. If I’m lucky, maybe I’m wearing a new shirt. My dream life is now about as exciting as the inexplicably popular online role-playing game EverQuest, where people spend hours a day living in a virtual medieval world as, say, a shopkeeper, squandering their fantasy life selling digital cabbage.

In contrast, my girlfriend has quite an active dream life: laughing, talking, the occasional sobbing. She goes through more emotions in one night of sleep than I do in a week. But her dreams aren’t really biblical in scope, either. They’re just vivid. In fact, I’d say she has the most literal dreams I’ve ever heard of. Her sleeping mind seems to scream at her in bold block letters — probably with sign language and Spanish subtitles. Not to say that she’s not an amazingly intelligent and complex woman; she just doesn’t seem to have time for nuance in her sleep. When training for a marathon, for example, she’d wake herself up with cries of pain after dreams in which she was running and her knees hurt. Freud couldn’t even read into that.

Vivid, literal dreams can also become problematic in a relationship. There was, for example, the unfortunate reign of Dream Alan. This guy appeared early on in our relationship when things were, shall we say, a bit tenuous. And Dream Alan was a prick. Once he told my girlfriend, "Yes, those jeans actually do make you look fat." Later on, he kissed another woman right in front her, with no remorse or apology. I spent many a groggy early morning trying to cover for this asshole. "Maybe he was kidding." "Was he using tongue?"

I don’t know what’s happened to good old-fashioned biblical dreams. Is it that we’ve somehow lost touch with the divine, that the universe no longer speaks to us through our subconscious? Are we just a bit too self-involved for the bigger messages to get through our solipsistic subconscious clutter? Or am I just blind? Is my subconscious actually trying to tell me something with my mundane dreams, something I’m too cynical to hear? Maybe the red sweatshirt that Greg left is my Whore of Babylon. Or maybe dreams never meant anything, and people weren’t cynical enough back in the day.

Maybe sometimes a Whore of Babylon is just a Whore of Babylon.

Get dream interpretations from Alan Olifson at alan@olifson.com