Dreams

The fact is that my subconscious is pretty damn shallow.

I have a very active dream life. I constantly have extremely weird dreams, full of shifting worlds and people, colors and excitement, and, well, sex. A fair amount of sex. Actually I don't know how I compare to other people when it comes to the amount of sex in dreams. It's not like it comes up very often in conversations. "I had sex six times in my dreams." "Really? I only did twice."

When I say sex, I don't just mean Sex. I mean shifting relationships that revolve around sexual attraction. I am counting dreams in which I find myself kissing a good friend as a sex dream.

But I'm on a tangent here. My point is that even though my dreams are weird and crazy it doesn't take Freud to analyze them. They are pretty straight forward. For example, on Friday night I dreamed that my improv team Thank You, Robot was performing on a cruise ship. We were all excited to be basically on a vacation with each other and psyched to be getting paid to do improv. But it was a Disney cruise and we were being forced to do dumbed down improv. (Part of it involved Matt dressing up as Animal from the Muppets and doing stand-up. It sounds a lot funnier than it was.) Later the cruise ship drove across the desert and took us to Iraq were we performed for the troops and had a great show that was super smart. I also spend a large portion of the dream worrying about were one particular girl was.

Simple. TYR had tried to shift our focus on Friday night's show and weren't entirely successful. The audience didn't seem to notice. We all adore each other and are pushing each other. I also watched some Muppet YouTube vids earlier in the day. And I spent some of the day trying to write a short story about the war in Iraq. And I had date coming up with someone I hadn't seen for two weeks. Bim bam boom. Simple.

So it is pretty obvious why I dream about sex. If, during the day, my brain even briefly flitters on the idea of anything romantic with someone, I tend to play it out in my dreams. Which (I am somewhat embarrassed to say) means I have kissed in my dreams 40% of the women I know. I have now made a small portion of my readers feel very awkward. It's not like the next day I see them and suddenly picture the dream (although that does happen). And in my dreams it usually ends at a kiss. Often the kiss is in passing. In my dream I might be with a group of people running from a poisonous gas that will turn us into lemurs and in a break in the action someone will suddenly kiss me for three seconds and then the dream moves on.

I have a fair amount of control over my dreams. I can sometimes nudge myself to dream about specific things if I think about it just before I fall asleep. I am often aware that I am dreaming and can chose to create and control the world. This has backfired at times. One dream which I remember vividly even after 10 years: I was fighting vampires in the house I crew up in. But it was also that Escher etching of the stairs (you know the one... like in the movie Labyrinth... yes, a total dream cliché). I realized I was dreaming so I made my hand into a gun. I pointed it at a vampire and a gun shot rang out. The vampire just laughed and said, "What are you doing? Do you think this is a fucking dream?"