For the last couple weeks different people at work—both patients as well as employees—have been talking about the movie Inception. Since the movie is about dreams, its no wonder a Sleep Center houses a lot of discussion about it. People at the Sleep Center have long since given up on me following any part of current pop culture, but since it involves dreams a few people asked if I had seen it and what I thought. I doubted the movie had any relevance to dream interpretation, but I thought if I was going to convince people of that, I needed to see the movie. So last night Sammy, Boyce, and I went and saw it. Both of them loved it, and while I enjoyed the film, I think I had a different interpretation. I don’t want to spoil your movie, but I do want to blow your mind: even though you watched that movie, it’s all less real than any dream of the guy who tore your ticket, no matter how dimly you remember what that guy looked like.
Part of the movie’s premise is that you can enter one another’s dreams through a series of chemical mixtures. More than the movie itself, the three of us were interested in attempting, even though we know it can’t be done, of entering each others' dreams. Our chemical mixtures were some drinks, and our laboratory was Boyce’s basement. We all tried to fall asleep at the same time, and although we didn’t have iv’s hooked up to a briefcase like in the movie, we sometimes reached out and slapped or pinched each other where an iv would be, while saying things like, “I’ll be the guy in the kickass motorcycle,” or, “Look for me, I’ll be in the kickass motorcycle’s sidecar,” or “Watch out for me because I don’t look when I change lanes,” or “I get it…but seriously, I hope I’m in a cool motorcycle,” or “What if motorcycles are just phallic images in dreams?” or, “I’ve explained to you a hundred times how symbols in dreams work. Why won’t you listen?” or “What would it be like to dream the idea of a symbol? What would that look like? If a symbol was trying to eat me, would it just be the letters?” or “Huh?” or “No, I get it, because if it was something, then it would be a symbol-of, not a symbol,” or “Exactly,” or “This better not be my dream right now.”
I generally don’t dream about Sammy and Boyce because they are in my mind so much while I am waking. Things lately have really changed in regards to what I dream about, so I had hopes that the experiment would work. Of course it didn’t. We didn’t enter each other’s dreams. I didn’t have a dream that involved Sammy and Boyce, despite the fact that after I went to sleep Sammy crawled on top of me and whispered his name in my ear over and over. We all did, however, dream. And I made it into both Sammy’s and Boyce’s.
Sammy dreamed he was in a rodeo contest with Kimberly Dong Kill, the leader of North Korea. I was the judge, and when I called it a draw, the North Korean leader rode a bull into a lake and when he came back out he was riding a clock.
Boyce dreamed he was riding a school bus, and Charlotte’s father was waiting for him at the stop to hit him with a shovel. When Boyce got off the bus, I was waiting on the other side of the street shaking a handful of doorknobs and calling Charlotte’s father some very, very vulgar names.
Both dreams were obvious, and I interpreted them both in one sentence—the same way I interpret every dream I now have of Rachel: “You’re leaving.” Just like my father used to say when he watched the orioles migrate, one of the earliest birds to do so. And I would tell him, “But they’ll be back in the spring,” and he would always say, “How do you know?”
