Can I interpret your bizarre dreams?
Maybe! I'll try!
Dreams: the mysterious portal to the subconscious! Sometimes their message is obvious, but often their true meaning is unclear. Last night I dreamed that me and everyone I know were all ghosts and we haunted a bustling TJ Maxx. I have no idea what that was about. In high school, I had a dream that I tried to make out with my boyfriend while my family was out of town, only for us to get interrupted by an axe-wielding animatronic Abraham Lincoln. That one was pretty blatantly a metaphor for Catholicism.
I currently have a head cold and depression, but my friend shared a dream with me and I knocked an interpretation out of the park so immediately that I decided this should be my new gig. I confidently pitched my idea to my friends and Twitter followers, and I realized that I was in over my head as soon as it was too late to un-commit to this idea. I’ll try anyway. Here we go!
Austin’s dream
“Dippin’ Dots was the ice cream of the future. But no one eats them anymore. They’re the ice cream of the past. I had a dream last night where I went to three different Dippin’ Dots machines, and none of them worked. One of them gave me a really cold magazine.”
This dream carries a lot of symbolism, as Austin alluded to with his musing on the status of Dippin’ Dots as the “ice cream of the future” of the past. Its true meaning was obvious to me.
This dream represents the anxieties of Austin’s generation. Millennials were promised an exciting future, but it turns out that the stories we were told in the ’90s were all overhyped lies. Our hope has melted away like the polar ice caps, or Dippin’ Dots. When we search for the shiny innovation we’d been told to pursue, we usually come up empty-handed. Even our backup options are outdated — the magazine represents print media, yet another industry that had begun to die by the time we could enter the workforce. We must give up our nostalgia for the past and search for the ice cream of the now.
Camille’s dream
“I did have a recent dream where me and a group of people had been gifted very elaborate $60,000 ostrich eggs, but they were cursed and kept getting punted clean through people’s skulls, Final Destination style.”
When I mentioned my idea for this post, Camille casually brought up this astonishing anecdote. This, obviously, was the point at which I realized I was not at all up to this task. But I’ll try anyway!
To me, this dream symbolizes the fear that you can’t trust any good developments this year. You might get a windfall in the form of a valuable egg, but the egg will be cursed to violently kill people. Camille, I encourage you to count your blessings and assure yourself that they’re here to stay. Calamity might be everywhere now, but you can look a gift ostrich in the nest without a kicker punting your joy into someone’s cranium.
Taryn’s dream
“I have weird dreams juuust about every night! Last night was that hubs and I had to impersonate a military family in order to get on a cruise ship. There were two kids who latched on to us, so we made them ours. We also has to travel via a tube we controlled with our minds.”
Thank you to Taryn for this response to my dream-soliciting tweet! So much to unpack here. I feel like this one is election-related. You want to flee on a boat, but you worry that… you’ll be persecuted? Hence the stolen valor, your disguise as a truly protected class of American citizens in the idealized classic nuclear family. But you realize that you can travel anywhere with your mind. Via a tube. Which represent the internet. This is a dream about bingeing something on a streaming service to distract yourself from the election!
Me, Allison
I keep having “the actor’s nightmare,” where it’s opening night for a play I haven’t rehearsed and don’t know anything about. Occasionally, I’ll have a different but similar dream in which I’m wandering through school, late to a final exam I haven’t studied for.
This dream means I haven’t finished the newsletter on time and I’m stressed about it.
More like this:
“Checking in with the butter princesses of the Minnesota State Fair”