As you know, my dreams tend to get a little weird. Sometimes I’ll have some boring dreams amidst the dilapidated houses with celebrity appearances and wedding LARPs with diva grooms, like dreams where Michael and I are arguing over taxes. But every once in a while I’ll have one of my reoccurring dreams, which are both so packed full of Freudian symbolism that it would be a shame NOT to analyze them.
My first reoccurring dream has haunted me since I was a teenager. I remember that I had it the summer between 8th (middle school) and 9th (high school) grades, and I know it started due to my anxiety of moving from one grade block to the next. It begins just like a “test” dream — a dream where you’re suddenly taking a test you haven’t studied for and your time runs out before you can even finish writing your name. Mine starts out where I’m in high school and I can’t find my classes. The bell rings, I wander the halls. I see my friends, I talk to them, I ask them if they can help me find my next class. They say they will, but they disappear before they can show me the way. It’s never the same high school either. Whether I’m in a giant warehouse or on a glittering spaceship; the classrooms are there, I just can’t find mine. This goes on until I get fed up and go home, which leads me to the second bizarre aspect of this dream: I can’t get home. My home is still across the street like it was in real life, but I just can’t seem to cross the street. My feet turn to lead, my soles turn to glue, or my back sprouts a giant bungee chord and I’m stuck to the school. Crossing the street is dangerous and frightening because cars are still whizzing by me in the dream. One time I made it across the street but couldn’t tell which house was mine. When I wake up, I’m still not home; I’m either back at school trying to find my classes again or I’m still roaming the street looking for my house.
However, I’m more disturbed by the second reoccurring dream because it deals with my mommy issues. In this dream, my mother is a hyper-domestic stereotype — complete with apron, red lipstick, and elegantly coiffed hair. In these dreams, she’s always smiling and always baking or cleaning. She’s never the main character in these dreams, she’s just part of the background: humming a little song and carrying a hot apple pie on her oven mitts. However, this isn’t my mother’s only bizarre characteristic in my dream; her domesticity is trumped by one more abortion of my subconscious: she only speaks in rap lyrics. Seriously. In one dream, my brother (who was his seven-year-old self in the dream) and my dad were suiting up in waders and hats to go fishing (something they’ve never done together) and as they gathered their fishing poles, my mom leaned out the front door, cupped a hand over her mouth and in a syrupy-sweet June Cleaver voice says, “If you see them boys ’round your way, holler ‘damn it, man’.” In another dream, she handed me my backpack for school and advised, “Remember what Ol’ Dirty said.” I don’t know what’s more embarrassing — assigning my domestic mother these foul lyrics or admitting that I know them in the first place. In real life, my mother is nothing like what I dream her to be: she was never a housewife when I was growing up and she couldn’t cook for shit. And unlike the first reoccurring dream, I’ve only been having this one for the past year or so.
If dreams are simply your wants and desires, then I’ve got a lot to look into. I’ve never wished domestic servitude on my mother no matter how much I might wish bad things upon her at times. And I certainly don’t want to stay stuck in high school forever, especially considering I’ve long since left it and college behind. Or if dreams are just your brain’s way of organizing thoughts, why lump my mother and rap lyrics together? Why am I wandering the halls of high school fruitlessly looking for my classes but am unable to leave?
Maybe I should just lay off the acid.
