Dreams, The Retelling Of

So I'm sick, sort of. I'm more post-sick, right now, in the same way some people describe themselves as post-feminist. That means I have a lot of very colorful phlegm with trace amounts of blood mixed in, and that I sleep poorly, which I've been doing anyway because I have this new job and it's taking a lot of psychic energy that works itself out into dreams of mastering the computer system over and over and over again.

By the way I'm typing this post on a computer in a hotel lobby, which means that it will be short and distracted.

Anyway, being sick and being under psychic stress meant that last night I had some very gripping narrative-oriented dreams and that I wasn't sleeping so soundly that I couldn't remember them.

When I was in my 10th grade English class, one of the exercises the teacher wanted us to do was to keep a dream journal. This is only one of a number of points where I was told to pay attention to my dreams, to the details of them, that they had all this information to offer. The idea, in that class, was that eventually we would write poetry based on those dreams. Or, you know, one day make short films about them. Who the hell knows.

Maybe that's a growing up in L.A. thing. Either way, I feel like you're told to pay attention to what's going on in your dreams. There is, you're told, meaning there. But the other thing you learn as you grow up is that other people will find being told your dreams intensely boring. Unless, of course, they're in the dream, and then you should really only tell them about it if there's something flattering to their presence in your dream -- you should probably avoid it if in the dream they were eating donuts or something similarly mundane.

People are waiting for these computers, and I don't really have much more to say about it, except that I find those two strands of focus on dreams a little funny and strange.