Someone eats my dumbo octopus-squid right in front of me. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I am really excited, because I've been asked by a friend in the youth group I once belonged to to sing a song for them. I choose "I Can Only Imagine." 

I promise myself I'll get started practicing after I get some sleep. I lie down in the curb of the road. A man comes up to me and pees on me.

"Hey!" I shout. "Hey, stop that!"

After several seconds, I get up, run into the trailer above me and call the cops. I have been assaulted by bodily fluids. 

After I make my report, I realize that there's a Buddhist version of "I Can Only Imagine," and I practice those lyrics instead. 

A woman tries to enter the trailer. I don't let her at first. All I can see under the blinds is her mouth. 

"Do you own this trailer?" I ask. 

"Yes!" she says.

Then I notice that someone is diving after my squid through a hole in the floor. I drop the phone call with the police to swim after her. I see her, but she is far ahead. She catches my glorious yellow squid which looks like a dumbo octopus. She's messing with it. 

I surface, then I find her and ask, "Did you eat my dumbo squid?" 

She unapologetically says, "Yes." 

I let it go. "Fine," I say, still quite mad. 

I find fluffy toast in her trailer made with lemon and blueberry. I put two pieces in her toaster and eat those as compensation.

Then, I go to Walmart, still unsure of my lyrics.

When I get there, I don't focus on my friends or my performance. I pass the McDonalds they're in and focus on clothing and super soaker toys.

INTERPRETATION

This is the second dream in a row I've had about being expected to sing, and it's a privilege, but then I blow it off by not practicing or memorizing the lyrics. I think I'm really worried about becoming indolent. I'm trying to be a self-starter, doing lots of self-paced things, but I just really struggle to motivate myself to do anything but write lately. 

I'm also dreaming about Buddhism more lately. I want to make that a bigger part of my life, but again, I don't often make time for it. 

I fail to perform as Marie Antoinette. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm in a large, office-like room with white walls. There are banquet tables covered with white tablecloths arranged in a large square in the middle of the room. 

I'm walking around a large square while pushing an SUV-like a baby stroller. And I'm practicing a song. I'm doing most of it wrong, but at least I can be right about one or two little things written on the paper if I practice. 

But the time comes to perform, and I haven't practiced enough. I know it too, but I put on my costume--a Marie Antoinette costume. I struggle with my tall hair. 

We parade around the square, performing for an audience that has arrived. A projector in the middle provides video and audio to accompany our live performance. 

Then it's my turn to sing. I don't remember all the lyrics, so I get out the printed lyrics for Marie's song. They're on a printed receipt. 

I can't find my place! The music plays, and I search, and search, and search for the current place in the lyrics, but I can't find them! The music stops. My chance to show what I can do is over. I never found the right lyrics. 

INTERPRETATION

I think this is me worrying about aging, and having additional responsibilities, but never finding my place in terms of what I'm supposed to do for the outside world. I'm still looking for work--satisfying work. Work that fulfills a spiritual need. I'm still trying to decide what I really want to do. It's a decision only I can make. Sometimes, people will feel entitled to butt in, but I just keep doing my own thing. But will I miss my chance to perform? 

The Conspiracy (dream)

I dreamed that there is a conspiracy going on to prevent Buddhists from getting sleep. 

In reality, it was my cat tapping my foot with his paw and meowing. I developed a habit of giving my cat a 3 a.m. snack every night, and he is faithful to wake me up and ask for it. 

I tell myself it will come in handy one day to have a cat who is not afraid to wake me up, because there could be a fire, or a home invasion, or a gas leak, and I would definitely want him to wake me up for that. 

But it hasn't come in handy so far. 

The role of "truth" in humor. (dream)

I had three dreams last night. There are two I'd like to talk about a little. 

DREAM #1

There are dragon like creatures that can climb walls and get to different levels of an enormous building I've arrived at. Green ones can be touched without being harmed. Red ones can both touch others and be touched without being harmed. Much to my surprise as I watch these creatures, I find that I am a red dragon.

DREAM #2

All humans start off not being real. We're kind of like ghosts. But if I can write a joke that's genuinely funny, I get a laugh, and I become a little less of a ghost and a little more real. I am encouraged as I find more and more funny things to write about everyday life. I think that one day, I might actually get to experience being a real person and break out of this ghostly state.

INTERPRETATION

I think both of these dreams point to my wanting to come out of my shell. I can touch and affect others in the first dream, and in the second, I make other people laugh and it helps me to escape living a completely hidden life.

I've been thinking a lot about the role of someone's personal sense of the truth in humor.

I recently read Shane Dawson's book of humorous essays, since I am writing a humorous short story collection, and want to learn from the people who have already gone down that path. 

Not everyone knows who Shane Dawson is. Shane Dawson was canceled a couple of years ago for making humorous videos that people think are racist. (I agree that they're offensive--at least the ones I saw. I didn't delve too deeply into the situation. I think I watched one and a half or two videos on the topic.) 

Not everyone is into YouTube drama... Personally, I usually block channels if I believe they are trying to make a name for themselves by putting out videos bullying creators or spreading drama, but sometimes channels I follow talk about YouTube tea and I get sucked in. I wouldn't want to associate with someone judgmental or a gossip in person, so I think it's a bad idea to do it online. But hey, even in person, good people talk about other people sometimes--especially if they're being a problem for someone else.

Anyway, after reading his first book, I think I understand how Shane Dawson got himself into trouble. I also think I understand how he got popular. 

His semi-autobiographical (I definitely can't believe the dialogue in the book actually took place) book, I Hate My Selfie, is applaudable in one big way: there's a joke in pretty much every single paragraph. There are 230 pages. So that takes a tremendous amount of effort and cleverness. 

However, almost all the humor I can remember is shock and insult humor. That's not going to land well with everyone in the audience, and even if it does, it tends to get tiresome. People stop being shocked. And a lot of people don't like insult humor. And a lot of people actually like and support the person being insulted.

There is subtext in humor. There are assumptions about the truth. Humor is very opinion-driven. And even though there's a joke a minute in this book, and the jokes are often clever, you have to assume some childish things are true in order to feel good about laughing at them without reservation. A lot of the assumptions in the jokes are shallow too (for example, a lot of it is about physical appearance). 

Fortunately, Shane avoided racial topics and jokes for the most part in the book. He mentions his first, less severe cancelation for that in the book. The second one hadn't happened yet.

I think Shane is way, way funnier on the written page than in video. I'm not even tempted to smile in my heart in the privacy of my own home at his comedy on the screen. But whoever wrote this book, whether Shane or a ghost writer, is a very talented writer. I read the book in a day because it flowed so well. And you do end up liking the Shane "character," because there are several heartwarming moments in the essays as well.

So I hope I learned something about "the truth" from reading such a controversial book. I think I did absorb some things I'll find useful in the future, like thinking carefully about the underlying implications beneath a joke. 

To sum up my rant/review, it's my theory that he assumed that he knew enough about minority cultures, without being a part of them, to comment on them in a way that combines his shocking and insulting humor. And it ended up in this PR nightmare. He mentioned that Margaret Cho talks about race and gets away with it, but from what I've seen, she is Asian and talks about being Asian. She has a stake in the community she jokes about. She's not punching down. Dawson forgets, or doesn't know, that a comedian isn't supposed to punch down on people less powerful or less fortunate. He forgets that when he makes his jokes about homeless people as well. 

Anyway. I've also been reading David Sedaris's humorous autobiographical essays, and I've been learning from those too. For one thing, David doesn't use social media at all, and I think it's really helped him as a writer. He's been focused on meeting people in person, and I think that saves him the time and trouble of dealing with that small, but loud and obnoxious handful of genuinely hateful people on the internet. It also bonds him that much more tightly to his actual fans. He can also get helpful feedback about the quality of his writing by trying out experimental material at his readings, which I think is a really good idea. It's really hard to find useful feedback that actually helps you to improve your writing, but a laugh is a definite indication that something is working.

I haven't found too many more writers of humorous essays. There's always Dave Barry. And I just heard about a book called Ant Farm which I've put on hold at the library. I'm trying to learn from sitcoms and late night television as well.

The Quaint Little French Bookstore (dream)

DREAM 

I drive to a little bookstore in a quaint small town, and all the books are in French. I struggle to read any of the titles, but the bookstore owner is kind, and he indulges me when I go up to the counter and ask him to tell me what the titles of interesting-looking covers mean. Hey, I could probably learn to read French, right? 

Meanwhile, there's a video game about this bookstore going on. It accompanies the real-life bookstore. But in the video game, we're kids searching through the darkened bookstore at night with our flashlight. I'm playing this game with friends. 

Then reality blurs again, and we get to a level at which the dad of one of the kids is a real-life dad, and he's telling his kid not to get on chat. (The video game is a chat.)

Wanting to continue the adventure, the kid finds the chat in a separate window on the dad's computer and starts it up again. 

This launches a sequence in the real life bookstore. The kid is in a tiny car, and he rams it at impossibly high speeds over and over again into the bookstore's shelves and patrons because he doesn't know how to drive it. 

INTERPRETATION

I was saying to my best friend last night how I've been feeling so gross from watching people fight on the internet for the past couple of days--especially in the comments. I was thinking that maybe I need a break from social media and YouTube. 

So instead of watching videos before going to sleep last night, I turned on my Kindle app and read some of the mystery cozy that one of my elderly neighbors wrote. 

It's a Hardy Boys style mystery, so I think that's reflected in the dream with the fact that the location is a bookstore (and a cute one, like the word "cozy"), and there is a child who gets into really big trouble for doing something he probably shouldn't in order to continue the adventure. Also, I think the way the video game is a chat reflects how the book is mostly dialogue.