I was not happy, not at all. For starters, I was dead.
You know how it can be with dreams.
I heard years ago that researchers have determined that all of us dream every night, but most of the time those dreams are forgotten when we wake. How they were able to determine this, I have no idea, but I figure there is no harm in going along with it.
What I do know is that I rarely remember my dreams. I think it may be a gender thing. My ex-wife often told me stories about her dreams and my daughter, Abby, routinely recounts her dreams, often in vivid detail.
I suggest a large federal grant be awarded to study if females remember their dreams better than males, not because it is important, but because it would drive my Conservative small-government friends to apoplexy, which is more than reason enough.
Now, back to the dream.
I was dead, as you recall.
You’ve all seen those movies where a person dies and then steps out of his dead body and observes his corpse and what happens next. That was the way it was for me in this dream.
Somehow, I had come to terms with being dead. I assume I had agreed that it made sense that I should be dead, perhaps on the account of my suffering horribly from some hideous disease. It was some sort of mercy killing. I was good with that.
I don’t know who all was involved in this decision. I assume Tess had a vote, but that’s a terrible accusation to make against someone, even in a dream. At any rate, the impression I got was once we had all agreed that I should be killed, I excused myself from the discussion and left the manner of death up to everybody else.
That was a mistake.
The first image that appeared to me in this dream was the out-of-body me looking at the dead me. The dead me was submerged in a barrel of water – you could just see the top of my gray head below the water’s surface.
“Drowned in a barrel?” I thought. “No. no. no.”
It seemed to be a horrible, humiliating way to die. Who drowns in a barrel? It just isn’t dignified.
But it got worse. I watched as a hand reached into the barrel, grabbed my hair and lifted. The only thing that came out of the body was my severed head.
Well, that tears it, I thought.
Look, it’s bad enough to be drowned in a barrel but to have your head cut off, too? Whose idea was that? What possible reason could there be for lopping off my head after I’ve drowned? It was just rubbing it in, I thought.
The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.
I was standing among a group of people. Tess was there and this other guy, who I think was probably the funeral director.
“How are we even going to have a funeral?” I complained. “I can’t just lie there in the coffin in a new suit and no head.”
The funeral director tried to calm me down. “We put another head on your body,” he said.
Now, I am suddenly looking at myself laid out in the coffin and I do have a new head. It is a mannequin head like you see in the department stores.
“What the…?” I snorted. “It doesn’t even look like me! It doesn’t look like anybody.”
The funeral director started jabbering about all the things he could do to make the mannequin head look more like me.
I wasn’t having any of it.
“Why can’t you just put head back on?” I demanded.”It’s right over there, bobbing up and down in that barrel”
Somehow, everyone thought I was nitpicking. I could tell they were getting pretty sick of me complaining about everything.
So I woke up.
The pioneering work of Freud, along with the story of Joseph from the Bible, suggests that dreams have some relevance to our waking lives. They are subconscious expression of our conscious being and, as such, we can learn much from our dreams.
If that’s true, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what my dream means.
As hard as I try, I can think of no circumstance where being drowned in a barrel and having your head cut off is cause for optimism of any sort.
Save for this: In the event that it is determined that my life should be terminated, do NOT drown me in barrel.
And don’t cut my head off, either.
Is that too much to ask?
I wouldn’t think so.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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