Have you ever had someone tell you about a really vivid dream they had and then want you to interpret it for them? Well, something like that happened to me recently and the conversation went a little something like this:
“You have a degree in psychology, don’t you, Daryl?”
“Who told you that?” I asked with interest.
“I think your brother mentioned it to me once.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s not really much of a degree.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well,” I tried to explain, “back when I was going to college, to get a degree in psychology, you had to pass a couple of really hard statistics classes, and as you know, that part of my brain – the part that is responsible for math stuff – has never properly functioned. So, in order to pass those two classes and get my degree, I kinda….well, I kinda had to cheat.”
“Really?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And how did you do that?”
“Well, it’s a long story,” I assured my friend, “but part of it involved dating the smartest, and the least attractive, girl in my statistic classes, so let’s just say it wasn’t one of my finest hours.”
“But to get a psychology degree didn’t you also have to study all about dream analysis?”
“Yes,” I said, “there was a class about that, but the professor mumbled a lot so I don’t really remember too much about it. Why?”
“Because I had this incredible, crazy dream last night that is still messing with my head, and I need someone to help me figure it out.”
“Oh,” I warned my friend, “I am actually the last person you would want to ask about that, or about anything else related to psychology for that matter. In fact, if the truth be known, when it comes to psychology, I’m a lot like that guy who knows just enough karate to stroll into a country-western bar and get his butt kicked.”
“You seriously can’t remember anything that professor taught you about dream analysis?” my friend asked with disbelief.
“Well,” I said, “I do remember that he said that all of our dreams are about something we’ve either done, or want to do, or have seen or heard about others doing. In other words, our brains don’t make up brand new stuff all by themselves in our dreams, but rather just mix up a bunch of real or imagined experiences that we’ve already had.”
“That kind of makes sense,” said my friend. “So, I tell you what, why don’t I go ahead and tell you about my dream and see if you can make heads or tails out of it?”
I once again repeated that I didn’t have a clue about why people dream what they do, but he seemed determined to tell me all about his dream, so I politely agreed to listen.
“Okay,” he started off, “it’s still very confusing to me, but in my dream, while I was sleeping in my bed, I suddenly woke up and decided that I needed to go somewhere, but I didn’t know where that somewhere was. But I got up anyway, and the next thing I knew, without even taking the time to put on any clothes, I was outside, and I just started to run. I could see this white farmhouse off in the distance and I guess I was running towards that. Then the dusty road I was on started heading off in another direction, towards an old wooden bridge off in the distance. A gentle wind was blowing through my hair, and I was running free and easy, and no one was chasing after me or anything scary like that. But suddenly, running right next to me – running a little ahead of me actually, like he was in charge of where we were going — was a wolf. And then, slowly but surely, it turned into more of a human form, like a werewolf. It didn’t seem to want to harm me or anything, but rather just run along with me. And another mile or so down the road, a man-sized mummy, all wrapped up in a white cloth of some kind, suddenly appeared, and he started running along with me, too. So, there I was, with a werewolf on one side of me and a mummy on the other, just running and running under a really pretty moonlit sky.”
“So,” I interrupted, “your dream was basically just about you jogging with a werewolf and a mummy?”
“Yes, but why in the world would I be doing something as crazy as that?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe you’ve been watching too many old Abbott and Costello movies?”
“Abbott and Costello movies?”
“You know, those great old black and white comedies where poor Bud and Lou meet up with werewolves and mummies, and Jekyll and Hyde, and the Invisible Man, and all kinds of different ghosts and scary creatures. Now that was one great comedy team! Did you know that at one time back in the 1950s Abbott and Costello movies were so popular that they were the highest paid comedy team in America?”
“What are you talking about? I’ve never even seen a bloody Abbott and Costello movie!”
“Sorry,” I said. “I told you I wasn’t very good at dream analysis.”
“But a crazy dream like that just has to have a meaning,” my worried friend assured me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think all of us spend way too much time trying to find the meaning behind everything in life, when in reality, sometimes the answer to something is that there simply isn’t any answer.”
“But why, even in a dream, would I be butt-naked and running around in the middle of the night with a werewolf and a mummy?”
“Maybe you just don’t like to jog alone,” I ventured.