Don’t tell me your dreams.

I mean, if you want to tell me about your hopes, your ambitions, your aspirations, yes, by all means. Go right ahead. But don’t tell me about the dream you had last night or the one you had last week, or even the one you had when you were six. I don’t care.

And it’s not just me, not by a long shot. Nobody cares about your dreams. Nobody cares about anybody’s dreams. When you’re sitting there with your therapist, yammering on and on about how you had a dream where you were trapped inside a kumquat with a midget Eskimo, you know what he’s scribbling on his little notepad? “I don’t care.” Over and over again.

The main problem is the setup. Most people just start, “So I had this dream last night …” and launch right into the dreary details, never once giving consideration to the poor listener. What you need to do is offer up a topic sentence. Something like, “I dreamt about mollusks,” and stop right there. If the listener is intrigued, you’ll hear, “Mollusks? Really? What about them?” If the listener couldn’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about your damn mollusks, the conversation ends there, with both parties being satisfied: The speaker got across the gist of the dream, and the listener decided whether or not to pursue.

The only time it’s okay to launch right into a speech about your dream is if you’re a moderately attractive woman, the dream was dirty, and the listener is a man. This is always okay. “I dreamed I was trapped in a prison with a bunch of half-naked schoolgirls” is always going to illicit a response of, “Really? Then what happened?”

But regular, run-of-the-mill dreams are SO uninteresting. And the dream-speaker doesn’t realize it, because to them, it’s the deepest, most fascinating, complex web of symbolism and spiritual meaning since the Bible.

Maybe. But you know what? The Bible’s boring too.

© 2004 Crankypants