Cracker by Damian Christie

All Your Dirty Dream Are Belong to Us

So dirty dreams eh?

How many times has someone, a friend, told you that you were the star in their somnolent musings the night before?

Yeah, me neither.

But when it does happen, what’s the correct way to respond? Should you mumble something like you do after real sex, i.e “goooaaalll!!!!”, “How was it for you?”, or the ever popular “sorry, it doesn’t usually do that”?

Does it mean they fancy you, subconsciously or otherwise? Should you offer to make their dreams a reality? Why the bloody hell did they tell you in the first place?

Either way, it’s the exception that proves the rule, the rule being: No-one ever wants to hear the details of your dreams. Ever. No matter how interesting it was to you, to them it’s just a bunch of crap that your head made up while you were sleeping. It’s not even as interesting as the crap you make up while you’re awake, because it makes even less sense, and everyone retells it in this awful tone as if any detail might be significant…

“But then I ran around the corner, but it was like, a really, really sharp corner, kind of like a hairpin, you know? And then I was in this long corridor, and everything was like, covered in wall-to-wall carpet, but with that awful pattern that hides stains, like the stuff they use in airport lounges, you know?”

Which was why bFM’s thankfully short-lived dream analysis segment was pretty much up there with Worst. Radio. Segment. Ever. Enticing people to call up, filling them with the mistaken belief that their dreams actually mattered and there was an audience wanting to listen as they recounted their sub-normal sub-conscious events. “Wall-to-wall carpet you say? Hmmm… see what that says to me is… you’re really, really boring. Now fuck off and next time you want to talk to someone about your dreams, actually can you just not?”

But dirty dreams? Go right ahead. All the details in the world. Slower. “So when you say ‘roughly’, do you mean Harrison Ford's kiss in Bladerunner kinda ‘roughly’, or Zinedine Zidane's in the World Cup final? Oh, riiiiiight.”

What’s this got to do with publicaddress? Nothing, sorry. You can go back to reading about coins now.

(publicaddress.net readers who have –understandably I like to think – had erotic dreams about the author are encouraged, nay required to send their best recollections through the usual channels.)