Dreams of my Father

You know how only inexcusable bores tell you what happened in their dreams? How it only takes around one microgram of self-awareness to realise that nobody else gives a monkey's about the tiresome machinations of your sub-conscious? How the merest implication that, because your dream featured something wacky like, I don't know, a marzipan swan or something, you somehow have a unique and bizarre mind, is enough to justify your immediate and brutal murder? Yeah, well, I had a dream the other night, and I'm going to tell you about it. How do you like them apples?

In my dream, I was having a blazing row with my dad, because he had asserted that there is only one sort of dance. I mean, honestly! One kind of dance! You can imagine my frustration. I was all, like, 'Yeah, Dad, so I suppose that ballroom dancing and break-dancing are just the same, yeah?' But he was having none of it. He was adamant. Over and over he insisted: 'There is only one sort of dance.' Well, as you know, you can argue with your dream-dad until you're blue in the face, but once he has it in his head that there's only one sort of dance, there's very little you can do to dissuade him of the fact.

And as I swum up out of sleep, the fury was still there, rattling around inside my skull like an angry wasp. I wanted to phone my dad up there and then and finish the argument once and for all, until I realised that it's not my actual dad who thinks there's only one sort of dance. He freely acknowledges the wide panoply of dancing styles. It's my dream-dad. And he's gone now, probably forever. The argument will never be settled. He's out there, somewhere, still thinking that there is only one sort of dance, and nobody will ever be able to put him straight.

Frustrating, as I'm sure you'll appreciate. I can always hope that I might bump into dream-dad in another dream, on another night, but you know what dreams are like. The new dream-dad will probably have no recollection of the argument, and when I say, 'You know when you said there was only one sort of dance...?' he will stare blankly at me as though I am an idiot. I hate that.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that there must be some Freudian interpretation of all this, that probably boils down to some sort of intimacy issue. Well, perhaps you have a point. Well done. Perhaps when my dream-dad says 'there's only one sort of dance', he actually means 'I hate you and I wish we'd had you adopted'. It's difficult to say with dreams.

So yeah, that's my dream story. I hope you enjoyed it. In my next post, I'll tell you all about another dream I had this week. It had a marzipan swan in it. I'm mad, me.