I had the craziest dream a few nights ago. And I really mean it. Not like when people say “Oh man, I had the craziest dream. I was eating nachos in my middle school but it wasn’t my middle school, it was 7-11 and I was talking to my friend Jen and then her face turned into this boy I went to elementary school with and he was like ‘I hate you.'” That’s like every dream, right?
My dream was this: I was nine and my sister was about 11 or 12. We were in van that was driving in San Diego and we struck up conversation with these two very fat ladies sitting in the seat behind us. They told us they were a couple and we were like “That’s cool.” Then, we all went to leave the van, and one of them rolled on to me and crushed me. It was excruciating pain, on par with the many times I’ve been shot in my dreams and felt it. Or the time I got impaled with an arrow in the hollow of my neck and PULLED THE ARROW OUT. That was some sick shit. But I didn’t want to be rude about this lady’s weight, so I tried to be polite and go “Excuse me! Can you move, you’re crushing me. Please?! PLEASE!” After that terrible pain was over, the next scene was me in a harness, bouncing around on a zip line or clothes line because I couldn’t walk seeing as all of my bones were crushed. At which point my dad says to me “Guess you’ll never ride horses again.” (I don’t ride horses). And in the final scene, the media was all over the story of a little girl getting crushed and what does it say about the obesity problem in America that a person can break another person just by laying on them? News stations were getting ready to release a video of the two women on Splash Mountain at Disneyland. I really didn’t want this to happen because I knew that if people found out they were lesbians (because only lesbians go on Splash Mountain, apparently) it would be a media frenzy and I didn’t want them subject to that kind of ridicule.
What does it mean? Probably that I’m reading David Foster Wallace right now (The Broom of the System) and he likes to intersperse bizarre short stories within the book that leave you saying “How does a human being not on acid come up with this?”
Or, allow me to analyze this based on a dream interpretation book I bought when I was 15. Given the current situation here in Yemen, maybe the heavy lesbians represent Yemen, an unfamiliar place, but one I’m totally open to getting to know. The being crushed represents the protests here – scary, but I don’t really want to be too quick to judge an entire people over what was like a thousand people. Horses: Hmm. That was thrown in by my subconscious to throw my conscious brain off course. Nice try with that decoy, subconscious, but my waking brain is too smart. My worry about the Splash Mountain video getting out is a parallel to the anti-Islam video that sparked the controversy in the first place. Boom: Analyzed. Thanks for listening, peeps. Been carrying that one around for days.
Sweet dreams,
YemenEm
The Next Dinner Party 