Oh Dave! Now

I involuntarily tense up whenever someone says, especially in the workplace, “I had an interesting dream last night.” It’s not that I don’t care about other people’s dreams. Dream researchers, at least as far back as Freud, acknowledge the significance of dreams and their interpretation as bellwethers of a person’s psychological state and growth. I concur. But—and that’s a big but—hearing about other people’s dreams is about as thrilling as listening to the details of their bowel movements.

I didn’t always feel this way. When I was 15 years old, I lost my virginity to a cute slut who was a year older than me. It was a monumental experience of course. Though she and I never repeated the act, it both freed me and terrified me. Two days later, feeling an itch, I secretly took a bus to downtown Minneapolis to the Red Door Clinic to get checked for syphilis and gonorrhea.

Before I learned the results were negative, I had a dream about her. We were madly in love, and stood holding hands on the sidewalk in front of her house. We talked about when we thought we would die and how. When I woke up, I thought about the dream and what it meant. I decided it was an omen—the address number on her house both in the dream and in reality was 1924. Since I had been standing on the left and she on the right and we had been talking about dying, I decided it meant I would die when I was 19 years old and she when she was 24.

I kept this omen to myself, until now. Of course, it didn’t come true but for four years it had a big influence. I really believed it so when high school life got to be a drag and I considered suicide, I decided what the hell, I’ll be dead at 19 anyway, may as well tough it out and have some fun.

Sound crazy-making? It was. I took it seriously only because dream omens ran in our family. My older brother Peter died tragically at age 16 in a fire. Labeled the black sheep of our family, he had been suspended from school, again, for smoking in the boys’ room. Afraid to face our parents, he ran away from home to stay in an apartment with some 20-something gay friends in downtown Minneapolis. A fire started, apparently from a cigarette, and he didn’t get out of the apartment in time. After a couple of days of lying unconscious in the hospital with third-degree burns, he passed away.

About a week after his funeral and the initial shock and grief had lessened, my mother tearfully confided to me that a few days before the fire but after my brother had run away from home, she had had a dream. In the dream Peter was running in our backyard screaming, completely naked, in fact, without any skin. She said the dream really upset her but she was afraid to tell anyone, not sure what it meant, and afraid that by telling someone, it would come true. Her older sister and an aunt had had dreams that came true so she was afraid hers would too. In fact, it did.

I was convinced that I had inherited the prophetic-dream ability from my mother so I took my “1924″ dream super seriously. I turned 19 in the middle of my first year of college, an intensely busy year. I didn’t dwell on dying but kind of went through the motions of studying and taking tests and did well. A few friends and loved ones had actually died in the last four years so I appreciated the time I had left. On my 20th birthday, I celebrated but wondered how I had misinterpreted my dream. I asked around and the girl I had lost it with hadn’t died when she was 19; if she had, then my dream would have meant I would die at 24. Feel like screaming in frustration now? Yeah, me too.

So after obsessing over a false-omen dream for four years, my days of serious dream interpretation were over. I still pay attention to my dreams. Like right before I launched this blog, I had a dream where I was at an author’s panel discussion sitting in the front row, and the author had her name, Barbara Kingsolver, tattooed across her forehead in script. You don’t need a degree in psychology to interpret your dreams, in fact, putting too much weight on them is a waste of time. Dream interpretation is easy and doesn’t warrant much thinking or discussion (though there are plenty of websites that have all the answers). Examples of my DIY dream interpretations:

Dream: Looking for a bathroom but can’t find one or all the stalls and urinals are taken or in the middle of the room amongst a crowd of both men and women. Interpretation: Wake up and go pee.

Dream: Rabid dogs lock their jaws onto my arm. Interpretation: Need to tell Eric to stop nagging me about going grocery shopping.

Dream: I’m visiting the set of “True Blood” and having sex with every cast member in an orgy scene. Interpretation: Need to have an orgasm within the next 24 hours, if there’s time.

Dream: Juggling monkey brains at the office (after watching “Survivor”). Interpretation: I’m surrounded by idiots.

Dream: By willing it, my body rises up and flies above the power lines and trees, high above the city. Interpretation: My mind wishes I hadn’t given up smoking pot.

Dreams are great, I love them, but sharing them regularly with others isn’t necessary. In novels, dreams are a cheap and easy way to develop characters and plot. I recently finished reading “The Time Traveler’s Wife” and enjoyed it a lot, but the endless dream sequences about put me to sleep.

People don’t talk about their bowel movements, but you can get just as useful information from interpreting them as from dreams. You know, because one dump to the next is infinitely variable. When you feel the cramping and sit down on the toilet, you never know what’s going to come out. (Unless you had lunch at Popeye’s Cajun Fried Chicken—that’s a no-brainer.)

While stool-reading may not tell much about a person’s psyche, doctors, parents, and pet owners know from experience that it reveals plenty about one’s state of physical health. The tricky part is determining the cause and effect of which proteins, beverages, spices, and vegetables lead to which state of digestive being. The constant struggle between constipation and diarrhea and the attempt to achieve a middle ground is universal. So where are the epic poems, songs, novels, films, and Ken Burns documentary about this struggle? Is it any less important a subject of the human condition than love, death, war, and peace?

Perhaps it’s because stool-reading should by nature, like dream interpretation, be a solitary venture. Who cares if today your stools were soft, muddy, and particularly pungent? While yesterday’s stools were firm, compact, a pleasing shade of sienna, and hey, for once made a clean break, requiring just one swatch of toilet paper? No one, so please keep your dumps—and your dreams—to yourself.