For me to fall asleep (and I regularly do it twice a day now, rather than once) is to surrender abjectly and completely to an inner idiot. It is to cede all reason and rationality and become the protagonist in a world where nothing makes sense. My dreams are as appallingly nonsensical as a Greens defence policy. But I’m one of the few who will admit his dreams are punk anthems written by a fevered chimp. Somehow people have come to believe their dreams have mystical wisdom, a subtext founded on solid truths. They just need interpreting, a gentle translator.
Freud was, in essence, an empire builder, like Rhodes. And when he realised dreams were a continent that hadn’t yet been claimed he planted a flag and drew a vast, detailed, and completely fake, map. There’s no evidence for his claims on dreams and what they mean. His theories are fiction dressed in a lab coat. He was making stuff up. Nevertheless, Sigmund set off an industry of dream interpretation to which a person who thinks dully while awake might be told he or she slumbers as a genius. Well, I say only folk whose waking thoughts are wine-spill shallow would bother trying to decode echoes from the ghetto that is their slumbering brain.
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There is no logic, anyway, in my dreams. There is no order, justice, gravity, morality, not even a narrative arc. And all this is bad enough, but then Sarah will overheat and toss the doona off so that it doubles itself on top of me. With my temperature rising, my dreams seethe with horror; the brake pedal doesn’t work, the tyres have no tread, the cliff edge looms, nuns mumble prayer while hanging from meat hooks in the warehouses of my mind, bikies batter down my door, and the Cats lose the 2008 Grand Final again, et cetera, et cetera. And people advise you to live your dreams. If you lived mine you’d be arrested and quarantined. But, on the upside, you would be seeing quite a lot of Margot Robbie.
Alas, I know way too many people who sermonise their dreams as if they were Holy Writ. Priests spreading the wan gospel of their own unconsciousness. Last year, as an obedient citizen of a stopped nation, I was watching the Melbourne Cup with a friend. We were at a party standing next to each other and as the field laboured down the back straight on the flatscreen she said, as if it was nothing at all, “I used to be able to dream the winner of the Melbourne Cup. The night before the race, every year for about 15 years.”
Hearing this, I suffered a flush of envy lasting a full furlong. Dammit, if I could fix Group One races while asleep I’d be rich. I’d buy a nudist colony and go among the naked wearing lederhosen. It’s always been an ambition. But that’ll never happen because my premonitions are flawlessly awry. I dream lies. I dream tales told by idiots full of sound and fury. My dreams don’t pay off. So how was my friend dreaming Cup winners?
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Of course, it’s just another example of a simple soul succumbing to confirmation bias. It works like this: she has dreamt of so much random stuff in the night that she has a link to any horse in the race. Next day, when Kiwi wins the Cup, she recalls she was dreaming of skiing in New Zealand, which is a pretty irrefutable Kiwi reference. The same night she also dreamt of Louis Armstrong playing his trumpet to the US Marines, but Mr Jazz came third in the Cup, and Combat came 23rd, so she overlooks that musical/martial interlude. You can retrofit any thought to a future fact, but too late to get a bet on.
It’s an astounding thing to say, that you have dreamt Melbourne Cup winners. It’s an astounding thing to believe. But to consider yourself prophetic is such a beguiling egomania that it can’t be cured by argument. So, not wanting to denounce her gift outright, and wanting to keep the conversation light, I said to her, “Did you ever think of giving your old mate a tip on a long shot? I mean – Prince of Penzance was 100/1 in 2015. That would’ve been a nice leg-up for a lifelong buddy.”
She looked at me as if I’d suggested jack-hammering swastikas onto Uluru. “I wasn’t doing it for profit,” she said coldly.