We all know dreams can get pretty weird; I know my strangest tend to come if I’m running a fever, or alternately if I took a dose of naproxen sodium (the drug behind Aleve) before retiring. Otherwise, most of my dreams now are fragmentary and generally very mundane, ordinary events that might occur during the day.
The other night was different, and one particular detail stands out to me. You see, even when things get weird, I can usually tell the genesis of the weird elements from something the day before – something I saw, or heard, or pondered about, that planted the seed for my mind to latch onto later on and make an important, if nonsensical, element. Just not this time.
Within this dream, I was with an acquaintance, a NASA astronaut (no, I don’t actually know any,) in a shopping mall, getting loaded up to take a motorcycle trip someplace, though it was unclear whether this was my bike or not. Someone nearby overheard one of our comments and went off rather strenuously about some policy of NASA’s that he disagreed with, forcing another acquaintance and I to point out that he was going a bit overboard. And as this was happening, I glanced over at one of the nearby decorative planters that you’d find in malls and see that there’s a zip-lock plastic bag full of soup sitting there, full enough to resemble a small, brown pillow with indeterminate paler lumps within.
The curiousness of this registered on me as I was waking up, perhaps because I was still in a transitional stage, and my primary focus was, What the goddamn hell was this soup doing in my dream?
Where did it come from? I mean, not in the mall, but in my psyche? Why did my brain subconsciously feel that this was an element that belonged, or needed recognition? It’d be weird enough to find a bag of soup just sitting on some random flat surface in a mall, or even a vape shop, but this was created by my own brain and placed there to be seen distinctly while I was informing some stranger that he was sounding a little unbalanced (like I could talk.) I don’t particularly like soup, and so there are very few that I even bother with, certainly none that resembled this bag of thick brown goo, perhaps a gumbo, or some variation of lentil. And seriously, a gallon-sized zip bag? Like that’s not an accident waiting to happen…
Yes, I know some people believe that dreams are manifestations of something greater and mystical, usually the same people who believe crystals have wondrous powers somehow undetected by everyone except women in hemp dresses that use the word “patchouli” in complete earnest. No, I’m quite certain this is all from my own head, which might make it worse, really. Sure, pondering what this strange appearance possibly means on some higher plane, and how important it might be to find out in time, could produce some anxiety I suppose, but we’re talking about my own mind, the interior decorator of my dreams, that said, “…and right there, a bag of soup.” I’d like to think I know my brain, but not when it comes up with that.
We won’t talk about what birthday just passed not all that long ago, but maybe I’m being told to get used to the idea of soft meals…