The Pun Also Rises(as seen in the North Adams Transcript)
"Daydream Believer"I have a dream. But it's not about racial harmony or anything like that, more about walking down a long nonexistent corridor in the middle of my old high school to arrive at a room that really belongs in my college where I'm handed a ruler and have to joust a stranger using one of those rolling office chairs as a horse. Because let's face it, we don't get to choose our dreams. Dreams at night only occur in the deepest stages of REM sleep, which means that in addition to losing your religion, it essentially takes many hours of sleeping to warm up to the point where you can dream. And then your subconscious basically makes Hungarian goulash out of whatever images and concepts are in your brain, dumping them together in ways that may or may not make sense, and may or may not be pleasant. Some of us might get sweet dreams made of Thebes, while others of us will have a recurring nightmare. (The latter group will probably win the Magic tournament. And if you get that joke, you're probably a nerd.) Apologies to Dr. King, but dreams are not something so easily chosen. I'm thinking that he might have more accurately said "I have a daydream." Daydreaming, unlike night-dreaming, lets us actually control what is in our mind. Better yet, it doesn't even require the hours of preparation time, which may be why it's so popular. After all, everyone daydreams at some point during the day, unless my bosses are reading this in which case everyone but me daydreams during the day. Regardless, in daydreams we are the kings and queens of all we survey. We can imagine ourselves fabulously successful in our chosen field, beloved by those we love, and in possession of an entire mansion filled with cheese. Martin Luther King could imagine racial harmony, as well as an entire mansion filled with cheese. (Sadly, in his lifetime, he only managed to achieve the second.) The problem with daydreams is that they have very bad reception. If dreaming is like watching a movie in lush surround-sound in an IMAX 360 degree theater, daydreaming is like taking a 6-inch black-and-white TV and trying to illegally watch pay-per-view but mostly getting static lines and no sound. Now this doesn't stop us from watching daydreams, because people don't want to pay their dream bills, and even when the dream channel has boring reruns of documentaries, the daydream channel always has something good on. But what we really want is to somehow get the daydream shows in the dream theater. Absent the awesome powers of lucid dreaming, there's no way to make daydreams into dreams. In fact, it's almost easier to try to make them into reality. Martin Luther King daydreamed himself nailing 10 theses to the church door, the first of which was "Can't we all just get along?", and then made it into reality. He daydreamed a world where people recognized the equality of people of all races and all religions, but that one's sort of tricky to make into reality, so he nailed another 10 theses to the church door for good measure. Sometimes, dreams and reality just don't cross. Unless this very world is a dream. After all, our dreams seem real to us while we are experiencing them, but when we wake up we recognize them as dreams. Maybe we're all just in the Matrix, a world controlled by computers where a lot of people are named Mr. Smith and people are valued mainly for the amount of energy they can produce for the system, rather than who they are as individuals. My friend Neo tells me this isn't too far-fetched. But I disagree. The world is different than dreams because we can feel the reality of it. As I sit here in the chair at my desk, I can feel the reality of the keyboard, of the armrest, and of the chair's wheels as they rolls across the floor. I question only one thing: Why did someone just hand me a ruler?
Seth Brown is a local freelance humor writer who is three months behind on his dream bills. He appears frequently in the Washington Post's Style Invitational, and his first book "Think You're The Only One?" was recently published by Barnes & Noble. His Web site is www.RisingPun.com All work on this page is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first. |