I hate when people tell me about their dreams

So here are some of mine

My dad died six months ago, then I lost my job and started a new, very horrible job right away, I got married, quit the horrible job, and then devoted the rest of my summer to trying to sleep.

I started to have stressful dreams. In some, I wake up in my own house completely alone and discover that front door is wide open, so I tear apart the house trying to find whoever came inside. The worst dreams are about my dad. My new age spiritual mom will tell me, “he’s visiting you,” but in these dreams he would do weird things like call to me from his bedroom in our childhood house and then when I found him he would turn to dust or something. In others, I return to this house for something and discover it has turned into a Starbucks drive-through and I need to put on a headset and get to work. There’s a line of cars around back and we’re out of chai concentrate.

I’ve always had extremely vivid dreams that I can usually remember. I write most of them down. There are a number of motifs – most of them involving some kind of regression – like showing up to work (any job I’ve ever had) and finding out it’s now a Starbucks. Sometimes I go into the office and they tell me my degree needs redoing and I’m forced back to university but the university is my high school and we’re not allowed to leave. I often dream about reuniting with a glamorous but mean friend from high school on imaginary trips to a version of London that doesn’t exist, and in the course of our conversation I realize she’s been making fun of me this whole time and she thinks I’m weird, and she thought I was weird all along.

Everyone around me in my sexy Modern Orthodox community is having children (if they don’t have 1 or 2 already), and as newlyweds we’ve been in the discovery phase of family planning. This has resulted in dreams where I am carrying around a huge, ugly, sweaty baby that only stops crying when I hold it, and nobody loves it but me – but because it’s so ugly and sweaty, nobody wants to be near us.

There’s an episode of This American Life I listened to in 2013 called The 7 Things You’re Not Supposed to Talk About. Sarah Koenig from Serial interviews her mother, who sounds a lot like Anna Wintour, who has a list of seven discussion topics she strongly believes people should avoid. Mostly because they’re extremely boring, and in her words, “nobody cares.”

Her list includes: How you slept, your period, your health, your dreams, money, diet (including weight loss and food restrictions), and route-talk – describing how you arrived at a particular place. It was the part about dreams that really resonated with me, because every time somebody starts telling me about their dreams I start to squirm.

“And this is exactly your objection to dream talk, right,” Sarah Koenig from Serial says to her mother, “which is that dreams are all about the feelings they evoke in the dreamer. […] Which is very hard to convey after the fact. So what you're left with in the retelling is essentially, as you say, fiction. Bad fiction, hard-to-follow fiction.”

Her mother says yes. All of the above.

I held these rules for conversation very close to my chest. As a 19-year-old, I loved having clear cut rules about what you should and should not say, how you should or shouldn’t speak. In fact I had a library of books devoted to how exactly to live (another essay, soon).

I’ve been progressively sleeping better since the summer and I’ve gotten a new job that I like. I’m starting to feel normal again. I sleep with headphones in, listening to podcasts, and sometimes I forget to put on my sleep timer and whatever I dream is parallel to what they’re talking about. I recently had a dream that Montreal and San Francisco were the same place, but we needed to evacuate the city in submarines. Once I got on the submarine, I was offered a lot of money to make sponsored content for the Oura Ring, and when I woke up, I was listening to an ad for the Oura Ring on a podcast. I listened to so many episodes of Who, Weekly in my sleep that I’ve started to really feel like the hosts are my oldest, closest friends, even though I don’t know how their faces look.

In another dream, I’m in a Los Angeles/Calgary hybrid (city mashups are another motif) and my friend is driving us to shul on Shabbat. We’re trying to be discreet so she parks inside a stranger’s garage and we have to sneak out. In another, I’m back in high school but also at my current job and also in-office in Hollywood where I’m trying to get promoted from an intern to be an entertainment executive (I don’t work or aspire to work in entertainment). My teachers are mad at me because I’m spending too much time hosting a TV show, and I’m giving advice to my husband on how to balance high school, my dream job as a TV host, my normal job, Hollywood, and this internship. It’s hard to be a modern woman and do everything, but I have a feeling I can make it all work.