“Last night,” said UD to Mr UD as he drove her to the Grosvenor Metro stop this morning, “I dreamt that a man and his family asked me for help. I was walking home and they stopped me and asked me for some sort of assistance.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I said to the man What do you do for a living? And he said I’m a CIA agent. And I said If you’re a CIA agent you can survive anything and then I kept walking.”
“Was that the whole dream?”
“Well, here’s something else. In my arms, I was carrying home meat. Wrapped supermarket meat of all kinds. No bag. Just carrying all these wrapped meats.”
Les UDs gazed at the gorgeous morning fog along Wisconsin Avenue. It made everything moody.
“I don’t know what it means,” said UD, “but I think I know some of the influences. This ex-CIA agent, a GW grad, is in trouble for leaking information. I read about him before I went to sleep. Plus I spent the weekend with my sister, a vegetarian.”
“Fine. That explains it.”
“It doesn’t really.”
“Does anyone take the interpretation of dreams seriously anymore? Dreams are so weird. How can such weird stuff tell us anything?”
“Art is weird. It’s often completely absurd. Do we say that – I don’t know – Mrozek’s The Elephant tells us nothing because it’s absurd?”
Mr UD smiled broadly.
“One of my happiest memories is when Mrozek visited us in Cambridge when I was a little kid. I made him laugh! I said something that made Mrozek laugh.”
January 24th, 2012 at 11:12AM
its likely that by and large dreams, like fogs, don’t tell us anything, but what people make of them,even to dismiss them, tells us a good deal.