I’ve been having really awesome confusingly twisted dreams lately. I haven’t had dreams like this since I used to play Beatles Monopoly before bedtime (the MOST stressful game on the planet and I have no idea how anyone thinks that it serves a recreational purpose. Not just Beatles Monopoly, all the various strains of Monopoly are probably equally as horribly nerve-racking.) So I’ve been dreaming that I’ve been having these long dialogues with the protagonist of my novel. It starts out that I’m sitting in some dimly lit room that looks like it came straight out of a Lynch film, and I’m drinking what looks like a bourbon or whiskey in a fancy little tumbler (catching up on Boardwalk Empire has been a bad influence, all I want to do is smoke lots of cigarettes, drink hard old-man liquor and spend all my money on prostitutes and other entrepreneurial shit), and in walks my main character, alive and walking and exactly how I imagine her looking in my head. In my dream I don’t seem to give a shit, and the entire situation seems completely normal. She walks over, pours herself one of whatever it is I’m already drinking, and we start to talk.

The first frustrating thing about this dream is that I can’t, for the life of me, remember what the hell we talk about. I can only remember the situation, which is cool as hell, but the content is all waxy and smeared and completely incomputable. The second frustrating thing about this dream is that I distinctly remember thinking that this girl is a total douche and I couldn’t wait to get away from her. I mean, at first when I woke up, I thought it was kind of funny. You know, I meet this person that I completely made up, her personality and style loosely based off of myself and some of my favorite people, and she SUCKS. Then I realized that it’s probably not ideal. This is probably my subconscious telling me something is really wrong with the construction of this character.

She is flawed, as all characters and people are, but she is supposed to be like effortlessly awesome despite these flaws. Her flaws are supposed to make her more charming and lovable (yeah I threw up in my mouth a little when I wrote that just now, but I’m leaving it so you can continue to think it’s something that people actually mean when they say it to you). If I could just remember why I hated her so much in my dream, it would probably help the story.  Or maybe, it’s ok that she’s super lame because it will just make the supporting characters better in comparison? (I know it sounds like I’m having a bit of a panic attack about this, but it’s really probably nothing. I’m probably fine and just need to stop trying to remember the only dream I’ve ever had that probably held the key to making my book not embarrassingly suckingly blowey and stupid. Probably no big deal at all).

Maybe it was just a fucking dream that means I’ve still got work to do (optimism folks, give it a try, it’s basically just denial for naive grown-ups). Either way, I hope I have a chance to talk with her again and maybe see what she thinks about all this. Even though she may be the least interesting fake person I’ve ever sort-of met, she might have some sort of insight of her own about the situation I’ve put her in. Next time I’ll pay closer attention.

In this dream, either nothing she had to say was worth remembering, or I was just too inebriated to retain any of it. Dream drunkenness is the only rational explanation for all of this…probably.