Yes We Can Can

Inca From Peru's 115th Dream

I awoke with a start this morning, at 6:15. I’d been having the strangest dreams. This happens to me sometimes. I have never really talked to anyone about it, or read up much on dreaming. I suspect my dream life is pretty normal. I sure hope so.

I do know we all dream every night, multiple times, and this dreaming is a mechanism for allowing us to work out subconscious conflicts in a relatively harmless way. Most of our dreams, we never remember. The only ones we do are the dreams we wake up in the middle of. But even those we only remember fleetingly, unless we immediately rehash the dream in our mind several times, or go to the trouble of writing the details down.

There are probably ten dreams I have had during my lifetime that I can still recall vividly. They were just so bizarre I kept thinking of them long after they occurred. I have never had a dream that foretold anything, as far as I know. And I am skeptical about the concept of interpreting dreams. You either end up with the explanation that the underlying meaning is explicitly sexual, like Freud did (some of them are sexual in some way, but not all of them, darn it); or you get interpretations which are so vague they might as well be a quatrain from Nostradamus. In this case, your dreams can seem to mean anything you want them to. Though in reality, there is no practical meaning to them at all.

I tend to look at dreams primarily as a way for my mind to ‘clean up its room’, to throw out the garbage that has accumulated there. Beyond that, any interpretation is dubious.

Dreams do seem to have a refreshing effect. If I’ve had a night of particularly disturbing dreams, once I have awakened completely and realized I can let go of my mental distress because it was only some dreams I was having, I feel suddenly refreshed, and unburdened. It is a pleasant sensation.

Who knows? Maybe this has something to do with the common phenomenon of immediate post-somnolent sexual arousal. Which is the most technical way I can think of describing the, you know. . . the crude term used to describe the aroused state some males find themselves in, just after waking up in the morning. Some females, too. There has to be a scientific reason why two people, at the point in the day they are likely at their least attractive – hair all disheveled, no makeup, face needing washing and/or a shave, morning breath – are possessed by the strong desire to engage each other intimately, in the Biblical sense; to tear up the bedding a little bit before they must get ready for work and/or the kids wake up.

I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Freud about this, next time I see him. In my dreams.

*****

In my dream last night, I was in Iraq for some reason, and eventually I was captured and placed in a prison camp with several others. The camp was physically typical, or maybe stereotypical; dirt floors, stone walls, tiny slits for windows. It was uncomfortable for a freedom-loving American, but we weren’t treated badly at all by the guards.

In fact, the camp we were held in was not far from an American military base, and our guards would go out at night and raid the base’s commissary, and steal American canned goods. They would bring the ill-gotten booty back to our camp and give it to us captives to divvy up amongst ourselves. The guards wanted us to have something to eat we would enjoy and be familiar with, instead of the featureless stuff they would otherwise be feeding us, some kind of porridge made of water and semolina flour cooked to a mush-like consistency.

We were pleased and thankful for the canned goods. My favorite was Chef Boy-ar-dee™ Overstuffed Italian Sausage Ravioli, in a 40 oz. family-size can. When I got it, I would bury all but one of the cans in various places around the floor of my cell, for future meals. We prisoners were allowed to keep one Chicago Cutlery® 8-inch slicing/carving knife (with a high-carbon stainless steel blade) in our cell – well, this was a dream, after all – and I would use mine to cut open the top of my can of ravioli. Let me tell you something – if you have been deprived of the basic culinary pleasures for awhile, a cold can of Chef Boy-ar-dee™ Overstuffed Italian Sausage Ravioli can taste as good as the homemade ravioli-manicotti-cannelloni plate at Villa Mosconi in Greenwich Village. A little tinny, okay; but it really hits the spot.

I found out how good “The Chef” could be this past September, in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. My family had fled east, into Louisiana, in search of the nearest electricity; but because I had to work, I stayed home – me and the beagle and a couple of box fans and a small generator. After several nights of Vienna sausage with crackers or bland cheese sandwiches for dinner, I dug around in the pantry and found a 15 oz. can of Chef Boy-ar-dee™ Overstuffed Italian Sausage Ravioli. One of my kids’ choices, no doubt. Anyway, I fished it out and opened it (with a big kitchen knife), and I ate the ravioli straight from the can. I was just amazed at how good it tasted. Heavenly. The already odd-tasting sugo (gravy), enhanced with a faint metallic aftertaste; the mushy ravioli wrapper; the stuffing made of the mildest Italian sausage I have ever come across; these had all melded together into a nearly orgasmic palette of flavors. God, I thought; I’ll never go back to Vienna sausage and crackers.

Chef Boy-ar-dee™ helped get me through the post-Hurricane Ike maelstrom, and I will be forever grateful to him for that.

*****

Anyway, that was the entirety of my dream last night, more or less. No sexual conquests of impossible-to-get women. No hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth to win the big game. No island-hopping the Caribbean on my 57-ft. yacht, various bikini-clad lovelies laying about the deck. Nope. Just me, a humble prisoner of war, enjoying to a ridiculous extent my dinner of American processed food, straight from the can.

Hey, Sigmund. When you get some time, figure that one out for me, my man.

*****