Shallow Psyche Theater, Starring Vincent Price as My Subconscious

I haven't shared one of my stupid, weird-ass dreams with you in a while.

Like this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Not one of mine, but could be. Could be.

Last night, I dreamed that I was with my family, by which I mean not actually my family, but a random assemblage of kids and adults that my subconscious threw together. Will Forte may have been one of them. Or maybe Will Ferrell. Also, Bamm-Bamm.

Don't you feel more normal and well-adjusted
already? You're welcome.

So this ragtag "family" and I made the rounds of several places in my dream-neighborhood in a repeating loop, with each visit slightly different from the last. This is a hallmark of my dreams: Continually revisiting places and trying without success to repeat my experiences each time. Because change is inevitable and you can't recapture the past, blah blah blah.

I'm sure I've mentioned how blindingly obvious my dreams tend to be, right?

Anyway, I was not a particularly good person in this dream. We went into a sort of fancy shop and I knocked over a spinning rack of postcards, which scattered everywhere, and I basically said "Sorry about making you clean that up." We went to someone's house and I demanded to use the private bathroom in the back, then had to be shown how to close the strange, elaborate doors so I could do my business.

Not quite that creepy, but almost.

Then there were the ants.

I noticed that everywhere we went, there were ants. Swarms of the little fuckers, crawling around on everything.

Asleep or awake, I am not a fan of ants.

Don't give me that look. You don't like me, either.

Unsurprisingly, my reaction to the swarming ants in my dream was to try to kill as many of them as possible.

In dream analysis, swarming ants represent internal chaos and turmoil while trying to move toward a goal or resolution. And the method by which you try to kill the ants symbolizes how you are handling said chaos and turmoil in your own life.

So let's just pretend for a moment that I myself have been experiencing turmoil while trying to achieve resolution to a personal problem.

I mean, you've read this blog before, haven't you?

The means I chose to deal with the ants in my dream was poison. And I sprayed that shit willy-nilly: where there were children, where there was food, in other people's homes and businesses, without regard to anybody's well-being or opinion of what I was doing.

In my waking life, I have no idea what kind of "poison" that correlates to.

Vincent Price sort of sums it up, you know?

Could it...could it be that the swarming ants represent the emotional difficulty of moving past a divorce and the poison symbolizes my reckless consumption of vodka to handle the transition, even though it's negatively affecting my child, my boyfriend, and my overall quality of life?

CAN I REALLY BE THAT TRANSPARENT?

Oh hell yes.

There were also flies in my dream, but you don't even want to get into the weird shit people claim flies represent.

Once again, gotta go with Vincent Price.

This has been another episode of Shallow Psyche Theater. May your dreams contain nothing but clumsily literal imagery. Good night.