Little had I known then but my life was about to turn upside down when a frazzled looking colleague ambled into our office break room one pointless Monday morning. I mean, I was not fully there myself, but it wasn’t anything some caffeine couldn’t fix. I soon saw that this crumpled up man in front of me with his bloodshot eyes would severely derail my own waking up process unless I did something. So I said:
“Slept poorly last night?”
Momentarily frozen as if shocked to be spoken to by another human being, the man mumbled out.
“Yes, er.. Yes. Bad dreams.”
I looked at my nearly ready coffee and looked back at the tortured soul in front of me. I sighed. The coffee only worked its charm if I imbibed it at a particular pace alone. Alone.
“You know what? I’m actually pretty good at interpreting dreams,” I fibbed glibly, “I might be able to solve your problem”
The man squinted at me for a second.
“How did you know that I’ve been having the same dream over and over again?”
I didn’t, but I clucked mysteriously. Then he launched into a story that stopped, started, stopped and started over again more times than the TV series Supernatural, but could be summarized in one line. A giant thirty foot wide foot (ha!) came out of nowhere to squash him like a bug.
“Did you notice anything.. I mean.. Was there anything about the shoe that struck you?”
“Actually, yes. Weirdly, it was the exact make of brown suede that our boss uses.”
I looked at the coffee mug fondly. Almost there, my darling. I then put a consoling arm around his shoulder and uttered the following words:
“You’re clearly unhappy with our boss trampling all over you to get work done at the expense of your health and sanity.”
“You’re a grown adult, a fairly smart, a decently qualified adult, and you should stand up for yourself and ask your boss to either back off, or pay you twice what he pays until HE STOPS!”
A thoughtful glint slithered into the man’s eyes as he truly focussed on me for the first time. I knew he’d be alright. What I didn’t know was that everything was to change for me.
“Thank you!” he said, and walked away, a little less crumpled than before.
So one thing had led to another, and I found myself quitting my comfortable white collar job and becoming a full time ‘dream matcher’ as I called it. Clearly, that very obvious interpretation of the giant shoe shouldn’t have been enough to quit my day job, but you should have seen that guy! He had looked like he thought I was the Messiah or something.
It had turned out to be a decent career choice however. Apparently I had this talent for unravelling the most ridiculous dreams into sensible life prescriptions. Once I got the ambiance sorted, the sleep deprived wackos started flowing in like a contagious disease. The tent was the first step, of course, but then I went all in. I bought dream interpretation books written by various quacks over the centuries and ceremoniously half-burnt them into a carefully placed pile in one corner. Then I got rid of electricity and lighting and all that and stuffed the tent with more aromatic pillows than any single man in history. I dropped my shirt and jeans uniform for an airy robe of some sort. Second hand antique shops all over the city were raided for trinkets of every kind until I could hardly walk around without fake diamonds shattering under my feet.
That was in the past. Now I was faced with the greatest puzzle of my fledgling dream matcher career and I feared that this was my Kryptonite, my nemesis, the problem that ended me for good. It wasn’t that I hadn’t encountered challenging dreams before. For instance, there was that time when this woman had walked in and said:
“I dream of dinosaurs.”
The bloody ambiance sold this whole dream matcher idea to the gullibles but I could hardly see a thing, and it was annoying. I popped on my IR-augmented glasses to see an average woman in average clothes with an average posture and an average expression on her face. Green, of course.
“I am an accountant, you see. I don’t even think of dinosaurs. In fact it’d be fair to say that the last time I thought of dinosaurs during my waking hours was probably about twenty years ago. When I was ten and had watched Jurassic Park for the first time. And then my brother said he’d liked it too, and I had to hate it from that point on, of course. So, basically, I thought of dinosaurs for all of a single day.”
She paused to wag a finger in what she thought was my direction but was actually at the human sized pile of half-burnt quack-lore in the corner. Ironic.
“So don’t feed me some simplistic interpretation about a hidden love for paleontology.”
I hemmed from the diaphragm like a death metal vocalist warming up, startling the wagging finger.
“Tell me, “ I murmured, “what do these dinosaurs do in your dream?”’
“They.. er.. Are flying. Flying with smiles on their faces over the lush green forest below.”
“The dinosaurs.. Are flying?”
“Yes.”
“With a smile on their face?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think of the Conservative Party?” I burst out, while straightening my body at the same time. I knew that in the dimness the effect would be of pressing urgency almost like a physical entity enveloping you.
The woman paused. “I…”
“I think that they’re exactly what this country needs. What with the out of control crime, them taking all our jobs, and having so many babies and changing our language, we need… discipline.”
“Discipline?” I rumbled gently.
“Yes, discipline.”
Her green jaw tightened into defiance.
“Clearly,” I put on my poshest Oracle voice, “the dinosaurs represent your longing for a time long past. A golden age, a utopia, an idyllic time when everything was perfect. The flying? It symbolizes freedom. Freedom to be what you want to be in a perfect world. A world that the Conservative Party can bring back.”
“Go and vote!” I added.
To this day, I was proud of that dinosaur connection. Yes, there had been other great matches as well. Like the man who dreamt he was in a coffin all the time because his mattress was too small, and the girl who dreamt she was an unappreciated wooden door and would wake up in pools of tears because her neighbours worked night shifts and had the bad habit of slamming doors from time to time. There was even this one guy who had this elaborate mythology constructed piecemeal over hundreds of dream nights about this sub-species of humans that broke off from the mainline and lived in harsh volcanic deserts until they evolved into gilled amphibious green creatures that no longer needed any water.
It turned out he often went to bed thirsty. I felt a bit bad for ruining his budding career as a fantasy writer, but at least he wouldn’t die of dehydration.
But my nemesis’s case was different. It was different because it seemed easy on the surface. Through the IR goggles, I had spied an inconspicuous looking man. Glasses, stubble, unruly hair, slouchy, I’d already filed him into a cabinet in my super-judgy shelf when he had spoken up.
“I dream the same pattern every night but the details are different.”
“I am a bird of some sort, but my plumage, the colours, the size, the feathers, everything is different each time.”
“You.. are a bird. Do go on. What do you do as a bird in your dream?”
“I.. er.. Perform these elaborate mating rituals. And then mate. And mate some more, until the cock crows at dawn.”
I was intrigued. Clearly, this man was involuntarily single - to put it nicely, and I try sometimes - and he wasn’t what you’d call conventionally attractive - nice one last time - so clearly it was a case of the coitus desperadus. Except, it wasn’t. You - clueless reader - might think so, but I, the world’s foremost expert on dreams, knew that the human brain didn’t work that way. It was almost as if it compensated for the mind numbing tedium of everyday life, the rules and order and mundane structures that stifled creativity, by going crazy wild at night. It was still subject to the limbic desires of the animal subconscious, but it was free to ride that imagination train to wherever it wanted as long as it was in the general direction of those primal desires.
This man’s dreams weren’t about sex.
I said my usual verbose time consuming nonsense mumblings until I had nothing more to say, but the pattern didn’t strike me, and I gave up and said:
“Have you tried Tinder?”
I had taken his money and bought myself expensive Ethiopian coffee, but the look of disappointment on his ghostly green IR face still haunted me. I hadn’t failed before and didn't want to this time. There was something else at play in this enigmatic man’s life.
I creeped on the Internet until I found his profile, and then his address and began to skulk around his neighbourhood. I watched him enigmatically throw out his cat litter everyday, and shuffle back and forth from work (8:30 - 5:30). I even watched his silhouette collapsed in a shadowy heap on what must be a sofa watching what must be Netflix for two hours before I called it a day and went back to my tent. One of those fake diamond pendants I stepped on yet again cut me this time, and it bled. It was a sign.
So I showed up at his workplace, confident he wouldn’t recognize me. He worked in IT. Of course.
He looked up from his eighth coffee and spotted me camouflaged by the printer. I could see the gears turning in his head. Shit. A frown creased his forehead.
“Aren’t you that hippie conman from the tent?”
“Hippie?”
“Conman?”
“Tent?!”
“You must have me mistaken for some other handsome devil because I am here to er.. Inspect the printer.”
After some more silver tongued falsehoods, I slipped away back to my tent with my nemesis none the wiser. I decided not to go back to that soul sapping office. Just in case.
So I continued skulking around the man’s house for four more days, until my brain was mush and I was ready to give up. The cut stung, and the ‘temporarily closed’ sign outside my tent stung even more, but what could I do? Either I’d be the world’s greatest dream matcher, or I’d do mediocre IT. At least the coffee was alright. One more day, and then that was that.
Cat litter thrown out. Check.
Garbage out. Check.
Post box checked. Check. Empty. Check.
Walk to office. Check. Sigh.
That was that. I had walked a third of the way back to my tent when it occurred to me that it was a Saturday. IT doesn’t do Saturdays. I ran like a madman back to that accursed office and snuck into the good old printer room, and peeped out the blinds for a glimpse of my eternal foe. There he was! But what was he doing?
He was kneeling on the ground, hunched over something protectively. Was it drugs? No, it was… Lego. He was building something with Lego bricks, and presumably the office had a set. Also presumably, he was too scared of public shaming to do this during work hours.
I stepped on a stray brick on my way out, and it hurt like the twelve realms of Hell, but I didn’t care. I’d been right, my mojo was still on, and most importantly, the Dream Matcher was still undefeated and going strong.
The note on Lego Birdman’s desk read:
“Go all in doing what you love, and others will love you for it. - Hippie conman.”
