Dear Diary Series: You Are Nobody

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

Dear Diary,

I had a weird dream last night. It involved a work trip, a big client meeting, a possible sexual assault case, and trying to find justice in an unjust world. There was a large, older man who kept groping me and sending me explicit content over social media, and there was nothing I could do, or nothing anybody did, to stop him. What’s even more concerning is that, in this dream, I wasn’t all that bothered by his advances even though he was quite old and saggy and probably had very dank breath.

Nobody cares about anyone else’s dreams. In fact, when you say to someone, “I had a really weird dream last night,” you can almost feel the other person checking out, as if to give a non-verbal sigh. “I’ll humor her for a bit,” you think, “but I’ll tune out somewhere in between the third and fourth sentence.”

If I were a psychologist, or a physicist, or a fortune teller or even a low-budget Long Island medium knock-off, I might have enough functioning brain cells to know what my dream meant, or to interpret it in a semi-spectacular way. Because I am bright, but not that smart, I just woke up and thought, “How bizarre,” before brushing my teeth and getting on with it.

The problem with everyone, myself included, is that we all think we’re so damn interesting when really, we’re all just water bugs half-heartedly skimming across the surface of life. That isn’t even cynical, it’s just a fact. We go to the grocery store and fondle the peaches. We sit in long lines for $0.10 off a gallon of gas at Costco. We admire our pets and think no dog, ever, on the face of this planet, has thought to chase its own tail before. We dress ourselves up in skirts we bought at outlet malls to go on dates with other humans, who buy aluminum-laced antiperspirant and pee in the shower. But they’re sexy, aren’t they? If you can look past the distasteful crew socks and the Little Trees air freshener dangling from the mirror of their grey, grey Prius.

I’d like to think that I have colorful and vivid dreams because I am a colorful and vivid person. According to WebMD, that isn’t even remotely true. Everyone has colorful and vivid dreams, every night. Most of the time, we don’t remember them, which is probably for the best…