My sick dreams, for example. No, not the ones involving a pony tail and a whip. I mean the dreams I have when I’m actually ill, perverts. They’re always mathematical in nature, or else involve me having to solve some kind of complicated puzzle. I’ll run imaginary math problems in my head for what seems like hours, or attempt to fit into a finite puzzle box a limited number of complicated shapes. Then I’ll start all over again. And over again. And over some more. I’ve actually gotten to the point at which if I find myself having dreams involving vast quantities of sums or complicated problem-solving that never seems to end, I’ll regard it as a harbinger of an illness to come and I’ll wake myself up, get out of bed, pop a couple of aspirin, and keep an eye out for cold symptoms over the next couple of days.
Then there are my reality show dreams. Although my nighttime fantasies usually have about as much of a life as a soap bubble, the reality show dreams exist in some kind of persistent alternate universe in which I’ve been a television star several times over. It all started in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when I started having recurring dreams about having appeared in the first season of MTV’s The Real World. Oh yes. I was part of the original cast! I lived in New York City with them for several months during filming. Heather was my best friend; we were inseparable during those long-vanished days. Julie and I got into some kind of feud right at the beginning and didn’t really have much to do with each other, even though Heather was trying to get us to reconcile. Eric Nies and I would stay up late at night and play cards.
But here’s the thing about that cruel experience, which has been verified time after time in that weirdly persistent alternate world, while I’ve slumbered: after I packed up my bags and moved back to Detroit to resume my life, I turned on the TV when the final cut of the show started to make its premiere and discovered that I’d been utterly edited out. The Real World wasn’t the true story (troooooue storrrrry!) of seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped. IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE EIGHT. Apparently I was just too BORING to make the final show. Ooo girl, Heather was upset about it too, when we all found out. But it was done, and there was no turning back: I was just an odd little footnote to those in the know, the eighth stranger left on the cutting room floor while everyone else went on to make history.
Like I said, sometimes I can understand my dreams more than I care to admit, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out this one.
However, because of my small notoriety, in my alternate universe I managed to get cast on a couple of other dream reality TV shows over the years. The first was Survivor, in which I managed to be the first male contestant to make it through the season without having ever removed his shirt, yo. Because that’s the way I play, y’all. I came in sixth place, having been voted off the island when one of my alliances went sour. However, in a subsequent Survivor All-Stars I managed to place third, which was fairly respectable. The gigs on Survivor directly led to my appearance on The Amazing Race, about five years ago. In the persistent dream universe there’s a very popular clip (over 3 million views on dream YouTube) in which I am in a Tokyo subway and say to Craig, who was racing with me:
ME: Which way are we supposed to go?We finished fifth. It’s because of the popularity of that clip that within the last three months we were cast in the dream version of The Amazing Race All-Stars, and at least once a show the editors include a little flashback to our most popular moment. And believe you me, since we’re savvy about why we were invited back, we play up the comedy.
HIM (pointing south): I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to head this way.
ME: Are you ‘pretty sure’ or ‘one hundred percent sure’?
HIM: I’m one hundred percent sure.
ME (heading north instead): Okay. Then we’re going this way.
Just don’t ask me where we placed, yet. The season’s apparently not over.
Of all my recurring dreams, though, the two most vivid have to do with my school days. The first involves a persistent reality in which it’s discovered that I missed a couple of credits in high school, not only invalidating my high school diploma, but my college and graduate degrees as well—unless, in the inexorable absurdity of dream logic, I go back to my old high school as an adult and matriculate again. You’d think that’d be nightmare enough, but there’s always a point in this dream in which finally the school day is over and I’m anxious to get home, but it dawns on me that I no longer remember the number of my school bus. This dream always ends with me not only trying to race from the back of the school to get to the school busses on time (apparently the lack of a math credit has invalidated my driver’s license as well, I guess), but trying to find the one bus among dozens that will take me home again and not leave me stranded.
Then finally is my most persistent recurring dream. In it, I’m usually an adult. Sometimes I’m younger again. I’m involved in a play. Sometimes it’s a play in which I actually appeared in my waking life, either from college or middle school. Sometimes it’s a play I’ve never seen. The point of the dream is that I’m inadequately prepared, and due to step onto the stage very, very soon. There are times in these dreams in which I’ve never seen the play’s script, and it’s floating around backstage always just out of reach so that I don’t have the ability to review it; in other instances I’ve got a vague memory of the lines I used to have, but I don’t at all remember my cues, or all the details. I’m always in a panic in these dreams. Will the lines come back to me? Will I just have to wing it? Or will I freeze and be exposed as a charlatan to the audience just on the other side of the footlights, staring at me?
I was thinking about this last dream in particular, a week ago. Craig and I accompanied my friend and former college roommate Eric to a local production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. Eric had been involved with the troupe in years past; like the good supporter of the arts he is, he wanted to make an appearance in the audience in order to visit old chums and evaluate just how far they’d fallen since his departure. The production itself was fine. The woman playing Mabel was terrific. The fellow playing Frederic had a weird and awesome tendency, when he wasn’t singing his own parts, of very clearly mouthing the words of everyone else’s songs while onstage. Watching him broadly articulate the consonants of “Poor Wand’ring One” with his lips while Mabel was warbling away made him look like a master ventriloquist.
But there was one woman in the cast who was utterly out of her element. She looked as if she’d been pressed into service mere minutes before the show—like she’d been pulled into the auditorium parking lot to drop off her kids at the soccer field nearby and had been kidnapped, stuffed into leg o’mutton sleeves and a bonnet, and forced onstage in some kind of perform-this-goddamn-operetta-or-we’ll-kill-your-family-and-little-dog-too hostage situation. Her eyes had the wide look of terror of someone who absolutely had no idea what she was doing. When she danced and sang, it wasn’t merely with her eyes glued to her feet as amateurs in community theater sometimes do; she was absolutely and utterly clueless about what she was supposed to be doing at any and every point of the production.
During “Climbing Over Rocky Mountain,” for example, her increasingly-panicky inner thoughts were projected all over her face as plainly as the opening credits of Star Wars on a giant screen. Do I walk forward? She’s walking forward. I’ll walk forward. Not too far forward. Okay. Are we swaying? I guess we’re sway. I’ll sway. Shit! We stopped swaying! Is this one of those things where we join hands and swing our arms? Okay. I’ll grab those hands on either side of . . . SHIT! Hands back down! Hands back down! Did anyone see that? OH MY GOD AM I SUPPOSED TO BE SPINNING MY UMBRELLA?
Craig and I were in tears and hysterics. Eric is too cultured and highbrow to notice these things. He’s basically Downton Abbey’s Dowager Countess steadfastly refusing to comment during high tea upon the fact that a footman’s next-to-bottom button has a fleck of tarnish.
For two hours that poor woman looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Even though Craig and I both were helplessly giggling over her discomfort, I felt for her. Every single moment of her distress took me back to those silly dreams of mine in which I’m wearing some foppish Restoration costume or the rags of some old man, and I’m trying to chase down a copy of the script so I can figure out what the heck I’m supposed to be doing before I make a fool of myself in front of an audience.
It’ll be just desserts, next time I enter one of my persistent dream universes, that to atone for my blatant and unrepentant schadenfreude over that poor woman’s stage fright, I’ll be edited right out of that The Real World: New York original cast reunion show.
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