According to a recent article, no matter where you're doing the dreaming - from India to Indiana - human nightmares tend to follow the same set themes.
"Nightmares are the way we dream our biggest fears," says one dream analyst. And some of the biggest nightmares include falling, losing your teeth, getting chased, appearing naked in public and natural disasters.
Public nakedness? Really? I feel pretty good about that kind of thing in my dreams and sometimes I try out it out in the real world, too. But the others? Yeah, they kinda suck.
Also in the article: Even stars may dread the night, celebrity nightmares include: Halle Berry has recurring nightmares of her teeth flying out of her mouth. Gwyneth Paltrow has recurring nightmares of being in a Victorian house that is swept away by a river. Madonna has night terror dreams of being harassed by a knife-wielding dwarf.
I don't know about Halle and Gwyneth but as for Madonna, I don't think you can call memories and flashbacks of past sexual encounters "dreams".
Dream A Little Dream
Madame May's Mystical Ministrations
I was walking around the annual Octoberfest festival when I stumbled over a tent peg and landed, butt first, in a pile of crisp, colorful leaves. There was a bit of good-natured snickering from the families that turned my way to see what all the commotion was about - adorable kids wearing cute knit caps peered at me around grand swaths of cotton candy, bored teenagers looked up briefly from their cell phones to take a picture of me before returning to their perennial state of disassociation and parents smiled and headed my way to help me up.
After getting up, giving my thanks to my rescuers and brushing the red and yellow leaves from my coat and pants a voice said, "I knew that was going to happen."
I turned and saw a pudgy, middle-aged lady wearing a robe with stars and moons on it. She had wonderfully elaborate rings on her fingers and was wearing an amulet with a long knife blade at the end of it around her neck.
"And you couldn't have told me ahead of time?"
She tapped a sign that stood outside her tent - the tent with the tent peg I tripped over - with intricately detailed calligraphy, the sign read: "Madame May's Mystical Ministrations - Futures Predicted, Dead Talked To".
I gave her a look of incomprehension. She sighed, rolled her eyes, and pointed at the bottom line.
$20.
Oh.
Yes," I protested, "but I didn't know you knew something would happen, right? I mean, isn't that more your field? Besides, it's already happened, why would I want to give you $20 now?"
She gave me a look while continuing to point to the part of her sign that read $20 and said, "Do you think it's maybe possible that there might be something else you may need to know?" She wiggled her eyebrows and nodded her head. I reached into my wallet, handed her a twenty, and followed her inside.
The tent was everything you'd expect - dark and musty, smell of burnt incense, skulls and strange symbols decorating the walls, and, of course, the requisite small table with big glass ball book-ended by two chairs.
She sat down, pointed to the opposite chair and started right in.
"I'm seeing someone...someone very dear to you...things are a bit fuzzy..."
"Oh, that must be my uncle Oris, he always had to shave twice a day."
She gave me another look and continued. "I think their name starts with an...M."
I shook my head.
"N"
Another shake.
"Things can be unclear sometimes...maybe it's an...R?"
I got up to leave and she grabbed my wrist. "I'm just joking. Sit down...sit down."
As I began to sit back down, she said, "You are going to trip over a tent pole."
Half sitting and half standing, I gaped at her.
"You are going to trip over a tent pole," she repeated.
"Are you serious?" I asked, my voice rising.
Calmly, she nodded her head.
"But I already did that!"
More head nodding.
"And you just charged me $20 to tell me that?"
Another nod.
"And you're not going to give me the twenty back, are you?"
A shake of the head.
I stormed out of the tent, looked at the tent pole I tripped over, headed the other way, tripped over another tent pole and landed, butt first, in another pile of leaves.
There was more good-natured laughter, more little kids with cotton candy, more teenagers taking cell phone pictures and more smiling parents offering to help me up.
As I brushed the leaves off me again I saw Madame May standing outside the tent holding a $20 in one hand and pointing to a sign on this side of her doorway. The sign read: "$20 To Predict Your Future, $40 To Tell You How To Change It".
She tipped me a wink and went back inside.
"Bitch," I murmured under my breath.
"I think you mean witch, dear," was the reply from the tent.
Sleep For America
According to a recent article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune - which I cannot link to because they expect payment to access their archives€¦the fuckers €“ on-the-job drowsiness costs American companies $18 billion per year in productivity, the costs of which could be recovered by allowing as small as a 30 minute nap during the work day.
30 minutes a day = $18 billion dollars of extra money in our economy. Sounds pretty good to me.
In fact, I think companies should take things a step further. Forget the measly 30 minute nap. Forget the lousy $18 billion. What companies should do is let employees sleep all day on the job. For the average, full-time, 8-hour day that would be an increase in productivity of $288 billion dollars. That's an extra $288 billion per year pumped into our economy.
The companies could even be patriotic about their new wealth and give half of it to the federal government for the war in Iraq - the government could make a big campaign out of it. They could show commercials of people sleeping in hammocks set up in cubicles and factory floors all around the nation. Slogans like "Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You But How Much Sleep You Can Get For Your Country" or "Uncle Sam Needs You...To Sleep" or "If You Love Your Country You'll Sleep On The Job" would signal this new era in patriotism.
Sure, people would still brag about putting in 10, 12, and 15 hour days but they would be doing it in their hammocks.
When people got off work, they would be ready to hit the town and spend their new wealth, and they wouldn't need to stop going out and having fun and spending money until they returned to work the next day, ready for a good, hard day's sleep. All the spending would further spur the economy to hitherto unattainable heights.
The only problem I can see with all this is waking people up for lunch. Whole new industries would have to be created in order to deal with the morning mouth, bed head, and general crankiness of waking up. The silver lining in this, however, again, would be these new industries providing new jobs and even further stimulating an already orgasmic economy.
Sleeping on the job is the right thing to do.
Sleeping on the job€¦do it for America.
Harry Potter Burn in Hell
ATLANTA - A suburban county that sparked a public outcry when its libraries temporarily eliminated funding for Spanish-language fiction is now being asked to ban Harry Potter books from its schools.
Laura Mallory, a 22 year old born again Christian mother of four with another on the way, told a hearing officer for the Gwinnett County Board of Education on Tuesday that the popular fiction series is an evil attempt to indoctrinate children into the Wicca religion.
Education officials asked Mrs. Mallory to please stop breeding.
Battle of the Talibulge
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rice - Offered a high calorie diet and kept in their cells almost around the clock, many detainees at Guantanamo Bay are becoming fat.
Meals totaling a whopping 4,200 calories per day are brought to their cells - U.S. government dietary guidelines recommend 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day for weight maintenance - and some inmates are eating everything on the menu.
One detainee has almost doubled in weight, to 410 pounds, Nave Commander Robert Durand, spokesman for the detention facilities, said Monday.
Human Rights groups attribute the weight gain to lack of mobility in their small, contained spaces. The groups cite complaints of exercising fewer than three days a week, leading to an extremely sedentary lifestyle.
A representative from the Human Rights group added, "I'm sorry, that information was from a recent study on obesity and office workers in America. My bad."
Durand said detainees are simply served a wide variety of food and expected to choose what appeals to them. "They are advised that they are offered more food than necessary to provide choice and variety, and that consuming all the food they are offered will result in weight gain."
"Sorry," he continued, "my mistake. That is from another study on obesity in America."
Most of the prisoners were picked up in Afghanistan and other conflict zones and were slightly underweight when they arrived at the military prison in southeast Cuba. Since then they've gained an average of 20 pounds and most are now "normal to mildly overweight or mildly obese," he said.
A Whitehouse spokesperson added, "Even though the Enemy Combatants legislation went through we have decided to not inflict any physical torture on any of the detainees. We do admit, however, when we don't get the information we want from them during interrogations to picking them last for sports in gym class and occasionally circling around them during recess and chanting 'Fatty Fatty McFatterson" while pointing and giggling."
Good Eatin'
I was watching a television show on cannibalism and was wondering how so foreign and, let's face it, icky, a concept ever came to be considered appropriate behavior by any society. But then I got to thinking about it a bit more and thought it wasn't such a bad idea, you know, in theory.
The first guy to ever consider cannibalism probably woke up one morning in his cozy little hut in the jungle. Like most of us in the morning he didn't want to get out of bed but he had to - he was hungry and he had a wife and four kids to feed. So he made some coffee, strapped on his hunting gear, grabbed his spear and brushed aside the long grass front door to his hut.
Most likely it was hot and humid outside, you know, what with being in the jungle and all. As he took one last lingering look inside the cool, dark interior of the hut he saw his wife and kids fast asleep, comfortable in their beds and thought of all the quick, poisonous and hard to catch animals that waited for him out in the jungle. He thought of the hours and hours of hot, sweaty work it would take to track, hunt and prepare a meal.
It was probably about then that his stomach rumbled with hunger and he began thinking how unfair it was that he had to go out and do all the hard work while the wife and kids got to sleep in. Maybe he even got a little angry. Maybe he thought if he didn't have so many mouths to feed life would be easier and happier. Then it clicked. If he killed one of his family he not only wouldn't have that mouth to feed anymore, but he could feed the rest of the family at the same time without all that mucking about in the jungle.
Genius, he thought.
But who to kill? The wife was the obvious choice. She ate the most out of any of them. In fact, she had really packed on the pounds since the last pregnancy, and, besides, she was always nagging him in front of his friends. And, with her out of the way, there wouldn't be any new mouths to feed in the near future.
Although, she did let him have sex with her occasionally. Okay then, it would have to be one of the kids, probably the youngest one as it would put up the least amount of struggle.
So by 9:00 that morning the whole family had finished eating breakfast and, after finding out what she had eaten, the wife had him in front of the elder council by 9:15.
After hearing the charges against him the elder council secretly sympathized with the man - it wasn't so many years ago that they too had to go out hunting to provide food for their families - but they obviously had to put him to death for they were old and slow and, besides possibly being a bit stringy, could be considered by many to be good eatin'.
My guess is that near the end of the council meeting one of the elders stood up and said that the man had been smart to kill a human for food, for humans were amongst the slowest and weakest creatures in the jungle and the man had been smart not to kill his wife so he could still get nookie but the man had not been smart to kill a child for everyone knew the children were our future.
So they killed the man and ate him and vowed only to eat outsiders, enemies, castaways and missionaries for food from then on.