My Unconscious Takes Strange Forms
We really don’t want to hear about anyone else’s dreams unless we’re in them, and even then, it’s not that interesting. At some point you realize that it’s not you who gave this person a broken egg, or flew into a wall, but just another projection of the dreamer’s own consciousness. It’s never that revealing. “You were in my dream! You were barefoot and then you led me to a lake but you said that the water had books in it and my fourth-grade teacher was there, too, but she had a light saber and a mohawk. I wonder what it means…” It means you need therapy. We all do. The twenty-first century is killing us.
That said, I had an experience last week that goes beyond simple dreaming and enters into the realm of the supernatural. My unconscious spoke to me in the form of Britney Spears, at the exact moment that Britney Spears herself lay in a Los Angeles area hospital, birthing her first child by Cesarean section. What are the odds?
I’ve dreamt of celebrities before, but for some reason, it’s usually Jennifer Aniston. I have recurring, surprisingly not-weird dreams about Jennifer Aniston. I don’t know why. She’s alright and I wish her well, but if I could talk to any celebrity it would probably not be Jennifer Aniston. In my dreams I promise not to give away her whereabouts to the papparazzi and confirm that Brad Pitt was a total asshole to her.
But what are the odds of dreaming of a pregnant celebrity at the moment that they are giving birth? If Sean Preston Spears Federline was born at 1 p.m. California time, and I get up around 10:00 most weekdays, and I was dreaming of Britney right up until I was awakened, that pretty much means I was dreaming of Britney while the kid was being born. I mean, how weird is that?
It almost makes you think that we are all cosmically connected in some way and that Britney was giving off some seriously powerful vibes as new life emerged from her womb through an incision in her once-fabulous abs.
Dream: September 14, 2005
I am interviewing Britney Spears for Interview magazine. She is very pregnant, as she is in real life, and I am very excited because in Interview famous people are interviewed by other famous people, therefore, I, too must be famous! As in dreams in which I believed I was in love before I ever fell in love, the feeling of dreaming that I am a famous, published writer is so fantastic that though this dream, like all dreams, takes a strange, creepy turn, I try to fall back into it after waking up, but of course I can’t.
We meet at her family’s compound. I am aware of being in a Southern state that ends in “A” but unsure of where it is. It consists of an old single-story ranch house and a giant new mansion. Everything still happens in the old house, which has shag carpeting and sliding aluminum windows and other trappings of white trashiness.
Britney is kind of cool–goofy and ditzy but sweet. She talks a lot about wanting to join the library and for some reason I tell her about the Great Neck library vs. the Port Washington Library, as if she is going to join a library on the North Shore of Long Island. There are sprinklers sprinkling the lawn outside, and through the rainbows they create I can see a huge, uninhabited mansion, swimming pool and swingset.
As we talk Britney seems kind of insecure and I reassure her a lot, there is a lot of specific conversation which I don’t remember now at all. Underneath a piece of furniture, covered by a sheet, is a cage, and when I accidentally stick my foot under the sheet I feel something furry. I lift up the sheet and it’s a huge, like human-sized doggish creature, except it’s covered in artificial-seeming fur, like a muppet. It’s docile and sleeping but also scary and humanoid. Britney says it was a sick squirrel that they took in and it grew into this but there’s something suspect about that.
Congratulations Britney. I don’t really forgive you for that clip I saw in Fahrenheit 9/11 in which you said “we should support the President no matter what he says” while you were wearing a pink pageboy wig and a lot of eyeliner. I hope you realize that the “President” would say that you are a hypersexualized fag-hagging hoochie who gives the youth the wrong idea. Or maybe he would like it that you are 23, married and mommied. In any case, I wish you all the best. Thank you for taking the time to enter my dream while you were giving birth. I will try to understand your message.