Do Dreams Make Any Less Sense Than Life Itself?

I am fleeing through this green, green field. Who is with me? It is Amber, from Accounts Payable! She comes into my arms and kisses me. Her lips are cool, soft, and definitely potentially invigorating. She says, “I’ve always wanted to do that.” “Really”? I say, dumbstruck.

I want to kiss her again— but someone, something, is after us. Evildoers, perhaps. They’re pretty much everywhere these days.

I see a day-glow orange helicopter perched on top of a red barn. We must escape! The helicopter is listing, about to fall off the barn roof. How can I climb up there? And I don’t know how to fly a helicopter.

To make matters worse, Amber has turned into a cow.

Suddenly, instead of being in a field, we are floating down the swollen Wilson River toward Tillamook on top of the barn. Yet the barn is clearly a log raft, although I keep calling it a barn. Apparently, in this dream, log rafts are called barns.

Amber is a guernsey cow... no, a holstein— one of those attractive, splotchy ones. I still admire Amber’s beauty, although the desire to kiss her has become significantly less. I think this is good— Amber can live with the Tillamook cows and work for the Tillamook Cheese Factory. Tillamook has the world’s most contented cows.

Then our log raft begins to be boarded by the evildoers. One, who looks like Dick Cheney, smirks and levels a gun at me. I wake up in a sweat.

Crazy. But do dreams make any less sense than life itself? What do we really understand of life? Aren’t our certainties really just day dreams? We don’t know what it feels like to be a dog, or a weasel, or a toadstool. We cannot begin to comprehend the size of the universe. When someone talks to us, we really don’t know what they are saying— our English might as well be Bantu, and the Bantu might as well be rain. And the speaker has no idea what he means, and walks home later wondering what exactly were those sounds that spilled from his mouth.

Life is a fascinating phantasmagoria, but we leave it knowing no more, and perhaps less, than we knew when we entered. Life is a dream, and is no more substantial than the dreams in which we float at night, as we lie in our beds.