Séamas O'Reilly: Even my subconscious is a preachy hack 

Dreams are overrated according to Séamas O'Reilly

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

The other night, I was killed because I forgot my children’s names.

I was in Venice, for some reason, and presenting my children to an impossibly grand posh lady, probably in the hopes she would offer me patronage and, presumably, money. 

As I gestured to my handsome, well-behaved kids, something failed to click and I fumbled over their names, incapable of remembering as my wife looked on in horror. 

In the end, I took to the ground, faking a heart attack so I wouldn’t get in trouble, but this attempt was clearly seen through by my beloved, who rolled me into the canal as punishment. As I hit the water, I woke up – still embarrassed, ashamed and not altogether certain I wasn’t drowning.

It was the latest in a series of incidents which has reinforced my heartfelt conviction that dreams are overrated. 

Sure, I get it when people say that other people’s dreams are boring because, well ... they are. In terms of stirring narrative, the example I just gave above would not trouble any end-of-year short story lists. 

Dreams themselves are usually ungovernably tedious. It’s just that I happen to believe the notion they tell us about ourselves, is, well, also boring. 

From reading the above, you might guess that I’d been under stress related to memory, and you’d be right, as I’d spent a week cramming for my driving theory test. 

I’d also been looking at pictures from our honeymoon to Venice, which was five years ago last week, and the remaining details can be filled in by roughly 100% of the stresses I encounter in my daily life: obtaining money (as represented by the posh old lady), being a dutiful and loving father (doing thoughtful things like remembering my children’s names), and annoying my wife (like upsetting her until she is forced to oversee my drowning). 

The thing is, I knew all this already. 

I live with my stresses and insecurities all day long, and I gain little insight from suffering an endless film festival of garbled fables seeking to highlight them. 

I do not feel like I learned much about myself from this dream, other than the knowledge that even my subconscious is a preachy hack. 

I resent having to withstand yet another unsolicited, lecturing horror movie from my nagging subconscious during a time I believe should be given over to rest.

“I hate dreaming,” said the late, great comedian Mitch Hedberg. “Dreaming is work… there I am in a comfortable bed, the next thing you know I have to build a go-kart with my ex-landlord.”

I think about that quote all the time, usually, when I’ve woken up from another stupid internal scolding in the few hours of sleep I get as a father of two. 

Ideally, my sleep would involve nothing more than a quiet expanse of black oblivion, enveloping me for as many hours as I can get. 

If that is unavailable, then I would settle for a curated playlist of all the prestige TV shows everyone says I should be watching, but which I miss because I end up spending the slim few hours I have each evening watching those YouTube videos where, like, a safe-cracker rates the best safe-cracking scenes in movies.

Why we actually dream is still a matter of debate, but the going theory is that dreams serve as a sort of clearing house for the brain. 

Unresolved conflicts, spare imagery, background stresses, all scooped up like leftover offal so that the whole grisly cocktail can be poured down the butcher’s drain that is your memory.

All of which makes the stranglehold dreams have over the culture all the more inane. 

The fact that we still, in the year of our Lord 2022, say that something was “a dream come true”, when something really, really good has happened, when it should mean “a boring melodrama made a series of extremely trite references to my stresses and insecurities, solving nothing”.

The prevalence of dreams as ‘wish fulfilment’ is odd to me. 

Last time I checked I’ve dreamed pretty much every single night of my life. At just shy of 37 years old, that amounts to over 13,000 nights’ sleep, yet I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I’ve had a dream that even remotely fitted the dictionary description. 

I have that one dream where my teeth fall out about ten times a year. Showing up to an exam I’ve not prepared for, sometimes naked? Another ten.

I’m just saying if an ‘everything I’ve ever wanted’ dream has a 1-in-3,000 chance of happening, then it seems, at the very least, overstated to define all dreams by such an infrequent and unrepresentative example. 

To put that figure in context, America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there is a 1-in-3,000 chance you’ll be struck by lightning in your lifetime, and yet we somehow resist the urge to associate ‘being alive’ with ‘sudden and inevitable electrocution from the sky’.

Imagine, in fact, that someone did tell you they dreamed a sequence of incredibly gratifying things happening. 

You’d think they were either lying, or the sort of smooth-brained psychopath who has the dreams that dogs have. 

But no one has ever told you this, because they’re too busy spending their periods of sleep building go-karts and being murdered by their wives, or maybe more recently dreaming that a safe-cracker is rating your ability to crack a posh old lady’s safe, only the safe is made of teeth, and you’re naked, and the longer you find yourself unable to open it, the more likely you know it is you’re probably going to start faking a heart attack.

Only my son appears to be the exception, since he claims his dreams are just of playing, visiting the seaside, and seeing his nana and grandads.

I’d like to say this makes me happy, but I can’t. 

The fact is, I simply don’t believe him, whatever his name is.