A dream isn’t the worst place to try out new jokes
Sometimes I come up with jokes in my dreams.
Given that everyone seems to bring a camera with them to record absolutely everything, perhaps a dream isn’t the worst place to try out new jokes that might appear iffy or bad if recorded or taken out of context.
And because the audience is a product of my subconscious, they’re unlikely to be sycophantic. Indeed, they often boo.
It is said that a number of world-changing events or works of art have originated in lucid dreams. Paul McCartney claims he dreamt the entire melody for the song Yesterday. Mary Shelley dreamt a vision of the Frankenstein’s story. Lucky them.
Anything I remember isn’t new. Anything that seems new, I don’t remember. Although I can’t be sure because I don’t remember.
This week I did. In the dream, with a level of self-indulgence matched only by me telling strangers about a dream I had, I decided to debut my standup comedy routine about mathematics.
Specifically I was going to do comedy about Euler’s equation. I don’t know much about Euler but I know what I like. It’s going to be hard to get across the beauty of Euler’s equation through the brevity and typographical constraints of your average newspaper column.
In English its “e raised to the power of (iota times Pi) plus 1 equals zero. But that’s like saying “Yeah so the Mona Lisa, yeah. It’s basically this woman sitting in front of like a window and she’s got this weird smile?”
The equation is revered by mathematicians because it has the five of the most important numbers in maths in it e, the complex number i or iota, pi, 1 and 0. You’ve heard of 1 and 0. Pi is the circle one. Iota is the imaginary unit.
It’s used to solve problems that would be too hard to solve with real numbers. Say you were trying to build something on the other side of river and then you pretended you had a bridge. e is used in compound interest and … er.. other things .
To explain them fully would require an edition of the Examiner nearly as big as the Holly Bough. But suffice it to say, an equation that links these historically important numbers so neatly is like finding out that Mandela, Einstein, Elizabeth the First, Marie Curie and the fella who invented the stirrup were in the same hurling team at Minor level.
And this is the equation I was going to do standup comedy about in my dream. This isn’t my Frankenstein moment. But it does reflect a thing I’d simultaneously love to and also fear to do at the same time: Maths. As in properly.
It’s not like I have any particular aptitude for it but every so often while dossing on the internet, I get snared by some article that gives a glimpse of the sheer power of sums.
I want to make my millions, quit everything apart from this column and study nothing but difficult maths. But I’d also be afraid to do it because I know that years later, I’d get to a point where I realised I was actually only at the start of it.
I wonder how do scientists and mathematicians, or indeed any specialists do it? To be aware of how little they know.
The rest of us plod along aware that there are things we’ll never know but with no idea of just how ignorant we are. Know-it-alls know well they are only Know-A-Fair-Bit-More-Than-You.
But maybe I’d do it for long enough so the next time I catch a glimpse I could say to myself “I must go have a look at that next week.”
That’s the dream anyway.
