Last night I had a cool dream. I dreamed that Dann and I and several other friends of ours from our high school Boy Scout troop had all joined the Special Forces. Dann and another guy were in the Navy SEALs, and I was in the Green Berets. We were sort of sad because we weren’t all in the same unit, but we were also kind of glad, because we didn’t know whether I’d be able to make it into a Special Forces unit at all.

Maybe there’s some secret significance to this dream; I don’t know. I know our Boy Scout troop really tried to model the Special Forces any way we could (they wouldn’t let us have guns), although none of us eventually wound up going into the military. It was, however, the best kind of dream: the one where you’re doing something you’ve always wanted to do, but after you wake up, you don’t wish it was real.

This is very uncommon for me. Most of the time, I hate dreams. For the most part, when I wake up, I feel as if I’ve just finished watching an eight-hour stretch of MTV: weird, surreal, and completely nonsensical. Sometimes, though, I have dreams that make sense, and they don’t generally fall in the “innocuous” category. Usually, they’re either terrifying or unbelievably great. Terrifying dreams need no introduction, we’ve all had them, and the less said, the better. It’s the great ones I hate. In them, I’ve often found something I’ve been looking for for a long time, or gotten something I’ve been desperately wanting for a long time. This is wonderful – until you wake up. For instance, once upon a time, I had a book that I really loved. It was the sequel to an earlier book, and I had never read or seen the earlier book. (It had been turned into a TV movie one time, and I had the vague recollection of the last few minutes of the movie.) I searched and searched for the book, but never found it. One night, I dreamed I found it in a used bookstore. A lifelong dream had been finally fulfilled – and then I woke up! AAAAARGH! That’s why I don’t like good dreams (usually).

This dream, though, was good in that it wasn’t something I “really wanted” to do, it was just sort of an adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasy – the kind of dreams I wish I had more often. Besides “Green Beret Mark,” I’d like a “Kung-Fu Master Mark” dream, or maybe a “Billionaire Crimefighter Mark” or even a “Space Explorer Mark.” Unfortunately, these seem to be few and far between. Most of my dreams are the MTV dreams.

In fact, that’s one way I help myself go to sleep. Instead of counting sheep, I free associate things as quickly as I can, and before I know it, my conscious, logical mind has lost control of the associations, and my unconscious has taken control. I actually dream myself to sleep.

As a side note, I eventually found the book I was looking for, many years later. It was as good as I hoped it would be.