I have very narrative dreams. In fact, several of my short stories (available for the Kindle on Amazon, by the way, hint hint) are essentially transcriptions of dreams I’ve had. My dreams tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a narrative arc and the whole thing.

They often tend to have punchlines of a sort. I’ve been known to wake up from a dream laughing. For example, I once dreamed I was watching a documentary about baby seals, and the narrative voiceover described how terrible it was that baby seals were clubbed to death to make fur coats, while the video portion showed baby seals on the ice being clubbed, and leggy fashion models on the runway with gorgeous full-length seal coats. Then the voiceover explained that activists had gone out onto the ice and sprayed the baby seals with paint to make their pelts useless for the fur trade (video: bearded men in parkas spraying orange stripes onto baby seals), but that only worked for a time, as the fashion industry adjusted expectations (video: leggy models on the runway with full-length orange-striped seal coats over matching orange satin sheaths). Finally, voiceover says that activists, undaunted, have adapted their tactics to meet the challenge (video: bearded men in parkas loading crates onto seaplanes. Zoom on the crates: they are labelled Nair depilatory.)

My dreams also like to play around with cliches. I’ll be late for a test in a class I only realized today that I was enrolled in, and I’m in the wrong building, and no one can direct me to the right room, but finally I make it there and I find a seat and I realize I don’t have a pencil, but hey, it’s OK–at least I’m naked! Woo-hoo!

I’m grateful I don’t have those dreams that you can’t even relate to someone else–I was in a car, no, it was a boat–well it was a car but then it was a boat, but it was still on the highway, and I don’t know, the police came? And there was an owl? Or something? My dreams are very specific. If the car turns into a boat, there’s a mechanism involved, and I can tell you why it’s there and how it got activated.

So I’m grateful for that. Vagueness in dreams–it’s just sloppy.