Reality Television

In my dreams, I am a reality television star. I don't meant that it's one of my life goals, I mean that it's literally what I've been dreaming about recently. My dreams have always been what would normally be nightmarish, but without the element of fear. I feel that my dreams are strangely prophetic or perceptive in a way that I am not while I'm awake.

For example, when I was eleven, with no conscious understanding of insurance, I had a dream that I built a house on a cliff. Every once in a while, my house would fall off a cliff. I would be sitting in the house with a family that definitely wasn't mine, but I lived with anyway. I would feel the house tip, see all the furniture going to the ceiling, and see the house hitting the ground. Then the house would warp itself back up to the top of the cliff in pristine condition, and someone would come by to sell us insurance. Repeat this until infinity, and that was my recurring dream from that age. I didn't understand it then, but my dream was a prophetic metaphor for puberty. You keep encountering pitfalls like hair in unexpected places, awkward growth in feet and height, acne, and all the while someone is trying to sell you something from Limited, Too and the Disney Channel.

But what I usually dream about nowadays is not insurance, but myself as a reality television star. I'm usually on the Real World Season XXI in Armpittsburgh, or somewhere like that. In the beginning, I think I'm the only even moderately sane person in the house. Everyone's either crying, having sex in the hot tub, or crying and having sex in the hob tub. But suddenly I'm hooking up with that hot guy in the house whom everyone passively hates, except for the one girl with past problems who hates everyone and likes to tell them so. And it all spirals out of control until I'm walking around naked all the time because I don't want what I'm doing to appear on television. And I'm flipping the bird next to my face at all times so they won't want to use the footage, given that half of my face is blurred out. Then there are long periods between barfights where we just SIT there in the house, not doing much of anything, too bored to even get up enough energy to think about being bored. Towards the end, I think, "Did I really take off a year from college to do this?"

Or I'm on American Idol. I sing like no one's ever heard before the judges, and then pull a sweet dancing move so that they'll remember me. I charm them, and then I charm the TV audience, too. And I stand through that agonizing two-hour season finale while the votes come in on who should be the winner. My feet are cramping, I'm distraught, but I win! And it feels great. But for some reason I am a man.

My favorite, however, is the one where I'm on this sort of Amazing Race/Survivor combination show. We have to travel from deserted, tropical island to deserted, tropical island, eating rats and tanning and bitching. I form an alliance with a man who wrote a song about the show to get on it, but I discover that it was an emo song and break it off. About a month into it, we get to another island, where I am crushed by a manatee when I get in its way as it attempts to get back into the water. And it turns out that the guy whom I had formed a brief alliance with had enraged the normally gentle manatee and set it on my path in an attempt to injure me, therefore knocking off his prime competition. My first dream-dead thought is, "What an asshat." And I realize distantly that I died on reality television. It occurs to me that I'm watching my dead body on the sand, the crews swarming around it.

I don't know what those dreams mean, but I'm sure it's something deep. Being prophetic is difficult work.