REM Sweet REM

Dream adultery

Lately, I can't wait to get into bed. By myself.    

Before your mind wanders off in the wrong direction, let me explain. For whatever reason, maybe it's the apple and peanut butter I devour each night before crawling under the covers or that glass of red wine or even the late night talk shows I watch, something is causing me to have the most wonderful dreams. Night after night, I lust after terrific men who happily return my affections.

For hours (well, actually more like fifteen minutes as they say the REM state doesn't last as long as it feels) I am in total bliss. When I wake up, I'm happy for that dream life and go about my day-to-day chores with a smile on my face.

Unfortunately, my husband seems to be having these same dreams. About me. He wakes up in the crankiest of moods and accuses me of cheating on him.

Now I know they say that people who live together for years may begin to look alike and finish each other's sentences. But to dream alike? This seems pretty darn weird. But that is what's happening. And while I go about my business with a pleasant expression on my face, he stays mad at me all day long - as if I actually committed these adulterous acts!

He grunts when I bring him coffee. Won't talk over breakfast. Ignores me during dinner. Come to think of it, maybe this is why I'm dreaming about other men in the first place. But then we get into the ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?' and that's another matter entirely.

So, anyway, my nighttime activities got me thinking about dreams themselves and what they actually mean - the study of which is called oneirology.

According to ancient Greek and Egyptian societies, dreams are a supernatural communication. Well, the only thing supernatural about my dreams is that sometimes I'm twenty years younger than my real age. But not always.

Sigmund Freud explains dreams as the fulfillment of a repressed wish. In other words, I must have seen some hot guy at the grocery store during the day, studied his six pack and wished I could have sex with him. That's strange because the only thing I remembered about shopping for food today was that my favorite bananas were on sale.

Carl Jung said that every person in the dream is part of the dreamer. So in this interpretation I would be both the hot guy and myself. Which means all I really wanted to do was masturbate. Well, my vibrator is one of my favorite gadgets, with its low maintenance, one hundred percent efficiency rate.

Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, takes it one step further and says that every object, even the inanimate ones, are part of the dreamer. That would mean that the table my hunky lover throws me onto while he has his way with me, would correspond to parts of my personality. I do have a strong backbone and allow family members to place their problems on me much like one sets piles of junk on a table, but this might be carrying dream interpretation a bit far.

Which brings me back to my situation. After several days of his silent treatment, I asked my husband to talk about the problem he obviously had, and asked if he could be specific about his dreams. What did my lover look like? Did he have his way with me on a table?

Silence.

I tried to explain to him about the different theories regarding dreams. Maybe he wasn't dreaming about me at all, but about himself?

He refused to change his attitude.

I know he'll get over it. In time his dreams will move on to some other topic, leaving this obsession over my supposed infidelity to gather dust along with his rowing machine, his watercolors and his stamp collection.

But for now, I've come to the conclusion that my dreams really mean only one thing: I'm just plain horny.