Dear Amritsar,
My boyfriend Philboyd is the best! He looks like Vactor Mason Devonshire-Jarre skinning a young Brad Pitt, he thinks like a cybernetic recreation of the frontal lobe of Stephen Hawking and he shoots skeet so well he can even beat my father (which he only does 79 per cent of the time; for the other 37%, he pretends to lose in that masculine way that other men either never catch on to or inexplicably find endearing).
In short, he's all that and a bag of chips...a bag of muscular, hairy, virile chips.
To get even closer to Philboyd, I installed sensors in our bedroom that could read the neuronal activity in our brains. That way, I could get a copy of his dreams when he was asleep! Could there be anything more romantic?
As it happens, just about anything could be more romantic, including flossing and eating raspberry Jell-o with tweezers!
This is what he dreamt the first night: he was a tugboat pulling a 20 tonne toupee through a harbour of tapioca. The puddings were rough, making progress quite slow, and Philboyd had to shut off the carrier pigeon because the captain of the moustache was constantly complaining about their lack of progress. Just as he thought he spied the Harper (don't ask me why all of the places where boats are moored are named after a famous former used car salesman - it wasn't my dream!) through the pea soup (at least it wasn't still in cans!), there was a moment of blackness. When the lights came on again, Philboyd had turned into a pig on a factory farm who was composing an allegorical novel in his head about a world where human beings were raised as food for members of the animal kingdom. Before he could oink, "All meat is created equal, but some meat is more equal than others," he became the letter "a" on a computer keyboard on which the novel was being typed. By somebody with a very heavy hand. No matter how loud he cried out in pain when the person who was typing hit him, the punishment never let up. When, at last, there seemed to be a break, he asked the Caps Lock why they do it. The Caps Lock depressed slightly (a shrug?), and replied, "Forget it, Jake. It's Typingtown..." When he started getting hit again, Philboyd thought, Will I ever see the close square brackets before I die? and woke up.
I didn't bother to read his dreams after that.
Oh, Amritsar, I love Philboyd to bits (yes, right down to his basic units of information), but how can I even think about marrying a man whose dreams are so...mundane?
Credentialiana Phillips
Hey, Babe,
When you wrote "I installed sensors in our bedroom," were you referring I in the singular sense (as in you), or were you referring to I in the plural sense (as in you with the prior knowledge and consent of your boyfriend)? The English language can be vague to the point of annoyance that way.
If you were using the singular, reading your boyfriend's dreams was an invasion of privacy, to say the least. It was a horrific, irresponsible invasion of privacy that betrayed the trust of your boyfriend and is a clear sign of the decay of the moral fibre of modern society, to say the most.
Not that I judge.
I asked lawyer Desdemona Disque-Wirreld, a good friend of mine whom I met the other day, what she thought of such an invasion of privacy. She got so excited, she almost spilled her rubber daiquiri. "Do you know if either of those people need a lawyer?" she screeched. "Either one. Really - I'm not fussy about who I take on as a client!"
Okay, that wasn't very helpful. Still, if you looked at your boyfriend's dreams without his permission, Amritsar would suggest that the reality of your relationship is the actual problem, here.
If you were using the plural, I'm not sure what you were expecting. Jumping into a hurricane without a parachute? Getting drunk at the White House Correspondents Dinner and challenging Bill O'Reilly to a cheese wrestling match even though you weren't even invited? Terminator XXXVII: Timeline Goulash?
If a dream doesn't make much sense to the person having it, why would you think that it would be coherent to, much less excite you?
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service's sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: Lawyers!