I have it on good authority (ahem, pretty much every dude I’ve ever met) that a sure way to kill a conversation with a guy is to start it like this:
I had this crazy dream last night ….
I can’t speak to whether there’s any truth to that, largely because I took that advice to heart and pretty much stopped saying it. And so, on the (very) rare occasions where I do dream, and where that dream is memorable enough to stick around in my brain upon waking, I just keep it to myself. Because who cares, really?
Well, sorry to break it to you, pocket friend, but you’re already 100 words in to this “Jeni had a dream” story, so I’m going to assume you do care, and keep rolling with it.
One thing you should know is that I almost never dream about people I know. I honestly can’t remember ever dreaming about my children, and they’re now 13 and 11. It’s not that I dream about famous people, either. It’s more that whatever dream space I hang out in for minutes (yay insomnia) or hours (yay blackout curtains) every night is populated by … just people. Like, they seem nice, mostly, but I don’t have any kind of real connection to any of them.
And so it was really weird — again, for me, really weird — when I dreamed about someone I do sort of know in real life, and that person was my old boss, the current prime minister of Canada.
In that dream, we were sitting side-by-side and kind of … floating through the air? No, we weren’t chasing down whatever the latest airborne object was. More like being on a swing or a ski lift or maybe some kind of ATV/drone combo. And we were, to put it plainly, just shooting the shit. An absolutely unremarkable conversation. Not about work or family or whatever book we’re reading. Just, you know, ordinary stuff. Like you’d talk about with your neighbour when you’re both putting out the recycling at the same time. Blah blah blah. Yada yada yada.
I didn’t think much of it — except, again, how odd it was to dream about a real person I’ve really met — but then this showed up in My Stupid Morning Pages (yes, I’m back on that old horse):
It was nice to have a conversation that didn’t feel like work. As in, didn’t take any effort at all. I wonder where he goes for that stuff, in real life. Like, who does the prime minister actually shoot the shit with, without it being or seeming like work. I hope he’s got someone he can do that with. I hope it isn’t a thing that’s impossible at this point.
(You know, I don’t know why I had a dream that now has me worrying about a politician’s social life, especially when I haven’t had a single dream about this guy in 10+ years of being somewhat in his orbit. I guess this is the kind of random stuff that shows up when you’re an idiot who commits to writing down all the random crap that crosses your brain before the caffeine hits every goddamned morning.)
So that’s the weird dream I had a couple of days ago, and the semi-coherent things I scribbled down about it, and I honestly didn’t give it any more thought until I listened to this podcast which — among other things — talked about this exact issue: the pressures of leadership and if/how political leaders really do find it lonely at the top. It’s a good conversation, but the part I found most interesting was the 10 minutes or so starting at 6:30 and 16:40. Give it a listen.
Jeni Armstrong 