dreams.

I never feel more important than when someone informs me that they dreamt about me. It means that I, like old baseball statistics and the lyrics from seventh grade pop songs, have infiltrated the subconscious. The dreamer will explain how, curiously, it was the first day of third grade and I was their bus driver. Or how George Clooney morphed into me after stealing their favorite pair of sneakers. Or how I saved them from an untimely pancake-related demise.

But in the worst and most common of all cases, the dreamer will blabber on and on about every minute detail of the dream, describing the fifteen fluidly evolving scenes before and after my presence. They’ll rehearse the color of the walls of the prison that contained them and how it suddenly burst into flames and became a mall and how they were accused of shoplifting and though they were innocent, a number of Haggar slacks and slap bracelets were inexplicably found in their purse, and how the floor wasn’t really a floor but it was a floor and how before they knew it, they were on the beach and running away from a murderer but they could only move at turtle speed and how long after graduation, the school’s administration tried to convince them that they had failed to take one required course and now they had to go back to college and how it was Easter and…

It’s too much for me to handle. After about fifteen seconds, my patience is up. My mental absurdity filter is uncomfortably full. Not one more iota of useless information is welcome. But somehow, I’m stuck there, listening, completely at the mercy of the dreamer. If they wanted to go on and on for a full thirty-six or seventy-two hours I’d have no way out. You can’t just interrupt someone in the middle of their dream retelling. They’ll think you’re saying, “Your innermost workings are of absolutely no use to me. Please desist immediately,” when in reality you may be saying, “I love you, but if I have to absorb one more inconsequential detail about shape-shifting toaster ovens or naked speeches before the senior class, I will explode.”

Really, the best strategy is just to wait it out. Try to think of something else—something relatively more pleasant, like road rash or acne scars. And if you starve to death waiting for an opportune pause during which to shift conversational topics, so be it. You’ve played your part.

What the world needs is a code of conduct for the retelling of dreams. I'd suggest that we go ahead and make legislation of it. That would save a lot of poor souls from having to choose between hurting the feelings of an over-zealous dreamer/loved one or suffering inane-information-induced explosion. Here are the simple tenants I propose:

1. Avoid telling any individual about your dreams unless it involves that individual. Even then, relay only the parts of the dream that directly include said individual.
2. If you must tell an individual about one of your dreams, do so in fifteen seconds or less. Almost every detail you think is vital is not. Get to the meat and potatoes.
3. If it doesn’t make sense to you, it won’t make sense to a far-less interested third party. Keep it to yourself.
4. Avoid discussing uninteresting stock dreams experienced by most everyone: flying dreams, naked at school dreams, impossibly slow escape from a murderer, etc.
5. All dream retelling rules reign supreme except in the rare case that your dream is some sort of communication from God. In that case it’s not a dream, but a vision. Tell no one at all, except maybe your spouse.

I honestly believe that if abided by, these five tenants will revolutionize the art of meandering, pointless conversation the way the Constitution revolutionized modern-day nation building. In both cases, noncompliance should be handled swiftly and sharply. Think long, ironic prison sentences where the offender is forced to nod along to the nonsensical dreams of a schizophrenic. And if somehow, the offender ends up usurping control of the dream conversation from the schizophrenic, and resumes the practice of relaying the frivolously wild dream details, well, then there’s always solitary confinement.