Learn Your Phoom

In most of my dreams these days I am doing my job, sitting at a computer, typing. Then I wake up at 2:59 a.m. and go to work to bring you this news page: sitting at a computer, typing. This may explain why I wake up tired so often.

Are there hidden messages in dreams?

Not mine. The message in my dreams seems to be overt: This is your life. Get used to it. You’ll get over it, sooner than later.

But I had a new dream this week. As usual, I was at the computer, typing, then I got an email: LEARN YOUR PHOOM, with a link to click on.

In the dream I was pissed. I thought: “Who are these guys, trying to tell me about my own Phoom?”

So I deleted it.

But here’s the funny part.

I actually know very little about my Phoom.

So there was no reason for me to get mad!

Don’t worry: I’m not going to tell you any more of my dreams.

I have no opinion about dreams, though I would like to point out that Phoom spelled sideways is Oomph.

I have a friend who confided in me that he can’t stand it when his wife tells him her dreams, and that the longer the dream recitation, and the more curious, the more he can’t stand it.

But he listens, because he’s a nice guy, and, after all, she’s his wife. Last I heard.

He thinks his own dreams don’t mean a thing and wonders why he keeps having them, and he sure as dam shooting don’t want to hear about other people’s dreams. Even his wife’s. Which I can understand.

Would you want to hear about your wife’s dreams? I rest my case.

Among the many reasons to resent Sigmund Freud is that he boosted dreams from the grave, where they belong, into Modern Consciousness — An Important Thing!

Give me a break, Siggy. You were probably coming down from a cocaine binge when you had that Important Insight. I’ve read your letters to your (not yet) wife: Bragging about how cocaine would help you satisfy her … her … but I digress.

(By the way, Sig, where did you get your cocaine? And could you … but I digress.)

Umm … where were we? Oh, yes! The Phoom.

The ancient Romans and Greeks, and surely other cultures for whom I cannot speak, believed that dreams carry messages from the gods.

Maybe they do.

We’ll never know until we can get the gods to answer our phone calls, or go online. Which reminds me of a newspaper story.

Some paper whose name I forgot sent a reporter to cover Pennsylvania’s Johnstown Flood in 1889. He couldn’t get there in time on the railroads, so his paper had to run the Associated Press story on Day 1.

On Day 2, the reporter started sending his story by telegraph, with the lede sentence: “God looked down today on a scene of awful destruction in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.”

His editor interrupted to cable back: “Forget the flood. Interview God.”

The ancient Romans believed dreams were so powerful that the Emperor Nero had people executed for what they dreamed.

Another good reason not to tell people your dreams.

(Courthouse News columnist Robert Kahn has not repressed any memories. He just can’t remember them.)

Categories / Op-Ed