Jolly Porter

Mine

He kept his dreams to himself no matter how often they asked. Speaking about dreams did nothing to elucidate, rather it pushed them away, made them incoherent, destroyed the sensations. He knew that Candy Cat and the Batman People held no place in the tangible world of the waking. He preferred to remember them as they were, with bumblebee eyes and grand, shiny back-smiles. They would spend hours telling him all about their dreams, which he sometimes found dull but mostly licentious. Their dreams belonged to them as his did to him.

When finally forced to relent, he often used the pithiest descriptions available. "Good dreams last night," he would say. They pressed for more. "Oh, I went to the park," he offered, "and there was a puppy and then I woke up." After using the puppy dream a time or two, they began to worry that he was in suspended adolescence, he desperately needed companionship, his loneliness was overwhelming, he was a pedophile looking for romance. He loathed amateur analysts who wanted only fodder for gross interpretations of what he found simply to be great adventures of inanity. Eventually, he told them that he had stopped dreaming years ago. This disturbed them more. He went back to the puppy briefly, then used the old trope of falling from a great height. The analysis subsided.

He found his dreams began to linger when he woke. They stayed in his mind and back pocket through the day. Upon his next sleep, they left him. Occasionally he wished he had held on to them for one more day, remembered them as they were, and found why they lingered. Instead he reminded himself that he put no stock in dreams and kept his dreams from himself.