Dream: Inappropriate Bathroom Behavior
I was dining out with coworkers, in a group of four. These colleagues were nobody specific: just extras fabricated from spare parts in the subconscious. The topic drifted to the subject of building rapport, and how light physical touches can build a connection with someone, but you might be careful about that in the work place. I reached across the table to brush my colleague’s wrist, and he leaned back, grinning. My hand came to a stop before it would have come over his dinner plate. I smiled back, “and this is about the line where I would have invaded your personal space,” and withdrew.
I headed to the bathroom, where there was a short line waiting outside the men’s room. One or two guys turned back, not wanting to stand in line, and thus making it shorter. I was confident that the line would move quickly, and in a moment I was attending to my business at a urinal. I stepped back and to the right as the father next to me shook off his younger son, who he was holding by the shoulders. I glanced to my right to make sure I might not make someone uncomfortable by my distance-from-the-urinal, only to see a middle-aged, balding guy in a suit let loose a poorly-controlled stream of urine that headed mostly straight up. So, I side-stepped back towards the father and son team, who had concluded their shaking. The balding guy looked up at me and apologized sheepishly. I think at this point my subconscious realized it was remarkably deep into taboo territory, and embraced the theme. I was aware that two young boys were beyond the bald man, huge smiles on their faces as they pounded their fists to win a good-natured “jerk off contest” and were quickly spurting their own clotted creams into a shared urinal, as if my dream were being illustrated by a Robert Crumb who had been watching satirical Japanese pornography.
On my way out of the restroom, I encountered a waiter, who attempted, unsuccessfully, to press a wet-but-clean whiskey glass into my hand, as the proprietor wanted to celebrate the men’s room situation with a round of Whiskey on the house. I declined, because that’s not quite my scene, and on the way back to my table, I thought of the Yelp review I could write about this place: but where was I? Apparently, a two-restaurant chain with a location in Indiana and one in Tennessee. Based on the whiskey, I figured my dream was taking place in the Tennessee location.
Thinking of the words I might use to compose my review, I noted that I needed to check up on the exact meaning of “Bacchanalia” to see if that might be an apt description. I had this thought as I opened my eyes to realize that far from dining out with anonymous “coworkers” I was in fact laying in my bed at 3am. I wondered if instead the dream might still be fun to write up online, tried to remember the details and commit them to memory, then figured this was an excellent cue to climb out from beneath the covers for a mid-night visit to my own bathroom, which proved to be a reassuringly private experience. Whilst attending to my business, I considered whether the dream was homo-erotic. I concluded that actually, the dream was not erotic, but arguably sexist, but since the bulk of the dream took place in a men’s room, that the omission of female characters was not problematic.
A day or two later I had a revelation whilst driving in my car that the dream was in fact, very much an homage to Larry Craig. At that moment, far from being slightly disturbed by the bizarrely inappropriate non-sequiturs, I smiled a bit with just a twitch of pride at the sophisticated and insane dream my subconscious had treated me to.
If you feel that this account is lewdly inappropriate, I plead guilty.
. . . just don’t tell anyone, okay?
