Tiny personal hell of the week #4: recurring dreams
dream interpreters, please help
Welcome to Welcome to Hell!!!. This is a newsletter of sometimes deep (but mostly dumb) thoughts on life & stuff from Alison Zeidman, an Emmy-losing comedy writer.
If you enjoy that sort of thing, please consider a free subscription to support my dumb bullshit and receive these in your inbox.
It’s been a while, but it finally happened again the other night: I had another one of my recurring dreams about a boy I barely knew over 15 years ago. Why does this keep happening??
No offense to this person, but (outside of having regularly recurring and extremely intense dreams about him) he means nothing to me. You could say we grew up together, but “together” would be doing a lot of work there. I think maybe we were in the same kindergarten or first-grade class, and then maybe one or two math classes in high school? We definitely never hung out. I don’t think we ever even really spoke to each other much at all.
In the dreams, I’m always back in high school and he and I are always in some sort of complicated toxic post-romantic relationship awkwardness. Sometimes I wind up going to his house to look for him, and he’s not there and he’s never told his family about me but they are very interested in having me stay for dinner so they can tell me all about their close personal friend Mr. Jesus H. Christ. (I know nothing about his actual family or how likely they are to proselytize their religion to random teen girls, but given the ratio of Jews to Christians where I grew up (my 1 family : literally everyone else) I wouldn’t be surprised if this is like 99% accurate to what would actually happen if this were a real-life scenario.)
I’ve been having these dreams fairly regularly since at least my late 20s, but I have no idea what my subconscious is trying to tell me. I’m definitely not pining over this guy. I’ll admit I was very briefly in love with him at one point, but that would’ve been when I was like, 7 — so I don’t think it has any real bearing.
And here’s the strangest part: until a few years ago, I couldn’t even remember this guy’s name. I haven’t really stayed in close touch with anyone from my hometown except for my friend Elliot, but she didn’t know who I was talking about either, until eventually with helpful descriptions from me like “I’m pretty sure he was tall,” she remembered him:
“Ohhh, yeah. The guy who peed on his hands.”
What?
Back in high school the kid was a baseball star, and apparently there was a rumor that he was so serious about his high school baseball “career” that he peed on his own hands to make them…more callused, or something? Which is helpful for…doing baseball things, apparently? I have no idea if any of this is true.
But unfortunately, learning about this guy’s piss hands did nothing to help me figure out his name. I’m not proud to say that over the years I scrolled through many a former classmate’s Facebook friend page, trying and failing to end the tiny personal hell of “what the heck was that guy’s name??”
Then one day, totally unexpectedly, I finally came across his profile. And this would be a much better story if I could tell you I sent him a message and told him about the dreams and it turned out he knew what they meant or he had them too or even if he just told me to kindly fuck the fuck off, but that’s not what happened. I just know his name now, and that he likes to pose for photos with large fish.
I of course immediately told Elliot, and she was similarly relieved to finally have an answer to this years-long mystery. But we’ve never actually used his name since then, because it’s kind of hard to spell (it’s Swedish, maybe?). So whenever I report back to Elliot with new dreams we still just refer to him as “piss hands guy.” For example:
Anyway — I still have no idea what my subconscious is trying to tell me with these dreams. If you think you know, please tell me! And as always, please tell me all about your own tiny personal hell(s) of the week.
In other news: If you’re in Philadelphia, save the date for the first workshop of my first-ever solo show, READY TO DIE?, which I’ll be running at Case Comedy on May 14th. It’s a comedy show about living + practical guide to end-of-life planning.
I’ve been slowly iterating on this general idea since October, so I decided to just give myself a tight deadline to finally finish it and test it out on a small scale so I can see what’s working vs. what’s trash and continue developing. Please keep your expectations low come out and support!