Deep Duck

I am constantly plagued by weird dreams. There are a few in particular that continue to linger and bother me. I know everybody has weird dreams from time to time. Normally you forget your dreams as soon as you wake. Or at most they lose their power a few minutes after you wake. What’s so unusual is that these dreams, while they make absolutely no sense whatsoever, continue to bother me for days, even weeks after I’ve had them. Take my duck dream for instance:

There’s a short man in a white minivan who has a white duck with a bright yellow bill. He’s attached a small camera to the duck’s head. Actually it’s just a little flash-bulb that floats over the head of the duck, but in the logic that only exists in dreams; I understand this bulb to be an actual camera that the man has fastened to the duck’s head. I sense the duck is somewhat unhappy about this arrangement, and I wonder, “Why the hell did this guy put a camera on a duck’s head?” Well, the man releases the duck, which wildly flaps and flys about, and at random intervals the bulb flashes as the camera takes a picture of whatever the duck’s head just happens to be pointed at. After a few minutes of this the man recaptures the duck (which can never seem to get away from the man) goes into his minivan and develops the pictures.

This is where it gets weird. When he comes out he’s looking at the pictures and oohing and ahhing over the deep mystical wisdom of the wondrous duck who apparently has taken some profoundly meaningful photographs. When I look at the pictures, I see (as you might expect) a bunch of out-of focus, poorly cropped, images of mundane things that were randomly photographed from a duck’s-eye-view. But when I explain this to the man he gets upset and insists the duck is a great and wise duck and the photos are amazing works of art. And suddenly a crowd of people are there oohing and ahhing over the photos – and paying homage to the great and wise duck.

I tell them all they are nuts and that the man should leave the duck alone, but no one will listen, so I leave. Except that whenever the man releases the duck – the duck follows me – so I never get away from the madness. I think the duck followed me because it knew I was the only one who would be willing rid him of the stupid camera. But I never do, and the man always recaptures the reluctant duck and develops more photos and gathers a greater crowd of duck-fans. There was something else going on when the duck happened to fly into a building, but this is where I woke up so it’s all unclear.

As strange as this dream is, what’s stranger is that I am STILL PISSED-OFF about what the man was doing to the duck, and the fact everyone insisted the photographs were profoundly meaningful. It’s been almost two weeks since I had the dream, and I’m still thinking about it. The dream seemed so important when I woke, I just lay there forever trying to get back into the dream - hoping to find some resolution or understanding. What is it that makes such a surreal experience so compelling to me?

This is worse than when I had that dream where I had sent myself a message from the future telling me it was vitally important I build a time machine:

What sucked was there were no instructions in the message as to how to actually build the time machine, and I was deeply disturbed as to why I might have done this to myself. In the dream, I had my father and a team of highly trained accountants working on the problem, but we were getting nowhere. (I have no idea why they were accountants but such are my dreams.) At one point, I was yelling at the accountants, overcome with a sense of urgency – “Damn it men! I needed this thing built YESTERDAY!” and then one of the accountants, appropriately clad in think rimmed ‘birth-control’ glasses, a white shirt complete with pocket-protector, black tie, and high-water pants (actually he looked a lot like Michael Douglas from Falling Down) - Anyways he tells me, “Actually sir, once we complete the project, we will have it yesterday – it’s a Time Machine after all!”
“Oh, yeah” I realized, suddenly calm, and then I woke up.

But for some reason, even after I woke I remained disturbed as to why I would send such a message without instructions. Ridiculous I know. Still, somewhere deep down I’m convinced that these dreams are somehow important and I’m a fool for not understanding.