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A Letter to My Unconscious Mind

Simon here. Sera's in Esalen, getting her aura massaged or whatever they do up there, so I'm posting this bizarre entry behind her back. No doubt many of our readers will be puzzled by the following; I freely admit that I share your confusion. But to those of you who ask "What does this have to do with being hot and/or Jewish?" I can only wearily reply that ... um ... did I mention that Sera's out of town?

To Whom It May Concern,

I write to express my supreme disgust and overwhelming disappointment at the quality of last night's dream.

I refer, of course, to the meandering tale of a man — evidently supposed to me, but someone I can only characterize as a repulsive boor lacking the faintest shred of the social graces — who urinates in the middle of a car-audio store and then adds insult to injury by telling a dismayed salesman, "You guys wouldn't have this problem if you had a bathroom."

Were this a mere "blackout" sketch it would be shoddy enough. But your decision to make such instances of public self-relief the basis of an epic dream, a sleep-narrative of Tolstoyan length, Rabelaisian vulgarity and Warholian tediousness, is unfathomable.

For shame, sirs and/or madams. For shame.

Why, I must ask, does the character known only as "me" have to pee constantly throughout this interminable story, informing all who will listen that "I have the bladder of a camel"? Why must he unburden himself on a series of in-dash stereo consoles before the stricken eyes of floor managers and audiophiles alike?

Perhaps some toxic mixture of boredom, malice and homosexual panic prompted this golden shower of the sandman — I can scarcely be expected to divine what goes on in the drunken halls of the id. But I hasten to remind you that while some people might enjoy a feature-length snooze-story about pissing endlessly and repeatedly on the linoleum floor of a downmarket retail establishment, "some people" don't dream my dreams. I do. And this one both offended my sensibilities and tasked my patience.

Have you given no thought to what it is like to wake suddenly from such a dream and realize, to one's horror, that one must pee? And then to stand drowsily and barefootedly on the frigid bathroom floor in the dawning light and relive the whole sodden fantasia while emptying oneself, ever so boringly, into the porcelain abyss?

This will not be tolerated. In point of fact, the quality of my dreams has been distressingly poor of late, giving rise to the nagging suspicion that you imps who populate the far shores of my psyche are, well, phoning it in.

I refer in particular to the obsessive recycling of the shopworn "I have a Spanish final but I forgot to study all semester" dream, with its predictably mortifying third-act nudity; last week's protracted and deeply annoying "driving around my neighborhood but I'm lost" dream (in which your creative bankruptcy revealed itself in the cheap shock tactics of me crashing into another car driven by ... me); and your arguable nadir, a scene-for-scene recapitulation of the movie Zardoz with Carrot Top in the Sean Connery role.

I would caution you to put more effort into the scenarios that flicker on my inner eyelids, or you will force me to send you packing. Opening up a new can of imps, I assure you, will be no big thing.

Sincerely,
Me

Sleep Is the New Sex

Of all the many kinds of abuse and addiction now available — because America is the greatest country in the world — Jews are most predisposed to prescription pill abuse. This is in part because we tend to view physicians as deities and will greedily swallow any bolus that comes in a little amber RX bottle.

We're also likely to gulp down sleeping pills, because we worry a lot and the wee hours tend to be when the little anxiety factory we call the brain starts mass-producing visions of loved ones dying in flaming wrecks or hangnails turning into metastatic cancer.

Not that we Yids are alone. According to the Prescription Access Litigation Project (PAL), the folks behind the Bitter Pill Awards, the top five prescription sleeping pills raked in $2.7 BILLION in 2005. "Sleep is the new sex," reads a quote on their site from Arthur Spielman, director of the Center for Sleep Disorders Medicine and Research.

Of course, sleep was designated the new sex waaaay back in 2006. By now, slumber has probably been knocked off its steamy perch by, oh, I dunno, knitting or vomiting or watching preteen girls eating spaghetti with chopsticks on YouTube. Nothing's the new sex for long.

The point is, Americans are popping Ambien and Lunesta and other yummy bedtime remedies like crazed toddlers tasting the Skittles rainbow. Which would be just fine if the drug didn't apparently cause them to rise from their pillows and somnambulate into their cars, embarking on joyless joyrides to they know not where. Frequently they go the wrong way on one-way streets and crash into lightposts; when the cops finally pull them over they seem blissfully unaware of what's going on and have no recollection of the incident afterward.

Yep, "sleep driving" is now a frequent occurrence. UNCONSCIOUS PEOPLE are padding out to their Ford Foci and snoozing their way onto the nation's roadways. The problem has become acute enough to cause the FDA — which, as a Bush agency, is normally inclined to allow pharmaceutical companies to boil children alive if they so desire — to step in.

Now this class of drugs will require special labels, lengthy supplementary instructions and possibly concerned facial expressions from Walgreen's dispensary employees. All of which will satisfy the 10-second news cycle but begs the question: What difference do these warnings make if, after reading them cover to cover, you pop an Ambien, slip under the ol' duvet and an hour later are barreling through the Holland Tunnel, stomping the accelerator with your footie pajamas?

To be fair, many of the worst instances resulted from folks mixing the current generation of sleep-inducers with booze, antidepressants and other mood-altering wild cards. But plenty of ordinary, directions-following patients also ended up driving, cooking, terrorizing planeloads of passengers and doing other wacky things while in the throes of a dreamless, pharmacological oblivion.

Upon reading about this, we Jews at first experienced the same mix of incredulity and opportunity that no doubt caused frissons in the ranks of the nation's comedy writers. But a clammy, dystopian light bulb of rationality quickly took its place.

The ephiphany was something along the lines of: Well, this explains everything.

It explains the narcotic political culture in which we plod on down an infinite corridor of corruption, aware we should be outraged but somehow unable to scream.

It explains the snooze-button salon of celebrity worship, wherein the world's dumbest pretty people sit on our chests like well-scrubbed succubi, commandeering our psyches with the rapacity of prospectors in the Gold Rush.

It explains the nightmarish papering over of every last vestige of space with advertising, the sponsorship of all things, the branding of every square foot until there is nothing that doesn't serve the message of some corporate giant.

It explains the syringes in the ocean, the chromium-6 in the water, the melting of the ice caps on which the polar bears are scrambling to escape the onrushing waves, the general cheerful flushing-down-the-loo of the world that sustains us, all permitted with the drowsy insouciance of a Lunesta road trip.

Welcome, in other words, to Sleep Culture. We've all just been dozing — yet still active enough to participate in our own impoverishment. Just ambulatory enough to drive to the polling place to vote for the vague smiling face that swore to protect us.

We are the Manchurian Citizen.

And you know who'd really appreciate it if we woke the fuck up? The polar bears.

The problem, of course, is that coming to terms with this waking horror really, really makes you want to down a couple of sedatives with a tankard of vodka.

So if you see us zooming over the 405 tonight, don't bother waving — it's our naptime.