1: DAWN'S HEALTHY SHIT
dreamed by Chris Wayan

I walk down the hall to the bathroom. It seems empty, the door slightly ajar, so I start to walk in. But my friend Dawn squawks--she's sitting on the toilet! I close the door, apologizing. Both she and my housemate Ingrid are sloppy about closing the door, so I don't feel too guilty.

Quite automatically, I sniff and notice her shit is healthy. Doesn't smell offensive at all. Only overstressed carnivorous humans have sick sour shit. Herbivores like Dawn smell fine.

Wow, I can't seem to stop diagnosing people inadvertently! Don't mean to snoop... but I do.

• Interesting! Dawn is my housemate now? Not sure it was the same house though...
• I felt bored today and thought of calling Dawn. The dream says she's, uh, occupied right now. Though nothing's really wrong with her.
• ACTION: wait a couple days before calling Dawn!
• I wonder if my bursting in like that and inadvertently diagnosing her by smell was some kind of metaphor for psychic dreams--how I may unintentionally violate others' privacy. Though some friends like Dawn don't really mind, others panic or raise a big fuss... when I don't mean to. It's passive, chronic, instinctive diagnosing on my part.

A WEEK LATER

I get around to calling Dawn. Mention my dream about her taking a long time sitting on the toilet, and she gasps: "Around the time you dreamed that, here was MY dream...

FINGERED BY GUILT
dreamed by Dawn Z

I was involved in a murder. A guy starts blackmailing me. He mails me parts of the victim's body as proof of my guilt. The first package has a cut-off finger! I nearly flush it down the toilet, but then I remember what happened the last time our sewerline got clogged... [it flooded Dawn's tiny art-workshop with sewage].

So I swept the accusing finger under the rug!

Then I stopped and thought: "Wait, won't that smell?"

EDITOR'S NOTES, 2007

I love it! All those apparently psychic parallels--toilets, privacy, guilt, and especially the shared concern for bad smells (rare in dreams, which usually focus on visual, auditory and kinesthetic senses, not smell or taste).

The two dreams, taken together, form a shamanic diagnosis--Dawn fears she has a foul secret she must hide, while Wayan sniffs out everything but thinks Dawn's worst shit is nothing compared to the predatory shit out there!

But there's also the dreams' sheer comic weirdness--Dawn getting "fingered by guilt" and acting out the cliche of "sweeping the problem under the rug"; Wayan suspecting the dream's imagery symbolizes psychic dreams, when it turns out to be a psychic dream...

This isn't potty humor. This is psychic potty humor! Much more spiritually advanced.

--Chris Wayan--

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