NIGHTMARES

Why Are Other People’s Dreams So Boring?

Don’t you just hate the line: I had a strange dream last night!

Philip Ogley
Said Differently
Published in
3 min readSep 30, 2024

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Another boring dream? (Louis-Léopold Boilly, 1824 — Wiki Comms)

I wonder what Elon Musk dreamt of last night?

Space rockets? X-Tweets? Being President?

It’s possible.

In truth, he probably dreamt like the rest of us. A patchwork of boring childhood memories interwoven with real-life fantasies of sex, power, and death.

Stuff that may be fascinating to yourself but not to anyone else. Nobody wants to know what goes on in your head at night.

Unfortunately, humans are keen to share thoughts, however banal and bland they may be. We specialize in it. We love to talk about ourselves, even if it isn’t interesting.

Whenever anyone says to me:

“I had a strange dream last night!”

I look for the exit.

Dreams are too fragmented to put together in a narrative. They leap and bound from time and place and never resolve themselves. You can’t start to describe them in any real detail.

So why bother?

Novelists, artists, musicians, and filmmakers have tried for millennia to transfer their nighttime visions…

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