Subconscious Ass-beating

I don't blog very often about my dreams. I don't blog very often about my dreams for a few reasons:

1. I don't recall my dreams that often,
2. I understand that most people don't like hearing about dreams of others, and
3. TM2000 has, like, a dozen dreams a week that he can relay at any given time and I don't want to open up that can of worms (because, although #2 doesn't really apply to me, I have a mild compulsion to analyze every dream that someone tells me about).

I'm going to make a blog about a dream here, though, so if you're strongly anti-dream (so racist!) leave. Get out. Go on. I've opened the door for you. Yeah? You don't wanna make it, go now, yeah? Save us all a bit of time, yeah, if you don't think you can cut it.

No? Good.

(Who's seen the BBC Office? Motivational speech? So good...)

A few bits and pieces about me to understand the dream.

First of all, my first job was one as a kid. I grew up on a small town (graduating class: 30) in Oregon and my paternal grandparents owned a "mom and pop" grocery store called, at the time, the Cedardale Store some miles away. For several years, I worked at the store from 9:00 to noon on Saturdays (until the other kids started stealing my shifts!) I would pump gas, sort bottles and cans, ring up Twinkies and other groceries, and listen to country music with my grandpa.

It was a nice way to make $5 and it was fun to spend time with my grandpa and grandma.

Secondly, the other night when I was hosting karaoke I saw a guy I worked with about seven years ago. A nice guy who was a Flash animator... I got along with him well, but he was almost always grumpy. We haven't really stayed in touch, but we've stayed at the "What's up?" level.

Finally, I got a negative comment on yelp.com about my karaoke hosting skillz. Or, rather, my attitude while hosting.

In my dream I was hosting karaoke... a Cedardale Store. I was running the karaoke system behind the counter, and an assistant was over to my right running the cash register.

Everything was going well, until someone requested a song that wasn't readily available in the system. For some reason, the karaoke system needed me to use MySpace, and go to my account to find the song. I knew the song was on another person's account, but it wasn't one of my friends. So I went from my page to a friend's page to the page with the song on it.

The thing is that the system put the pages up on the video screen, and my friend had 8,000 friends. The song went well, but for some reason people were getting upset at me.

My former co-worker was in attendance (sitting near where the magazine rack would have been back in the days I worked at Cedardale) and he was leading the clamor against me. I heard him yell, "Get a job!" and later he approached me and said, "I was on your side until I saw that you had 8,000 MySpace friends. That's ridiculous."

I tried to explain that I didn't have 8,000. I had about 150 (actually 125, in case you care). The words didn't come out, though, and he disgustedly took his leave.

The end of the dream was chaotic. All of the patrons were milling about unhappily. I felt put upon, but my unemployment was an undeniable fact, and I had no defense against the masses' accusations on that front even if it seemed to lack relevance to the job I was doing hosting karaoke.

I think that my subconscious is starting to mill about unhappily, too. Ugh.