Trompe l’oeil is no fun in dreams

Apologies; I know it’s a bit boring when I write about my dreams, but this one was weird even by my standards.  I dreamed: I am part of a large (possibly Jewish…too much Maus before bed) family of (I think) bakers.  We have a shop on the fourth floor of a building and everyone in the family works there.  For bits of the dream–the normal bits that make sense–I am hanging out in what seems to be a fusion of the basements of my two best friends, cutting paper snowflakes and watching something on a very fuzzy, staticy TV.  But then, I realize it is Christmas Eve and I have to get home to my family to watch “Charlie Brown Christmas”–I really don’t want to miss Linus and his blanket!  Instead of going home, though, I go to the bakery to close up.  I am the only person there, and consider stealing a couple of cakes from the glass case to bring home for the family (as though the family won’t notice I had stolen our own cakes). 

So here’s where the crazy approaches.  I take a chocolate from the case instead, and am about to shove it in my mouth, when I realize I am not alone.  My father-in-law (I wasn’t married, but that’s the way with dreams) who was in charge of day to day bakery operations is there.  I apologize, saying I was just going to eat this one chocolate because it was damaged.  He doesn’t say anything, just looks through me and walks into the back room.  Behind him, sitting cross-legged on the counter, is my narcoleptic cousin Eddie (don’t ask me how I know his back story, but somehow the dream filled me in; he fell in and out of sleep at the drop of a hat, staring vacantly into the air until he woke or something woke him.  He’d always been that way).

Now, the crazy:  I realize that, all those times I thought Cousin Eddie was sleeping, those were the times he was really awake.  And all the times I thought Cousin Eddie was awake, those were the times he was asleep to everyone else.  I realize I am a frickin’ figment in Cousin Eddie’s recurring narcoleptic dream.  I’m not sure I can adequately convey how upsetting this was.  In the next scene, Cousin Eddie is taking me to the window, his hands gently pressing on my back, saying “It’s all for the best now” and I am scared but not resisting.  I sit down on the open windowsill four floors up (it looks higher) and, just before I jump, I say “It was good, you know?”  Then I fall, and mid fall, thank God, I wake.        

I don’t know if I meant the chocolate was good, or the dream life while it lasted, or nothing at all by that last phrase.  The real question is:  Are dreams like this the product of reading wacked-out postmodern fiction (too much Satanic Verses, Lanark and Angels in America before bed) or are they its source?  Which is indispensible, which auxiliary?  Who creates whom: the mind, fiction, or fiction, the mind? 

And here’s the other question: Why can’t I have nice, respectable Victorian realist dreams?