No sense trying to figure out my dreams

So if you were one of the guys I was playing basketball with in my dream the other night, my apologies. Yeah, I do sweat a lot. It's a glandular thing. Or just awful hygiene. Can't be sure.

Anyway, so me and some buddies were in a rigorous game of hoops in this dream, we were dashing up and down the floor, floating alley-oop passes to each other, and in one instance, I came crashing down the lane for an uncontested monster slam dunk. Aw, you shoulda' seen it. Just like I used to do on my bedroom Nerf hoop when I was 12. Except for the Farrah Fawcett posters on the wall. Had to take 'em down when I got married. Man, wish I had that choice to make again.

Now playing basketball with old friends -- several of whom I haven't seen in decades, which I'm sure can be explained by some subconscious mumbo-jumbo -- sounds like a fairly normal way for the mind to pass some time during slumber. Usually I dream that I'm running from wild beasts or walking naked through a crowded mall (look, I can't be responsible if you insist on picturing it), so I was kinda happy to be engaged in a normal non-nightmare for a change.

Except for one detail. We were using cheese for a ball.

Yep, that's right, cheese, Colby, or cheddar maybe, judging by the orange coloring, which incidentally, is the usual hue of a basketball. We didn't think much of it, me and my pals, we were dribbling the cheese and shooting the cheese and occasionally cutting the cheese. Well, I was anyway. Had bean soup for supper. Lotsa' fiber in that stuff.

Nothing else was abnormal about that dream if not for the cheese, which set me to wondering what possibly could have been churning in my brain at 3 a.m. to conjure up a competitive game of cheddarball. Was I hungry? Perhaps. Craving calcium? Could be. Or maybe, I was just feeling sorry for the dairy farmers who are struggling with low milk prices, and I figured if we'd all just buy a few more sporting goods made outta' mozzarella, we could help them out. You know, I could see that -- Gorgonzola golf balls, Feta footballs, pepper jack ping pong balls -- most cheeses are pliable and could be formed into any object we need. Those Limburger laces, though, I wouldn't put them in my shoes. Already got enough kids goin', 'Ooohh, mommy, my eyes burn' when I walk past.

Despite the best efforts of neurologists, psychotherapists, brain science researchers and Deep State conspiracy theorists (yes, they have working brains, too), no one really knows what dreams mean. Sure, some of 'em are kinda easy to figure out, like those ones in which we think we can fly. That can represent a feeling that we're not in control of our lives, for example, or may suggest that we feel we have achieved great heights in life. Me, I'm usually falling out of a crippled airplane in those. I try to look at the bright side, but that ain't always easy when you realize you left your parachute in your trunk and you're tumbling straight toward a granite landing pad.

For whatever reason, I dream almost exclusively of things in my fairly distant past. While friends tell me about the night notions they've had that include current happenings and sometimes even me (yeah, I know, I'm enough to deal with in the daylight), I wonder why my dreams are always centered on something from decades ago. I dream often of pets I once had or of being in the yard of my childhood house, but never about something that happened the previous day. So maybe it is true that consuming diet soda by the tankerload will dissolve your frontal lobe from the inside out. Huh. Wonder if it's reversible.

The most fascinating part I find with dreams are those tiny peculiar things, you know, like playing basketball with cheese. I could feel the texture of the foodstuff as I was handling the ball in that dream, and remember once when I passed off to a friend (and who says I'm a ballhog?) I could see flakes peeling off the edges. That told me it was young Colby Longhorn -- my favorite -- because it has that quality on the cutting board and between a Whole Wheat Ritz and a slice of garlic venison summer sausage. Yum, yum. I should get out on the court more often.

But where the heck did that come from? Why basketball, which I haven't played since me and some neighborhood thugs played a backyard game like 25 years ago (I could've charged a couple of those guys with assault and battery). And why cheese? I mean, I eat it, not a lot, and why wouldn't the ball have been made from cookie dough or Spam (which, along with Capn' Crunch, are the main components of my nutrition plan)? And why was I playing with this particular group of guys, and one in particular whom I've seen like only twice since high school? Heck, all those details make less sense than Mitch McConnell's mumbling meanderings about why it was absolutely wrong to appoint a Supreme Court justice during the presidential election of 2016 but it's perfectly fine now. I mean, yikes, does that guy wake up every morning and ask himself 'How can I be a bigger hypocrite than yesterday?'' But anyway, back to cheese basketball, which ranks just below butter baseball on the recreational sports popularity charts. After waking up from that dream, I laid there in bed trying to decipher what it meant, but had no clue. It ranked right up there with the nightmares I used to have about a giant rat trying to fit through a barn door to get me, but Nixon was president then, so you can kinda' see where the general fear originated. This latest one, though, has got me fairly flummoxed. No sense working too hard to figure it out, I guess, because that would mean wading deep into the caverns of my mind to find the answer, and I'm guessing they're flooded with diet soda.

I wonder if that's reversible.

THE

BORN

LESAR