Tell me your dream in one sentence. Or less.
I recently heard on an episode of This American Life someone's mother describe her rules for conversation topics and the particular ones she bans. This woman expects all polite conversationalists to steer clear of menstruation stories, detailed lists of directions and streets taken, money, diets, and a few others. One listed taboo topic that I've restricted since high school (when I was discovering a whole host of types of conversation that bored me--ones about jobs, getting drunk, college applications, what my friend and I termed "adult humor"--e.g. "Working hard or hardly working?") was dreams.
I hated then and still hate when people tell me their dreams. My problem isn't with the content--dreams are the coolest, completely unpredictable and fantastical--it's the storytelling technique. Or rather, the lack of technique. No structure, no unifying theme. I love the ideas buried in dreams, but there's always so much nonsense surrounding it that makes it hard to listen to dream-telling. Since there can sometimes be cool stuff in dreams, I came up with a compromise. Tell me your dream in one sentence. Boil it down to one sentence and, if it intrigues me, I'll ask for more.
And even better, since they take take even less time to enter my brain, pictures of dreams work too.
Example: This one is called "The plans of aliens, who invade Earth and shoot beams of light from their UFOs that make people grow roots into the ground and eventually turn into trees, are thwarted only by jumping on a trampoline, ceaselessly, to stop the roots from touching and therefore taking ahold in the ground."
