DREAM: I'm back in Byron, walking back to my parents' house from our neighbourhood sports complex. I've got a bat over my shoulder so I guess I was playing ball, though we'll get back to the incongruity of that in a minute. I'm walking down the sidewalk on this lovely summer's day when I notice a guy in a white, milkman-esque suit and cap sitting on a specialized bike, selling sub sandwiches to passers-by.
I take a closer look at the sub guy and, oddly, it's my friend Jeff. In real life, Jeff works for the city of London, but here he is, dressed like the Glad trash bag man and handing out subs to smiling customers. I ask Jeff what's up with the job, and he says (and this is a direct quote from the dream), ""Well, Lisa and I have been scraping toppings off of our subs for years and we finally had enough saved up to get our own business off the ground!" Lisa, for the record, is Jeff's wife. Whatever response I might've made is lost to the haze of my subconscious, or else I just woke up.
ANALYSIS: Let's first examine the financial opportunity of a mobile sandwich bike. We all know that food trucks are a goldmine* but trucks cost a fortune for maintenance, gas, etc. You can eliminate all of these costs by simply transporting the food on a specialty bike that has some kind of a cooler attached to it, maybe as a sidecar or something. You'd have to pre-make the sandwiches, of course, and obviously you'd need just an assload of them in the cooler so you wouldn't have to be constantly making trips back to the homebase to reload, and….hmm, ok, there are some holes in this plan. It's always been a dream of mine to, uh, have a dream about some wild invention that makes me a fortune. This might not be the one.
* How else can Dave and Alex afford that swanky new apartment, given that Alex's clothing store never has any customers? What, are we supposed to believe that a TV sitcom wouldn't ensure that their characters' homes are realistic matches for their financial situations? Pretty far-fetched!
In fact, this entire dream might be about failed wish-fulfillment. For example, my ballplaying days are long over, as I haven't hit the field since a softball game in 2008 that resulted in a pulled hamstring and an actual strikeout. That's right, a strikeout in SOFTBALL. With my own teammate lobbing underhand pitches to me. Jesus wept. It was that game that told me it was time to hang up the glove for good, thus ending a truly legendary career on the diamond. So there's that, plus my failed dream of learning how to ride a bicycle.
"Uh, Mark, you could easily just sign up for rec league softball. And geez, there's really no reason at all you couldn't still learn how to ride a bike."
Shut up, Voice of Reason! Anyway, the biggest failed dream here is obviously Jeff and Lisa's business model. Used toppings stolen from other sub sandwiches?!?! The mind boggles at the financial implication of buying an actual sandwich from a restaurant, scooping off the toppings and then Jeff making the dollar-bill motion with his fingers like Lisa says, "It's only a matter of time." Like, where does all the bread come from? And you've been keeping used roast beef in your freezer for all those years? Wake up! It occurs me that I actually don't know what Lisa does for a living despite knowing she and Jeff for several years --- if it's owning a restaurant, I may flip out.
So really it's failed dreams all around, with the biggest failed dream of all being that in this reality, Jeff and Lisa's bankruptcy-bound business will leave me with one less friend to mooch off of in the future. What happened to my dream of relying on my friends to keep me afloat? Am I supposed to rely on the kindness of strangers? That didn't work out well at all for Blanche Dubois.
Also, let's not ignore the fact that in having a dream about failed dreams, my subconscious is also telling me that I really suck at these dream analyses. That's just nonsense. If my subconscious really knew its business, it would be my real conscious, right? Who's the failure now, subconscious? You're not even top dog in my mind. Have fun being the Garfunkel to my conscious mind's Simon.
I take a closer look at the sub guy and, oddly, it's my friend Jeff. In real life, Jeff works for the city of London, but here he is, dressed like the Glad trash bag man and handing out subs to smiling customers. I ask Jeff what's up with the job, and he says (and this is a direct quote from the dream), ""Well, Lisa and I have been scraping toppings off of our subs for years and we finally had enough saved up to get our own business off the ground!" Lisa, for the record, is Jeff's wife. Whatever response I might've made is lost to the haze of my subconscious, or else I just woke up.
ANALYSIS: Let's first examine the financial opportunity of a mobile sandwich bike. We all know that food trucks are a goldmine* but trucks cost a fortune for maintenance, gas, etc. You can eliminate all of these costs by simply transporting the food on a specialty bike that has some kind of a cooler attached to it, maybe as a sidecar or something. You'd have to pre-make the sandwiches, of course, and obviously you'd need just an assload of them in the cooler so you wouldn't have to be constantly making trips back to the homebase to reload, and….hmm, ok, there are some holes in this plan. It's always been a dream of mine to, uh, have a dream about some wild invention that makes me a fortune. This might not be the one.
* How else can Dave and Alex afford that swanky new apartment, given that Alex's clothing store never has any customers? What, are we supposed to believe that a TV sitcom wouldn't ensure that their characters' homes are realistic matches for their financial situations? Pretty far-fetched!
In fact, this entire dream might be about failed wish-fulfillment. For example, my ballplaying days are long over, as I haven't hit the field since a softball game in 2008 that resulted in a pulled hamstring and an actual strikeout. That's right, a strikeout in SOFTBALL. With my own teammate lobbing underhand pitches to me. Jesus wept. It was that game that told me it was time to hang up the glove for good, thus ending a truly legendary career on the diamond. So there's that, plus my failed dream of learning how to ride a bicycle.
"Uh, Mark, you could easily just sign up for rec league softball. And geez, there's really no reason at all you couldn't still learn how to ride a bike."
Shut up, Voice of Reason! Anyway, the biggest failed dream here is obviously Jeff and Lisa's business model. Used toppings stolen from other sub sandwiches?!?! The mind boggles at the financial implication of buying an actual sandwich from a restaurant, scooping off the toppings and then Jeff making the dollar-bill motion with his fingers like Lisa says, "It's only a matter of time." Like, where does all the bread come from? And you've been keeping used roast beef in your freezer for all those years? Wake up! It occurs me that I actually don't know what Lisa does for a living despite knowing she and Jeff for several years --- if it's owning a restaurant, I may flip out.
So really it's failed dreams all around, with the biggest failed dream of all being that in this reality, Jeff and Lisa's bankruptcy-bound business will leave me with one less friend to mooch off of in the future. What happened to my dream of relying on my friends to keep me afloat? Am I supposed to rely on the kindness of strangers? That didn't work out well at all for Blanche Dubois.
Also, let's not ignore the fact that in having a dream about failed dreams, my subconscious is also telling me that I really suck at these dream analyses. That's just nonsense. If my subconscious really knew its business, it would be my real conscious, right? Who's the failure now, subconscious? You're not even top dog in my mind. Have fun being the Garfunkel to my conscious mind's Simon.
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