More Dream Analysis...

So, I had another of those weird and vivid dreams the other night.  As ever, I can only partially remember it, but the bit I recall most clearly involved me watching a TV report profiling some high profile Tory MP.  Now, when the archive footage of him rolled, I was - in the dream - shocked to see that he had this weird head, with no neck, its base almost as wide as his shoulders.  A bit like a Sontaran from Dr Who, (in fact, I remember thinking, in the dream, that this was the case).  But even more disturbingly, each side of his bloated head, apparently growing from his shoulders were a pair of fleshy protuberances which seemed to have a life of their own.  The best I can describe them is as being a bit like the head and neck of a seahorse, but larger, less well defined  and made of human flesh.  Each had only one eye, on the side furthest from his head and what appeared to be a mouth.  As the camera went in for a close up, I got a good look at the right one, as its eye turned to look into the camera and the mouth weakly tried to open.  But the weirdest thing about it all was that nobody involved in the TV show seemed to find anything strange about the MP's appearance - even when we had the close up of one of those shoulder things, nobody said a word about it!  Jesus Christ, I thought (in the dream), what's the matter with you people?  Can't you see that he's some kind of alien, or mutant, or at the very least grossly deformed?  Isn't it obvious that he isn't normal?  Somebody say something!  But they didn't.

I've thought a lot about this dream fragment since - it was so striking and surreal that it was impossible not to.  Inevitably, my thoughts turned to the question of whether it had any kind of deeper meaning.  The most obvious explanation was that my subconscious created the bizarre vignette as an analogy for what increasingly seems to be going on in real life news media.   Over and over again, politicians and other public figures seem to be allowed to do and say things which would have been unthinkable a few years ago, yet their words and actions are now treated as if they are somehow normal.  Nobody seems to want to call them out or draw attention to their outrageous positions and policies.  Moreover, so many contemporary political figures are so obviously insincere grifters, motivated entirely by personal ambition and greed, yet nobody in the media seems capable of seeing this, yet alone commenting upon it.  To be fair, the electorate themselves seem incapable of exercising any kind of critical judgement with regard to these individuals, seemingly not noticing their avarice and evil until they've elected them, then acting shocked when they turn out to be dangerous bastards.  So maybe someone looking like a Sontaran with two extra weird 'heads' growing on their shoulders could get elected as an MP and reach a position of prominence without anyone commenting on the fact.  Having said all that, it is, perhaps, a mistake to think that this is a new phenomena.  While I think it true to say that, in the past, certainly the post-war period, there were more politicians around who seemed motivated by things like civic duty and committed to the public good, people were still pretty bad at spotting the outliers, no matter how obvious they were.  Going back a bit further, let's not forget that much of the UK press (not to mention politicians) liked to try and characterise Hitler and Mussolini as normal democratic leaders (despite all the evidence to the contrary), decent chaps who, ultimately, would play by the rules.

But, getting back to that dream, maybe, as ever, I'm reading too much into it.  Maybe it was just a random weird dream, fuelled by watching too many monster and b-movies.  After all, dreams don't actually have to mean anything - they are a product of the subconscious and it is our conscious, waking, minds that seek to try and make everything fit into neat patterns with neat explanations.