Temple of Gold - or - How my Education Failed Me

After a raucous conversation about the validity and unsettling prevalence of the phenomenon known as “lucid dreaming” I realized that maybe my brain isn’t quite up to the level it should be. If you’ve never heard of the phrase before, “lucid dreaming” is the idea that you can control your dreams while experiencing them, or at the very least, become aware that your dreams are entirely fiction. And if you’re anything like me, you’ve assumed that this concept was created by Christopher Nolan in Inception. However, apparently a lot of people experience this and I am just completely out of the loop.

“You mean you have dreams where you know you are dreaming?” I inquire.

“Yea,” my coworkers replied while casually buffing their nails, “every once in a while.”

I continued on.

“And in these dreams, when you realize this, you can change the course of action?”

“Well obviously,” they responded, agitated by my naiveté. “Why would I keep doing something I didn’t feel like doing?”

I was floored, if not by the concept, but by how nonchalant they acted- as if summoning the nightly powers of a Navajo medicine woman was completely blasé. One of my coworkers went so far as to say she controlled her dreams entirely, thinking about what storylines to experience before going to bed and then systematically executing each plot point with its corresponding REM cycle.

“It’s fun!” she said, “I’ll be hooking up with James Franco in my cabana house when George Clooney comes in to check out the pH levels in the pool!”

It wasn’t fair. Long had I been made to suffer through intolerable dreams to which I had no control only to realize that a large majority of the population had upgraded their sleep cycles to include a full cable/DVR package. While I was left tossing and turning through uncomfortable event after uncomfortable event, the rest of the people were zooming past the commercials and switching back and forth from HBO to Shotime.

When describing my most recurring dream to my coworkers, the one in which my man-of-the-moment’s penis is revealed to be a skin-covered ten-foot rope with a bulbous mallet tied to the end, I am met with both horror, amusement, and pity; a deadly trifecta. It’s not that I don’t want to change the situation or realize that I’m dreaming while its happening, it’s just that I’m not sophisticated enough in my dreams to do anything but react. Realize that a rope/mallet penis is a fiction and try and change it? That seems to be out of my grasp. I’m too busy running away and hoping my feet don’t get stuck to the caramel-covered floor to form any logical solution.

And not to point fingers, but I have to blame my poor brain performance on my schooling. I’m far too vain to take genetic ownership of my less than stellar subconscious intellect, and so I’ve decided that someone else must be held accountable. But I think this is so.

If you’ve seen the recent film, The Fighter, or the less recent film, High on Crack Street, you have seen more than enough of my hometown, Lowell, MA. I attended public school all the way through graduation – which in my school meant that you had completed high school without acquiring a baby mama, a gunshot wound, or a parole officer. I’ve remembered very little from my entire primary schooling career, mainly because I was taught very little. The two things I have retained are my stealthy ability to sneak out of buildings and a general disdain towards males between the ages of 11 and 18.

The only real things I have remembered vividly are a smattering of completely unhelpful phrases in other languages. Other than trashy Irish boxers, Lowell also has a large population of Hispanic and Cambodian residents, which for some reason made a large impact on me in my formative years.

My Spanish is less than ideal. I took the language for four years and remember only two nouns, berenjena and ventana, and only because my teachers would consistently scold me for answering test question with the thinly veiled threat to throw eggplants out of windows (and the stern reprimand “learn more nouns!”). The only phrase I remember is “your mother is a whore because she called me fat,” something that, to this day, I have no clue how or why this was translated to me.

My Khmer, the language spoken in Cambodia, is much better. I know how to swear effectively and vividly (‘Fuck your pussy;’ ‘Fuck your mother’s pussy,’ ‘Masturbate your mother’s pussy,’ etc. etc.) I also know a wide array of Cambodian folk songs, my favorite being “Di Chay Cho Min Plum” or, “My Left Hand Has Fiver Fingers,” a raucous song detailing the exact number of fingers on both your left and right hands, and “Pla Sum Son Kor,” a triumphant retelling of the history of the Temple Angkor Wat to which I only remember the first three words and hum the rest.

But even this is a pathetic showing in the grand scheme of things. If I were to actually utilize this skill by going to Cambodia it would be a complete disaster. The locals would gasp in horror as I flailed around the country, desperate to be understood.

“Where to does this five-fingered man think he is going?” the villagers would shriek as they shielded their young, “Where is this ‘Temple of Gold’ he seeks and why he is swearing at my mother?”

“My left hand has five fingers!” I would shout, demanding some compassion. “As does my right hand!”

It would be an absolutely nightmare to which I could not wake up or be able to alter its course. There would be no redo or George Clooney to swing by and fix my paddy wagon. There I’d be again: up the creek, lost and disillusioned, with only ten-foot skin covered rope, a mallet, and my less than stellar brain to get me out of my nightmare and back into reality.

(Well that wrapped up nicely.)

Max