Last night was the second night in a row that I’ve dreamt about hamburgers and family. This is especially odd for a couple of reasons one of which is that I rarely eat beef.
Oh, during bar-b-que season I will splurge on a couple of pounds of Laura’s Organic Ground Beef, some really good pepper ham, spend 20 minutes in line at the deli to get the Swiss cheese you can practically see through, get some extra crisp dill pickles, and make up a batch of Bobby Flay’s Cuban burgers. You wouldn’t think it would work but garlic in mayonnaise has an extra special something that combines with the other flavors to make everything taste the way food always tastes when you’ve spent a long day outside doing physical activity: like nothing else you’ve ever eaten has ever or will ever taste that good.
Normally, though, my diet consists of a lot of chicken, increasingly more fish these days, and days on end of vegetarian meals which is why two nights in a row of dreams about trying to order or find a place to order hamburgers with either people I haven’t seen in a while or relatives who live far away is perplexing.
True, when visiting the out of town relatives the ritual is that the first night’s dinner, and subsequent snacks because we always over estimate how many we’ll eat that first night, consists of White Castle which, for some reason, spreads across the Midwest and the South like a weed and then jumps over the Mid-Atlantic to New Jersey. I suppose if they appeared at home, or if Little Tavern had been able to survive, getting them when visiting the relatives wouldn’t be as big a deal. Still, the sack of 10 or the sack of 20, always with extra pickle if you please, is a once, maybe twice a year thing.
And I’m usually pretty good and figuring out what my dreams are about. The work anxiety dreams are pretty obvious despite the guises they may wear. The palpable aura of frustration, people not following directions, me wasting time to do projects or evaluations that are then discarded with rationalizations that are unsupported by any objective facts even though the justify some manager’s preconceived conclusion, all of this mimics my normal work day enough that it takes but a few minutes for the semi-conscious part of my brain to realize, oh, this is a dream about work, and flip the mental channel.
But why the quest for hamburgers? Why the withholding ex-girlfriend (her father owned the food court housing the restaurant where I couldn’t order)? Why the non-supportive family (who happily ate while I couldn’t order)? Why the rental car? Why the niece in Iraq that I worry about sort of semi-constantly (this makes more sense; when visiting out of town she usually goes on the White Castle run)?
Dream interpretation on the web says to dream of hamburgers means I am lacking something in my life, emotional or physical satisfaction. That seems too Freudian and simple to me. Maybe I just need to have a hamburger.
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