The night I woke up after having written a joke in my dream, I knew I had to immediately share it with my wife, but it wasn’t going to be easy. First of all, she appeared to be in a deep sleep cycle, something I know nothing about, but I knew it when I saw it. But the real problem lay in the fact that the dream joke I wrote and was so desperate to share with her, was based on magic…a word that was largely forbidden in our home. You see, for years, my wife was a magician’s assistant, and let’s just put it this way, she was probably cut in half one too many times. The years she spent suddenly disappearing out of a dark purple velvet sack and suddenly reappearing in a glass coffin in another part of the stage had left a deep scar on her psyche.
Gone were the days of her glamorously emerging from a sarcophagus dressed as a hot Cleopatra, flashing that million-dollar smile, one hand resting on her glittering hip and other one flourishing in the general direction of her Master Illusionist boyfriend at the time who pointed and winked under a Pharoah’s headdress. And don’t even get me started on her “levitation trauma”…maybe ask her Rolfing practitioner to explain.
I joked with my wife that she suffered from Post Illusion Stress Disorder, or PISD…which is what she still seemed to be…at all things magic.
And should we ever accidentally stumble upon some form of illusion being performed, either live or on television and before I could stop myself, I asked the unforgivably naïve question: How are they doing that?... a shadow would pass over my wife’s face, causing her eyes to roll deep into the back of her slowly shaking head. Eventually, she would say something like “Okay…stop looking at his hands…do you see what his foot is doing?”
So, you can see why I wasn’t eager to broach the subject, especially with no warning, in the middle of the night. Granted, up to this point in our relationship, I had a poor track record when it came to rousing my wife from a dead sleep, most notably my gently rocking of her shoulder on the morning of September 11th and whispering “Honey, wake up…we’re under attack” I admit, as a husband, I shanked it badly that morning and I own that.
In all fairness, it bears mentioning at this point that for about a two-year stretch, my wife suffered from inexplicable night terrors causing her to regularly scream bloody murder in our bedroom. And I would routinely shoot bolt upright in bed and have to reassure her that she was only dreaming by reaching for her and shouting a modified version of “It’s okay!” but because my brain and mouth had not fully come online yet, sounded more like “S’okay! S’okay! S’okay! S’okay!” including the night where I had to literally pin her to the bed as she was pointing and screaming “Behind you! The demon-man is right behind you! Aaaaaghhhhh!!!!” requiring me to turn around in pure terror to prove to us both that there was NOT a demon-man right behind me by waving my arms through the empty space, which did not satisfy my wife who just saw me passing my arms through the abdomen of the unimpressed scary scary demon-man! So, let’s just say that Dead Sleep Matrimonial Awakening Boulevard runs both ways, S’okay?
Regarding the dream joke, by my recollection, I had only written two jokes in my life up to that time. One doesn’t count, because I had to write it for a character’s monologue where the joke was supposed to be bad.
It was supposed to play as a ridiculously inside joke for a chemical convention that my character was hosting. It was his opening icebreaker to warm up the crowd of assembled chemists. After cracking a high school chemistry textbook, the joke practically wrote itself:
So, some Glycine walks into a bar and he walks up to some Hydrogen and he splashes a drink in its face, then he walks over to some Oxygen and knocks its head on the table, and finally he saunters over to some Nitrogen and pulls its chair out from underneath it. Now watching all of this over on a barstool is some Carbon, and he turns to the bartender and asks: “What’s this guy’s problem” and the bartender says: “Oh don’t worry about him…he’s just a-mean-o acid.”
The only other joke I wrote came to me after watching a documentary on the Fall of Berlin. It goes as follows.
I’ve been wondering. If we are to assume that with every successive relationship, that we learn valuable lessons from our pain and come to identify the dysfunction of our unprocessed patterns of our families of origin, thus enabling us to make healthier partner choices going forward, who exactly then was Eva Braun’s boyfriend before she started dating Hitler?
So, you see, this was only my third joke and written in a dream no less, so I can’t take full credit or blame for it, depending on how you feel about it.
It was time to tell my wife the joke. I leaned over and gave her my signature shoulder shake, and whispered. “Honey. Honey, wake up…I just wrote a joke in my dream.” She stirred awake and said “What?” “I just wrote a joke in my dream and I want to tell it to you.” And she said so sweetly in a little tiny sleepy voice: “Okay” And I decided to just give it to her straight. “It’s got magic in it.” “No” she said “Oh no, no, no, no.” and even in the darkness I could see a shadow pass over her face and I said “Please? Please! Just let me tell you and then you can go back to sleep.” She breathed out a long sigh, and even though her eyes were still closed, I could tell they were rolling way back in her head as she braced for it. There was a long pause and then, from behind the comforter, I heard her faint voice simply say: “Okay.”
I composed myself and began.
“Why did the magician forget to perform his trick?” I asked.
“I don’t know” she whispered
“Because he didn’t put it on his “Ta Da!” list.”
She pulled down the comforter, opened her eyes and they twinkled at me in the darkness and that million dollar smile slowly made its way across my beautiful wife’s sleepy face and no doubt in spite of herself, she laughed a tiny little laugh and said two of the most heartwarming words that a dream joke writer could ever hope to hear from a girl who used to have live doves burst out of her bustier.
“Not bad” she eked out. “Not bad”