Dream Interpretation

I blame the New Yorker. It's all their fault for printing articles about nightmares and screwing around with impressionable minds like mine.

So, last night I have this dream. The details are a little hazy now, but it's a sort of Alistair Maclean meets Lost scenario involving a scuttled ship that may or may not have been carrying nuclear weapons and a handful of survivors who find themselves trapped on a remote tropical island without either communication devices or firearms but a fairly impressive collection of medieval swords. There are a whole bunch of subplots (none of them erotic, in case you were wondering) but the main story revolves around four people, who I shall call Good Guy, Bad Guy, Scientist Lady and Mystery Girl. After a whole set of clues and at least three dead bodies (that I can remember) Scientist Lady figures out that the ship was wrecked deliberately, for reasons that are never explained but that are immediately clear to everyone involved once the discovery is made. Suspicion falls on Bad Guy and Mystery Girl, who are nowhere to be found, mostly because Bad Guy has lured Mystery Girl into the jungle to poison her so he can have all the prize (whatever that might be) to himself. His greed and treachery prove to be his undoing, however, because when he returns to the group his is confronted by Good Guy, and, not having Mystery Girl by his side, is killed after a protracted and fast-action sword fight. Needless to say, all this happens in full-blown Hollywood action flick mode.

But that's not the disturbing part.

Apparently dissatisfied with the way the dream plays out, my subconsciousness decides to run the whole scenario again. Again the ship runs aground, again the crew starts to die mysteriously, again Scientist Lady does her thing and figures it out. Only this time when Good Guy confronts Bad Guy, Bad Guy gets the jump on him and wounds him badly. Things are looking pretty bleak for Good Guy, until Mystery Girl suddenly appears and proceeds to defeat Bad Guy in hand-to-hand combat (again with the Hollywood action flick effects), before handing herself over to Good Guy and Scientist Lady. Has she had a change of heart? Was she secretly on the side of the righteous? No, it turns out that she learnt about Bad Guy's plan to betray her because she dreamed about it, and decided it was more important to her to get even with him, even if it meant her own undoing.

And no, that isn't the disturbing part either.

The really disturbing part is that the next dream I have involves me lecturing on the underlying themes and motifs in the last two dreams - the central thesis being that the trinity of the Good Guy, the Bad Guy and the Mystery Girl is really a reference to the Holy Trinity (or is it Peter Paul and Mary, with the ship as Puff the Magic Dragon?), or that the whole thing is really a political allegory, with the ship being the ship of State, the Good Guy being capitalism (because of his 'invisible' hands), the Bad Guy being socialism (look, his sword is really a sickle) and the Mystery Girl being fascism. (I swear, my dream self was actually trying to explain this to other people.)

I need help.