Warning: crude humor ahead, which is surprising since my waking brain doesn’t “work blue.”
In this dream, we were visiting our friend and Archer’s sometime Shakespeare acting coach Scott at his cabin in Muir Woods.1 He told Archer this joke:
Q: What do the townspeople call the King’s fucking-cake?
A: A cake fit for a Queen!
In the dream it took both Archer and me a moment to get the joke. (I first thought it was a play on the gay-man meaning of queen, but it’s not.) But then we both did, and both laughed. I was at once appalled that Scott would tell that joke to my 11-year-old son and perversely proud that Archer got it.
My sleeping brain came up with a dirty joke that I didn’t get right away! How does that even work?!
- He does not have a cabin in Muir Woods. [↩]
My subconscious frequently leaves me jokes in my dreams which can take me a while to figure out. My favorite was during the year I lived in Israel (1978-79). Towards the end of the year, I’d gotten fluent enough to dream bilingually, and one night I dreamed I was reading a bilingual dog anatomy coloring book. (Perfectly normal, right?) I was looking at the page that showed the female reproductive system, and the uterus was labeled, in English, “menstruation chamber,” which was weird enough. But in Hebrew, it was labeled “מועדון העולה” which translates roughly as “a club for new immigrants.” It took me a while to realize that a fetus is, in fact, a kind of new immigrant.