I have these curious dreams where I’m with a group of people, say at a party or something, and they’re all extremely bright and witty and deep, and I sit there stumped and amazed as they spin verbal rings around me. Awake, I console myself with the knowledge that it’s all me, even the most brilliant among them. I understand that it’s all about my insecurity, the feeling that I’m an impostor in everything I do, but on the bright side it also reinforces my belief that there’s practically a bottomless well of good stuff down there, deep in the folds of my brain, if only I can dredge it up.

But dreams can be deceptive. Perhaps that brilliant conversation would sound like babble in the conscious world. I remember another dream in which someone showed me a single-panel cartoon that, in the dream, seemed wonderful beyond compare. You’ve seen those cow costumes where one person is the front legs and another person the back legs. This was similar, except it was two alien beings. They were standing on the on-ramp to a busy freeway, and instead of a cow costume they had a crude automobile shell over them. That was it. That was the joke.

In the light of day, this seems less like a cartoon than a situation waiting for a punch line, but down there it’s a different world. It’s a world where the rational resonates freely with the irrational, and in such a world that cartoon was heavy with connotations and implications that can’t be explained in the here and now. In the dream it was funny!