As surely annoying as it is to hear about someone else’s dreams, especially on a website ostensibly about parenting, but this dream, which along with a mosquito kept me from a proper night’s sleep the other day on the island of Samos, is odd enough that I’m going to force you to read about it:
So, I’m hanging out with Seth Rogen at the Saturday Night Live after-party, when Andy Samberg comes by and tells me how much he liked the sketch that Seth and I developed that night. At which point Seth turns to me, quite seriously, and asks if I want to help him with something. Conde Nast, he says, has recently canceled his favorite publication, College Football Magazine, and he’s angry. Furious. He wants to do something about it, and he wants me to help.
“You want me to help you take down the world’s biggest magazine publisher?” I ask.
He smiles.
The thing is, we’re not really equipped to take down Conde Nast. It’s not like we can just go get high-level jobs and destroy it from within. Instead, we get low-level jobs, the most basic we can find, at the main distribution warehouse, and proceed to become royal screwups, in the hope that preventing subscribers from receiving their copies of Vanity Fair. We knock over pallets, put the wrong labels on the wrong envelopes, and generally cause a ruckus.
Needless to say, this doesn’t really do anything, and then I wake up.
Then, when I go to hang out with Seth Rogen again–yes, this is some Inception-style meta-dreaming!–I tell him about the dream, and he’s skeptical.
“I told you I wanted to take down Conde Nast?”
“That’s what you told me.”
“Huh.” He sounds weirded-out, confused, almost as if he has no idea who I actually am.
And that’s when I wake up for real. A mosquito is buzzing in my ear, my neck hurts, I’m sweating, and I don’t really like this island. One more week, and I’ll be in Ithaca, and then I get to go home.