The first of many things wrong with this dream was that the set-up was implausible. The chain is simple silver, bought in New York for about $10. The ring was a birthday gift from a friend I hadn't seen in a while, and thus has immense sentimental value, but intrinsically, it's not worth much more than the chain. So, the whole thing is worth probably $20, $25 tops. So why it was that I ended the dream with a great pile of gold and semi-precious stones in front of me, grid only knows.
The second thing wrong with this dream was that, in exchange for this one rather nice, simple, almost plain piece of jewelry that I wear almost every day, I was somehow managing to pick out the tackiest of all the objects presented to me. Apparently, my good taste has not filtered its way into the nether regions of my brain. I shall have to work on that. The upside of this was that I missed my old ring terribly as I pawed through the trays of gaudy gold junk.
Which brings me to my main objection to this type of dream. It has a bad plot line and a simplistic, baseball-bat-style moral to it. It's like an O. Henry story, only without O. Henry's prose to cushion the cheap sentimentality and hyper-moralizing. And it's not like it's a moral lesson that I particularly need, either -- "oh, don't ever part with the cheap yet sentimental mementos that are dear to your heart in favor of more expensive but meaningless trappings of whatever!" -- I have already done stuff like run in front of traffic for this ring.* Though I would rather have nice things than crap, all things being equal, I am in no way a slave to materialism. I am in absolutely no danger of selling my soul for a pile of gaudy gold.
It wasn't like there hasn't been any other moving and affecting drama in my life recently that could have been adapted for the movies in my mind. Imagine if you were a movie producer being offered the choice to adapt The Lord of the Rings, War and Peace, The Odyssey, or To Kill A Mockingbird . . . and you said, "screw that, I'm going for the latest Danielle Steele offering instead!" Why make a cheap dream when you've got the material for a potential classic? Why does my subconscious insist on producing such a cheap, badly plotted baseball bat of a dream for my early-morning entertainment? Don't I at least rate something a little more subtle, with better production values?
*not recently. I have grown brains since that incident.
