Sleeping Next Snore to a Man Who Moonlights in Lumland

“Can I write about your dreams?” I asked my husband after he told me another of his whoppers. This one was about having an argument with Jesse Jackson over his utility bill.

“Sure,” he said. “Just don’t identify me.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t use your name. I’ll just refer to you as ‘my husband.’ No one will know.”

One of the best things about sleeping with my husband is getting involved in his dream life. I say “involved” because I once actually did an in-sleep interview with him.

It happened in the early days of our marriage, when we were still throwing potted plants at each other. (We didn’t actually throw them at each other but on the floor. It was a sign of one’s grief--like chest beating. It was a way of saying: You get me so mad I am going to take my favorite Boston fern and destroy it before your very eyes.)

One night when my husband was having an agitated dream, I began to interview him. “Where are you?” I asked him. “Yetta yetta blah-blah,” he mumbled, as dreamers often do.

I repeated my question, “Where are you?”

“Lumland,” he said, clear as a bell.

Had I been a TV reporter, I would have had the scoop of the year. The first interview with an actual sleeper. “This is Alice Kahn, reporting live from Lumland. . . .”

As a result of this interview, the word Lumland became part of our intra-family vocabulary. Instead of saying, “I’m turning in now,” we say, “I’m going to Lumland.”

Over the years, the Lumland mythology has gotten more elaborate, including reports of seeing the Lummy--the king of Lumland. Eventually, “I’m going to bed” became “I’m going to see the Lummy.”

I might add that my children, verbal conservatives that they are, will have no part of Lum language.

I bring all this up because this very morning my husband arose from Lumland in a cold sweat. “What happened?” I asked him.

“Oh, we were in a foreign country drinking beer,” he said.

Nothing to write home about yet. “So what was so scary about that?” I asked.

“It was the method of transportation in this country that bothered me,” he said. “To get anyplace, you had to ride down this canal on the back of a brontosaurus. Have you ever ridden a brontosaurus ? It can get you nervous.”

My husband has one of the richest dream lives I know. He says it only makes him eager to get up and go to work. Anyplace but Lumland.

Dreams are the last frontier, as every bront rider knows. Anything can happen there. It’s totally out of control. And despite 3,000 years of theories, no one really knows a thing about them.

My husband has a theory about his dreams. He used to have horrible, violent dreams in which he was the victim. All manner of maniacs pursued him in every way imaginable--and in many ways I could never imagine. Then, about 10 years ago, he switched from victim to pursuer. Once he became the maniac in his dreams, he says, he began to make money in real life.

If he could only figure out how to organize weekend seminars in Lumland, he’d be a millionaire. I can see it now: Power Dreaming for Middle Management.