Last night I dreamed of buying a printer.
That’s a pretty crap dream, by any standard. Not only was the subject matter mundane and worky, but I couldn’t actually find the right printer.
The study of dreams is called oneirology, which is a nice word—if a little heavy on the vowels—but this is the actual scientific study of dreams, not the crystal-powered one I was looking for.
Regardless of what it’s called, I looked up the meaning of dreaming about a printer, with my metaphorical tongue firmly in my digital cheek. (Yes, that phrase makes me feel funny too.)
According to the site I happened upon, dreaming of a printer indicates that you’re struggling to express yourself. Shit, that’s not bad. I can extrapolate that back until I start to feel entirely neurotic. (I was surprised to find it listed in the first place. Man, the internet is big… Now where have I heard that before?)
Or, it could be that I’ve bought 2 printers in the last couple of months. Indeed, this has completely thrown my lifetime printer-buying-months-to-non-printer-buying-months* frequency right off the charts. I expect I’m going to experience some serious regression to the mean over the coming year.
I bought a new wireless colour inkjet printer in June, because the one I had was ancient, and made a noise like an old man trying to drag a pool table up a hill when it scanned—and took about as long to do so.
Two Mondays back, I bought a black-and-white laser printer after getting a quote to print materials for our first public web writing course that made me request clarification.
‘Sorry, how much did you say?’
…
‘But I could buy a whole laser printer for that…’
She smiled and nodded.
I went and bought a printer.
*Now that is what I call a compound adjective! The internet may be big, but I feel pretty safe in guessing that no-one has ever written that before.
