In your dreams
Some like it hot. Not me, though
I’m telling you this because I feel you need to know.
Last night I had one of those dreams so realistic that it takes most of the next morning to accept it was a mirage. You know the kind? Where you might still be a bit sweaty and panicked by it, even though the sun is out and you’re making the breakfast coffee?
Somehow good dreams don’t have this long tail, preoccupying your morning — it’s only the crummy ones. I hardly ever come downstairs elated after a thrilling dream, throwing open the windows and thanking my lucky stars for the gift of a subconscious.
My dreams are mostly awful, especially now in my fifties. I’ve often done something terrible before the action really begins, leaving me tossing all night, facing the bitter consequences. There are operatic scenes of anger and recrimination in these dreams. I walk into places I should recognise, but don’t. My house is full of strangers. My family isn’t my family. I’ve lost something important and can’t find it again — like a baby, who isn’t mine. Everybody’s furious, and I’m the central problem.
Then again, sometimes the plot is as basic as getting my hair cut short. In reality this would be traumatic, because I have a manly jaw. So I wake up sweaty after these piddly sorts of dreams, as well.
After a powerful dream, the confusion lasts an hour or two. But by mid-morning, when you’ve fed the dog and cat, hung the laundry and emptied the dishwasher, you’re at peace with the knowledge your mind made everything up. You can let go of the remnant emotions the dream made you suffer — shame, if it was an embarrassing dream. Fear, if you were being chased in it. Worry, if you dreamed about exams. Loss, if you dreamed somebody you loved was still alive.
You can now enjoy another cuppa and breathe out, because none of it really happened. Your relief is immense, because the dream was unhinged. Your life can plod on, and nobody needs to know about the restless darkness roiling within — that there are weak points in the circuitry behind your face.
This pure gratitude was exactly my feeling this morning.
After my sex dream.
About Rory Stewart.
Listen, I’m not knocking Rory Stewart (though in imaginative terms, I believe I already have). I mean, why not Rory Stewart? Certainly, he’s an unconventional sex object, being someone with a family tartan, but his appeal as a public intellectual is truly global. He’s earnest, honest, well-read, well-bred, a believer in God, democracy, country and civility, an Englishman in New York (Kabul, Geneva, Paris, Brussels), a gentleman and a scholar.
Brainy people love Rory Stewart; thoughtful people, who belong to book clubs and go to festivals and argue across dinner tables featuring many forks. Rory Stewart is respected by respectable people. I could do worse and, frankly, he could do better.
My fancying Rory Stewart — admittedly, without my knowing it — may even be well within the bell curve of middle-aged normality. I say this because I texted my friend Ness not long after waking up and she happened to be with her husband, a specialist in statistical modelling.
“I HAD A SEX DREAM ABOUT RORY STEWART,” she read out loud.
And her husband said, “Who hasn’t?”
It’s good to know my sexual subconscious is no outlier, and I’m squarely inside the data set. But I can’t pretend I’m pleased I dreamed about the world’s most famous Centrist Dad in lustful and spicy ways.
For one thing, Rory Stewart is happily married. I know this because he mentions his wife every five minutes on The Rest is Politics, his juggernaut chart-topping podcast. Their subject could be a coup or crisis, standoff or ceasefire, and Rory’s all ‘Shoshana’ this and ‘Shoshana’ that. Mind you, his co-host Alistair Campbell is even more loved up. His every third mention is FIONA THINKS, though mostly it’s TONY SAID, spoken with a dreamy sort of wistfulness.
It’s possible they’re constantly dropping their wives’ names to deflect feminist criticism about their show, which is that it’s a typical two-hander, dominated by the opinions of men. Owing, I suppose, to the hosts being men, many of their guests being men, and their endless analysis of male politicians and leaders — mostly systems designed by and featuring men.
Certainly, Rory gives the impression he’s entirely comfortable in male company, having been taught by men (Eton, Balliol), worked largely with men, and who thinks deeply about the actions of powerful men both past and present.
Maybe this intense and dominant masculinity is why I sex-dreamed about him?
It’s a waste of a fantasy to have a sex dream about someone contentedly married. Especially for me, a woman over 50. Sexy dreams don’t come along very often in menopause, even if you’re on the patch.
This is because ancillary things get in the way of the sizzle. For example, you won’t stop thinking about the wife. She’s impossible to disregard because by midlife, you’ve learned that wives are more interesting than their husbands.
Take Shoshana. She has an astrophysics degree and clearly rocks a flat shoe. If I had to make a choice for a meaningful relationship in reality, I’d pick her over him. There’d be fantastic conversation and shopping, and I wouldn’t even have to take my clothes off.
It’s not because he’s conservative, either, that this was a wasted erotic opportunity. Frankly, congress between the left-leaning and the right-leaning should be encouraged, in order to create a centre that will hold. I’m all for bland, useful, fair-minded government, and there isn’t a lot of it about in these furious, intolerant times. For this reason alone, we should date outside our political species.
(In some ways, dating across the aisles is kind of like those Facebook videos about rescued animals. It turns out that if you comb a wild fox cub or squirrel with a nit shampoo, blow-dry them, build them a little hammock and take them to the shops in a leash and a harness, creatures we’d otherwise demonise and consider pestiferous can co-exist with us quite peacefully, and make lovely pets.)
No, what you want from a sexually abandoned dream isn’t a married lust figure but one who MIGHT be available in your waking life, if the cards fell that way.
Personally, I prefer age-appropriate candidates for my sex dreams which, in a country this small, rather narrows the field (no All Blacks, thanks; I could be their mother). There are very few hot industry leaders here, unless you’re aroused by agribusiness, and those guys are always wearing boots caked in shit. Even our firefighters are rumpty and Dad-looking. Most are volunteers and look exhausted, like they’ve been up half the night with a colicky baby.
With an entirely sexless political class and no celebrity ecosystem, that only leaves civilian NZ men over fifty. In my view, for no fault of their own, there are slim pickings for fantasy among this group. They suffer from a lifetime’s exposure to the ozone hole and live half a world from the nearest significant museum, which appears not to bother them in the slightest.
Sexually speaking, I can’t work with this.
I need to mention that in my dream, Rory Stewart saw me undressed (actually, I surprised both him, and myself, with my nudity). He, however, remained fully clothed. The dream seemed to consist mainly of his coming across me au naturel in a range of settings — one was an open carriage, possibly at Trooping the Colour. Nothing exactly happens between us, but there’s an atmosphere of erotic charge which, if you live in Karori and can remember Oasis the first time around, is probably as good as it will ever get again.
The problem with Rory as my sex object is that the dream kept wavering away from erotic activity, distracted by inanimate things. For example, wallpaper. The wallpaper of what must have been our love nest was truly awful — chevrons and flowers, which are two designs that don’t belong together. Rory didn’t compel me enough, frankly, to pay attention to him instead of the maximalist detail of the setting. My brain would not let the furnishings go.
It takes quite something to stop me thinking about interiors, actually. I’m OBSESSED right now by pleated lampshades, and I’d do absolutely unspeakable things for a bobbin-leg milking stool.
Oh, I would. I really would.
Your sentence about the distance from a museum and not minding, will keep me going for ages. Beautifully put.
Incredible 🤣. I only recently discovered Rory Stewart on account of listening to The Rest is Politics podcast but was yet to put a face to the voice. I’m not sure what to make of all this. I find it frustrating that the few sex dreams I’ve had over the years involve people I don’t want to have sex with and no actual sex occurs.