Dream diary, 6/8/09: The Facebook survival kit

I dreamed that when you joined Facebook, they gave you a medical kit to help you survive in case of natural or man-made disaster. When I picked up mine, I thought I'd have to show some sort of proof that I'd joined Facebook, but it turned out to be pretty much on the honor system. The kit was full of expensive injectable medicines, some of which needed to be refrigerated, so there was an ice pack of liquid nitrogen at the center of the kit, which was steaming like dry ice. They had also included a vial of strychnine, in case the disaster was so bad (like a nuclear holocaust) that Facebook members might want to kill themselves quickly rather than die a slow and painful death. In the dream, I thought this was all very thoughtful of them, but was concerned about how expensive it all was and how the company would be able to sustain itself while doing this program.

I woke up feeling very baffled, almost laughing, at dream priorities and dream logic.

Comments

[Ramel]

It is always good to know that other peoples dreams are just as weird as mine

[sav]

So are you addicted yet? I joined Facebook just this year--a few months ago. I put it off for so long for lots of snotty reasons but mostly because I knew I'd become totally addicted. When people call it Facecrack, they're not kidding.

I don't post a status update every day, but I check it all the time to see what people are doing, and I leave comments on people's posts a lot.

Anyway, I hope you are enjoying yourself.

Your survival kit could be seen as a metaphor for how to fix social-networking faux pas. The "natural disaster" could be someone's posting status updates regularly but never getting any responses from "friends." Or posting something that at the time didn't feel like it but turned out to be an extreme overshare. The items in the survival kit could be used to patch social-networking wounds, or in the case of the extreme overshare, take yourself out of the game altogether--for instance, the metaphorical strychnine is something one could use to die a fast social-networking death instead of a slow and painful one. (Come to think of it, I could have used that strychnine once--or at least an ice pack.) Ha!

[Beth B.]

You mean you really didn't get one of those?? Mine was in the mail 2 days later.

Dream logic is wonderful, isn't it?