Saucy Reality Dream Drama

Date: 3/23/2022

I'm having some fun swimming laps in an indoor public pool. It's great because I have wireless headphones playing music. They fall out and I go to the bottom of the pool to retrieve them. My mom or brother says, "you try to swim by pushing as much water out of the way as you can". And I'm mad because of this, because it feels like I can't swim around for fun without them critiquing my form. Like in real life it's always that I need to come up for air on both sides when I freestyle. And I guess I never really acknowledged it to myself, but it just annoys me when they says that because I really just feel comfortable on one side and I feel like I swim very strongly if I just do that side. And they're not swimming experts either they swim as much as I do, which is very little. Frank Yang is by the side of the pool. They have these restaurant booth type hot tubs, where it's just a diner booth with two sides and a table in the middle, but it's all enclosed as a hot tub. So Frank is sitting in that hot tub think and I think I'm sitting across from him, and he's talking about enlightenment and mentions some philosophy about homosexuality. I find myself admiring his gains, he looks like a classical masculine Asian man, like a Yukio Mishima. Which is to say masculine but kind of lingeringly feminine, and aesthetic all the way. Anyway I'm asking him about vipassana and stuff and feeling very motivated to get the results of meditation. Then it kind of transitions to my old living room and my mom and brother are there, and it feels like we're underwater and I can swim around so I start hovering around them making funny poses, and they're like "oh boy look at this guy go". Then as I'm enjoying that or trying to swim laps again my brother starts playing the piano, which is the most annoying thing sometimes. Like we're at a family function or whatever and he'll start playing the piano with the volume loud and no one asked, and often the same ass shit. It's ok that he likes piano but it feels like no one is enjoying it at all but him, and maybe even he senses this and keeps playing to emphasize how great his passion for it is and how important he is blah blah blah. My mom has said in the past he's not that good, and while he's a hell of a lot better than anyone else in our family, I'm sort of inclined to agree with her. No one cares about his piano playing but him because he's not that good. Nothing wrong with that, he's got a job, it's not like he's got much time to practice. I think part of those little impromptu performances he used to do and just his piano hobby in general is how fucking dead ass serious he takes himself. He practices dead serious expression hammering the keys very hard in this forceful style. I know this passage definitely makes me seem like a hater and it's because I am. And when he plays for us he plays the same ass shit and like unnaturally tries to put on a flawless performance but it sounds calculated and not natural. Basically, as a decent person I try to avoid disencouraging his piano and just support him. Though I'll admit I don't really show an outpour of support, which I kind of feel bad about, but it's just not there. I even recognize it's admirable and he's pretty skilled. Anyway I've always wanted to tell him to just stop playing that garbage for pete's sake, and in this dream that's what I did. I was having a good time flying around or swimming or whatever and he just hassss to start playing his crappy impersonation of a talented jazz musician. So more or less I slammed the piano shut, grabbed him by the collar and slammed his head on every surface in the room while rhythmically shouting every repressed thought I had about his piano playing, ending it all with "you FAGGOT!" and crashing on the couch satisfied with myself. He immediately shrieks faggot back and throws a picture frame at me and I dodge it. Then he throws a glass bottle and it explodes against my head. I wake up disturbed. I guess the lesson here is thus far I had almost even pretended to myself that I didn't have these feelings, and it manifested in this dream. So maybe you should healthily recognize how stuff makes you feel, as long as you don't act rashly based upon it. And maybe there's some aspect of this feeling I have that could be shared with him and would actually help him, and maybe he's so self important and attention seeking when it comes to piano because no one has shared true possibly constructive views on his playing out of fear of offending him. Maybe the whole thing could be fixed by salvaging the bit of rational criticism that was repressed, making him blind to people's reception to him, making him shittier and more frustrated, and was forgotten after it snowballed into loathing of his playing. You should just come at him with some sensible poking, of course insulting will get him nowhere.