I had a dream last night that Donald Trump was my father.
It was a terrifying dream -- but not a terribly surprising one.
Just before I went to bed, I had been reading Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father. Or rather, I had been reading the reviews of it on Amazon.
I'm not normally one for political biography, but it seems like a good book to read in times like these. Also, I thought that if perhaps I read about our current leader, it might distract me from thinking about one of our aspiring future leaders, whose name I really do not want to mention too much. But whose name I will unfortunately have to mention again. Because I want to tell you about my dream.
Before I start -- I should be a little more specific, for contextual reasons. See, my problem wasn't exactly that I had been thinking too much about Donald Trump -- it was more that I spend too much time thinking about how I don't seem to be thinking about him nearly enough. My friends on Facebook can't stop thinking about Donald Trump. If he becomes President, the country will descend into fascism. If he becomes President, they will move to Canada. My Facebook feed is practically wall-to-wall coverage of my friends' meditations on the pure evil that is Donald Trump.
And yet somehow, I remain unmoved.
I believe it is my guilt at this indifference towards Mr. Trump, coupled with an unfortunate series of events that ended with me falling asleep with my head too close to the radiator -- that somehow caused my mind to melt itself into this dreadful Freudian slip of sleep.
But really, that's only half the story. The other side of the story is that when it comes to Trump, I'm good at denial. It's taken me some months to master this. In fact, when SNL announced in October that Donald Trump would be a guest host, I was livid. How could such a show, a staple source of my socially progressive internet lolz, give this man a platform? How could they live with themselves, when the pursuit of making him entertaining could very well lead to at least one or two people thinking he maybe wasn't quite as bad as they thought? How could NBC sleep at night? Well. These thoughts caused me a great lot of angst for a good part of October. But then, somehow, before his appearance in November -- I had learned how to Jedi-block Trump from my mind. Whenever he crept back in -- or appeared on my Twitter feed -- I took a deep breath and re-directed my thoughts to visions of the Statue of Liberty, siamese kittens or sugar-based products.
Now, just one problem remains. While I had have trained my conscious mind -- I clearly still have more work to do on my subconscious.
Which brings me -- finally -- to my dream.
In my dream, Daddy Trump makes me wear a formless white campaign t-shirt, emblazoned with 'Make America Great Again' and flushes my birth control pills down the toilet. He makes me to move out of my cozy rent-stabilized apartment in Astoria and into the malevolently gleaming Trump Tower. He makes me sign a waiver that I will never eat tacos again.
I'm incensed. He carts me off to a rally somewhere in Middle America, where I am forced to stand in my shapeless white shirt and listen to all the horrible things he has to say.
After the rally, Daddy Trump is furious at my lack of commitment to his cause. He punishes me by deleting all my black friends from Facebook and canceling my New York Times digital subscription. I tell him that life isn't worth living. He tells me that I am a disgrace of a daughter, and forces me to study Ivanka's Instagram for good WASP outfits, so that I can look like a real lady.
When I refuse to dye my hair blonde -- he tells me I'm too old and wretched to be his daughter -- and not fit for public life. He exiles me to the penthouse suite, where I must stay awake around the clock to watch the Hudson River for boats of illegal immigrants.
It was somewhere around this point that I woke up in a cold sweat.
And I think I may have arrived at the moral to my story: It's probably not a good idea to try and ignore Donald Trump. If you do, he may come for you in your sleep.