Her dream / his dream

7 April 2015

By Frank Scoblete

Everyone who gambles in a casino has a dream: Some players dream of winning big; some players dream of winning anything at all; some players of winning the approval of the world at large (which often goes with big wins). Some players even have fear dreams where they get their heads kicked in.

But these dreams are waking dreams, more fantasy than anything else. It’s what players do before they actually step foot in the casinos. Still, some slot players, the ones that I call inveterate players, have actual “dream dreams,” meaning real dreams, about playing the slot machines - and these “dream dreams” might reveal a lot about their personalities.

Are dreams about playing slot machines merely about slot machines? Or can these dreams relate to other things? Let's take a look at a “her dream,” related to me by Jean Carlin, a retired nurse, and a “his dream,” related to me by her husband, David Carlin, an auto salesmen who told me, “I will never retire.”

JEAN: I have a type of recurring dream that involves slots. It has nothing to do with winning or losing money per se, but the dream always begins at the slot machines and then it takes off from there.

So I am at the machine, usually some machine from the movies or television, like Star Wars or Jeopardy. But then my mother, who passed away about seven years ago, appears to me and tells me to stop playing and take care of my brother. The thing is, I have no brother! But my mother is insistent.

I tell her “I have no brother, Mom,” and she touches the machine I was playing and says, “Anything you win on this thing should go to your brother.”

I don’t bother telling her again that I don’t have a brother, because now I am outside the casino and I am watching those people who hand out fliers for “girls” and I think that maybe I should give them some money and tell them to get a decent job.

Then I am back in high school and some of the bully type of kids are picking on me. I used to wear these very thick glasses until I had Lasik surgery in my mid-20s. Some of the kids would try to trip me and I would fall into the lockers. They’d call me six eyes because my glasses were so thick.

I really did not enjoy going to school. But now I am back there and I am rich; I come up to the school in a limo - I assume I won all that money on a slot machine since the dream started at the slots, but this is not clear in the dream. Everyone is so nice to me that I find myself at a podium giving a speech, but now I am no longer in school, but at a big banquet.

If you know me you know I don't like to talk to groups of people. I could never be a teacher. I would freeze. I wouldn’t say I am shy, but I would be really nervous in front of a group.

Everyone cheers my speech; I really don’t know what it is I am saying but it has gone over really big, and then I am back in the casino with my mother and she says, “I’ve saved the machine for you.”

Then I wake up. I wonder what it all means?

DAVID: My slot dreams are basically that I win a load of money on Megabucks or a machine like that, and I throw a big party where I treat all my friends to a great dinner with expensive champagne and for some crazy reason beer, and I hand out expensive cigars even though I don’t smoke cigars and don’t even know what a good cigar is. Everybody is cheering me. I raise my fist.

Everyone is singing and some of the couples start to dance because all of a sudden it's like a disco from the 1970s and everyone is doing the Hustle or something like that. I don’t dance, but in this dream I am dancing like a maniac. My wife is there, but she is young and we are not married. My wife’s mother, who was a very aggressive woman, is standing in the crowd but I ignore her, which I found hard to do in real life.

Then a war starts, or at least an attack, and there is bombing and the walls of the building, which is not the disco anymore, come falling down and I just escape. I am dragging some guy who I am saving from death and I have great strength at the moment. And the last thing I remember is a camel passing by.

That’s about it. The slot machine started everything off and then the dream seemed to go in all sorts of directions. I’ve had some similar dreams that start off with a big slot win, although I have had dreams about losing, too, and in those I really get depressed and wake up sweating. I hate to lose; I can tell you that.

FRANK: So what do these dreams by two inveterate slot players mean? The slots do play a part, but again, do you have any idea of the meaning of these dreams? I know slot machines, but I'm not great at interpreting dreams. I’ll leave that up to you.