Queen Hillary? In Your Dreams!

By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 10, 2008

I was at a Hillary Clinton press conference. When she appeared we were all stunned. She was wearing a gown reminiscent of Queen Elizabeth I -- a tight bodice with bubble-like bustles completely surrounding her waist like petals on a flower, and voluminous sleeves. The entire creation was made of gold and silver lame and looked more theatrical than authentically royal. A male reporter asked her why she was wearing so much silver and she replied, My father was a miner.

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We are dreaming of the candidates. The election has taken over our televisions, our radio stations, our newspapers, and now it has taken over our REM cycles.

The other week, dream-Barack Obama was auditioning to become the new pastor of Ronnica Rothe's church.

He preached in rock star makeup and a long sweater-coat "with his hair in these ponytail clumps that stuck out a foot from his head in every direction," says Rothe, a seminary student. The congregation gave him a test to see if he could remember everyone's faces and he failed, but he was so cool that no one seemed concerned.

Rothe lives in North Carolina, land of the recent primary and media blitz, and was treating herself to a rare break: "I hadn't been listening to the radio or reading the news at all." But there was Obama, making inappropriate jokes from the pulpit, creeping into her subconscious.

Susanne Forestieri of Las Vegas conjured the Hillary-as-Elizabeth vision above. But the Hillary who invaded Rebecca Schoenkopf's dreams was simultaneously Emma Thompson and also Jennifer Lopez circa that bad housekeeper movie co-starring Ralph Fiennes. Clinsonpez worked as a maid in the lavish hotel where Schoenkopf was staying.

"She had these big, sad eyes," says Schoenkopf, an editor in California. The dream occurred shortly after a male heckler had instructed Clinton to iron his shirts, "and I didn't want her to be humiliated anymore. I wanted her to be okay."

All over the country, these dreams, alluded to in fevered blog entries that begin with something like, "I swear I'm not high, but last night . . ." There is even a Web site for the afflicted. After a friend dreamed of shopping for Tupperware with Clinton, novelist Sheila Heti started MetaphysicalPoll.com to compile people's subconscious thoughts about the race. She has now posted about 130 Clinton dreams and 150 for Obama (plus a dozen for McCain, who is not, it seems, so McDreamy).

On Heti's Web site, Barack Obama is a romantic guy, one who strokes the cheek of a female voter while simultaneously embracing his wife. The Obama of dreams can levitate small objects, has released a CD titled "Barack Obama Sings 20 Classic Love Songs," and likes to huff the fumes of Speed Stick Gel deodorant. He once bit off two of Osama bin Laden's fingers in hand-to-hand combat, and he carries around the digits as trophies.

The dream Hillary Clinton is much more nurturing than dreamers expected her to be, though she does wear a $1 billion dress made from the "fleece" of endangered penguins. She has beautiful skin up close and she eats a lot, in various dreams consuming french fries, spare ribs, Thin Mints and a can of Dole Pineapple Whip, which she found in a public restroom stall.

"I'm sure it all reveals something," says Heti, who receives three or four new submissions every day. "But you could make meaning out of anything," so she doesn't think too much weight should be given to the project.

"Dream research is like holding a Dixie Cup under Niagara Falls," says Kelly Bulkeley, former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. He says that interpreting individual candidate dreams would be difficult without more context -- all posts to Metaphysical Poll are anonymous -- but he does notice some general trends.

Many of the Obama dreams possess the characteristics of mystical reveries: positive emotions, good fortune, magical occurrences. Clinton dreams are also positive, but occasionally with an edge: feelings of pity or fear or general nagginess.

None of which, given the stereotypes the public has cultivated surrounding the candidates, is in the least surprising.

Still, why? Why are we delivering Michelle Obama's baby, looking for a parking spot with her husband, and even -- as happened to Guy Vallance of Washington -- having a tea party with Ralph Nader and a bunch of plastic pink flamingos? ("I'll tell you one thing, the man does not take cream," Vallance reports.)

Celebrity dreams are not terribly common, Bulkeley says, but they tend to occur most frequently among people who are plugged into the culture via magazines, blogs and television.

In this campaign cycle, that describes . . . everyone. We are all watching Tim Russert talk about Indiana, we are all sending our friends another YouTube video lampooning the candidates.

Bulkeley isn't sure why there's a dearth of McCain dreams, but he speculates that his recent lower profile compared with the Democrats has something to do with it. Liberals do tend to have more active dream lives than conservatives, dream analysts speculate, with more instances of the bizarre.

Gretchen Grant is a Web designer, identified on Metaphysical Poll only as "Mother of Three and Democrat in Pennsylvania." She's one of the 12 McCain posters: She dreamed of walking through a demolished neighborhood and seeing the suit-wearing candidate standing knee-deep in rubble. He bent over, picked something up and shouted, "Look! I found a penny!"

"He was just delighted with himself," Grant says in a phone interview. "I wanted to say, 'Okay, that's nice, let's move on now.' It was odd to feel parental to someone so much older than me."

It gave her a moment of reflection.

Holly Silva also felt introspective after her therapy-themed fantasy. She dreamed actress Kathy Bates was her psychiatrist, who told her that her problems were all related to the glass ceiling. "I thought her analysis was a little trite, very Feminism 101," says Silva, a medical copy editor in St. Louis.

But then a parade of magazines began to float by on the movie screen of the dream, all featuring unattractive photographs of Clinton. "And I realized [the dream] wasn't about me at all. It was about Hillary."

Silva, 41, had been leaning toward Obama about 80/20. "When I woke up from the dream," she says, "It was more like 65/35."

Not every dream is as rich with meaning, but to witness the true power of the subconscious, look no further than Joey Gavronsky, a Georgetown University junior from Florida who was straddling the Clinton/Obama fence until he dreamed that Obama showed up at his dorm room to drink coffee with his friends. That, plus the real-life fact that the Grateful Dead had recently pledged to support the candidate, was enough to put Gavronsky firmly in Obama's camp.

It might not be the best reason to vote for someone, Gavronsky says.

But then again, it's hard not to trust our dream personas, which often seem so much wittier, so much smarter, so much more informed than we are in our waking lives.

They tell us nothing about the candidates and everything about ourselves, our brains breast-stroking through the sludge we encounter during the day, processing the information overload in a way that makes total sense, if only in dreams.

It's not unusual for someone to dream of "being thrust into an intimate situation with a powerful figure," says Gillian Holloway, a psychologist who incorporates dream therapy into her patient sessions. It might mean that in waking life, you're considering a life-changing opportunity -- one that does not actually involve Hillary Clinton.

The race is even invading the sleep cycles of foreigners.

Allison Trottier is a Canadian living in Ontario -- the U.S. presidential race has no business dropping in on her sleep. And yet, almost every week, there's Mitt Romney, swooping in to hijack the nomination from McCain. There's Obama, eluding a group of sinister hippies who pursue him in a stolen bus.

When asked if she thought her dreams meant anything, Trottier hesitates before answering: "Maybe that I should stop watching so much CNN?"