Anger Dream: "How stupid are you?"

In the dream, I have a friend over to my house. As often happens in my dreams, the location is my parents' old condo at 21555 Dewdney in Maple Ridge. As was often the case when friends stayed there, my parents' main concern was serving food to the guests. They carried it farther than any other parents: in fact, I recall having a female friend stay over - platonically - and she reported waking from dreams in which my father had her tied up and was bringing her food, making her eat it. There was none of that in my dream, but my Mom was making a giant wokful of fried rice (a wok just recently thrown away by me, here in real life, as it had gone to rust underneath the sink).

But there was a catch: some of the food had been bought - I cannot say why, but it was so - at an adult novelty shop. Not a sex toy store, mind you: there used to be a real "joke shop" Dad would take me to, when I was a kid, that sold things like whoopie cushions and soap that turned black and such. I forget the name of it - something like Krazy Korner? Anyhow, it was that sort of shop, not a sex toy shop or anything, but some of the novelties they sold were themed around sex or drugs or such; it might have been actually a restricted shop, the sort I needed my Dad with me to be able to enter. Because of this, my parents were worried that my guest (who I think was female, in the dream, though I'm not entirely sure) would get in trouble with her parents - or get US in trouble with them - if she ate food from an adult novelty shop without them having been consulted. There was nothing "adult" about the rice, but... my parents wanted her to go home and bring a note from her parents saying it was okay for them to feed her.

I confronted them both in the kitchen, full of rage: "How stupid are you? No, seriously, HOW STUPID ARE YOU, I'm not joking. You need her to get a NOTE?" I could be furiously indignant and unkind with my parents. One of my father's comments that haunts me from the last month of his life was observing after I snapped at him that I was often "harsh" with him. It's true: I could be a real asshole. I used to have a sort of disturbing fascination for Flannery O'Connor's short story "Everything That Rises Must Converge," because I could find my own relationship with my parents inscribed in the relationship between the mother and son therein.

Anyhow, it was an uncomfortable dream and brings back memories of an uncomfortable time for me, times I was an asshole to my parents. There were plenty of them. But I remembered it when I woke up - as I was standing in the kitchen, chiding them for stupidity - so I wanted to write it down.

Interestingly, for once, my dream memory has a better memory than I do; it usually fudges details, but I hadn't thought of the layout of my parents' old kitchen in years, and yet it put the stove in exactly the right place. If you'd asked me yesterday where the stove was, before I had the dream, I'm not sure I would have remembered.