The dream I had last night could probably be considered the cliché Steve dream.

I and some friends were at a convention, a mix of Comic-Con and Dragon-Con except it seemed to truly be a convention for independent “content creators.” Robb and Tanya were there, I think, and we were trying to peddle the sitcom to people at the booths. It was, of course, difficult getting anyone to take notice. I visited a booth Robb had already visited, where there was a line of non-TV-related people signing autographs for a large line of people, and I butted in line to a non-busy person to try to give them one of our demo DVDs. (The butting in line came from the movies Friday night, when I cut the line so I could get two water cups.) The person I talked with was nice, but we both realized Robb had already given them a demo DVD, so I was really just making a fool of myself.

There was, as always in these dreams, a huge world surrounding the task of shopping the sitcom. To describe it would take many paragraphs, and that’s not considering how much information I’ve forgotten since waking up this morning.

The end of the dream was, however, the most telling bit of the entire exercise.

In the center of the convention space, which was low-ceilinged like at Dragon-Con, I found racks of toothbrushes. As I always do when I come upon toothbrushes in real life, I searched for the extra soft variety. In the dream, I was expecting failure, as always happens in real life. But no! Lo and behold, the entire bottom of the rack was filled with extra soft toothbrushes!

I was so excited, and I knew I had to buy a bunch to take home, like I did in my parent’s town last Christmas, when I did find some extra softs and took home 5. My dream excitement was tempered when I saw on the toothbrushes that these were special “Limited Edition” extra softs. How annoying. And yet, how lucky I saw them before they were discontinued.

As with anything in my dreams these days, a leisurely pace was not allowed. There was pressure as I shopped for the toothbrushes. I was delaying my friends (I think it was my boss Richard by this time) by stopping for this personal errand. I had a few toothbrushes in hand, but then I started looking at them. They were all different, but not “normal.” In continuing to scour the selection on the racks, I saw that there were nearly infinite varieties of Limited Edition extra soft toothbrushes. Small heads, large heads, narrow heads, fat heads, many bristles, very few bristles, short handles, long handles… but I could not find the kind I wanted.

This part of the dream may sound stupid, but it’s not. In fact, it’s about as correct a reflection of the waking world as you can expect from a dream.

My friends were pressuring me to leave, but I could not find what I wanted. I knew I had to buy something, though, because there was no guarantee I would ever find extra-soft-bristled toothbrushes ever again. Yet the selection and design of the toothbrushes was so over-intellectualized that none of the brushes seemed to be useful.

As far as I can recollect, I ended up grabbing a few random brushes. A couple had tiny heads and long handles, and two had square heads with only four clumps of bristles, once in each corner, like a Lego. I had extra-soft toothbrushes, but at what cost?

I had a good chuckle and head-shake when I woke up from this dream. But I have to ask why? Why, why, why oh why do I have to dream about my real life? Where, after all, is the fun in that?