Obama: Hope and Sex and Dreams

Judith Warner has written a piece that has been the topic of some discussion for the past few days.

I find it at once very disturbing and extremely entertaining.

If I take it seriously, I am completely creeped out. If I take it as a joke, it's hilarious. Then again, if I take it seriously, I think it's hilarious; and if I take it as a joke, I'm also creeped out.

I don't know how to react -- laugh out loud or cringe. Either way, Warner's piece is bizarre.

Warner writes about a dream she had starring Barack Obama. It's weird, as dreams so often are. So what? It's not odd to have a public figure show up in a dream.

(I bet Chris Matthews could fill a book with his dreams and fantasies featuring Obama. Maybe he's working on one, if not for public consumption than for his own personal pleasure.)

Turns out Warner's friend confided that she, too, was preoccupied with the Obamas. In her case, it was impacting her interaction with her husband and children, and how she viewed them.

Warner wanted to find out if Obama was occupying the dreams of others as well. Could this be a widespread phenomenon gripping the nation?

Warner writes:

As we all know, in journalism, two anecdotes are just one short of a national trend. I figured that my friend and I couldn’t possibly be the only ones dreaming, brooding or otherwise obsessing about the Obamas. Were other people, I wondered, being possessed by our new first family?

I launched an e-mail inquiry. And learned that they were. Often, in strikingly similar ways.

Many women — not too surprisingly — were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams, the women replaced Michelle with greater or lesser guilt....

OK. Here's the truth: Not all American women are dreaming about sex with Obama. Nope. No dreams about Obama. No daydreaming either. Nothing. Nada. I can't relate.

Some of the dreams Warner recounts are fleshed out fantasies.

There was some daydreaming too, much of it a collective fantasy about the still-hot Obama marriage. “Barack and Michelle Obama look like they have sex. They look like they like having sex,” a Los Angeles woman wrote to me, summing up the comments of many. “Often. With each other. These days when the sexless marriage is such a big celebrity in America (and when first couples are icons of rigid propriety), that’s one interesting mental drama.”

...Another Washington woman, a global health care consultant, expressed her sense of Obama-inadequacy in a dream: “I dreamed I was an Obama girl. I had a chance to be in the same room with him for the first time. There were dark velvet chairs and he was standing there with all this dark and mist around him. His lips so purple and sensuous as if to be otherworldly,” she wrote to me. “I moved gently toward him and then I said the wrong thing. Obama tamped it down like some vapor that didn’t register. He wasn’t even flattered.”

...One woman wrote that when she couldn’t get to sleep at night, she “lay in bed and thought about the Obama girls in their rooms at the White House. I thought about Marian Robinson up on the third floor. And about Barack and Michelle, a couple who clearly have a ‘thing’ for each other, spooning together in bed. It helped me relax.”

OK. These stories are just creepy. This is the cult of personality taken to a new level. (I propose that it be termed "Chris Matthews Syndrome" - CMS.)

The one woman is crushed that Obama rejected her in her dream. It's an expression of "Obama-inadequacy."

And the other woman thinks of Barack and Michelle spooning in bed to help her relax when she can't sleep.

I suppose it's better than popping Ambien but I can't imagine using thoughts of the Obamas sleeping together as a relaxation method.

For some, not knowing the Obamas has almost turned into a feeling of being snubbed or excluded. Like in middle school. It’s funny. Almost.

“Why won’t my kids be sleeping over at the White House? And as my daughter noted, why couldn’t she get to sit front and center and see the Jonas Brothers and Miley perform at the kids’ inaugural concert? If she went to Sidwell, then she might have these chances, she said …” wrote a mother whose kids are not at Sidwell Friends school with Sasha and Malia.

This isn't funny. It's sad. These people need help.

Their lives are a disappointment for lack of being touched by an Obama. That's pathetic.

Warner isn't just writing about some funny Obama-related dreams. She's relaying that some people have some very unhealthy thoughts involving the Obamas.