Healthy motivation to stay on top of your cultural game

Dear Hipster:

I had the strangest dream the other night. In the dream, I was at a restaurant with friends and we were all ordering absurdly named cocktails from a waiter in a plaid tuxedo. He took my friends’ orders, but when it was my turn, he asked to see my ID, which I couldn’t find. When I couldn’t produce my driver’s license, he frowned and said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” I protested, but that just made the waiter angry. He snapped his fingers, pointed at me, and all of a sudden a handful of armed security guards in the uniforms of UN Peacekeeping troops (blue berets and everything) rushed out from hiding, assumedly intending my arrest. At that point, I woke up unable to sleep anymore, so I arose and went about my day. I don’t usually remember my dreams, but this one stuck with me for some reason. Maybe because it was crystal clear. I’m not a socially anxious person, and frankly most women over 30 are amused and sometimes even flattered when waiters card them, but I can’t for the life of me figure out if this dream means anything. What do you think?

— Melissa

Lucky for you, my graduate degree in advanced hipstering from the Ferris Bueller School of Righteous Dudeness required an intensive seminar in dream interpretation as part of my concentration in the obscure arts and sciences, most of which you’ve probably never heard of before now. Among hipsters, dreams can inspire never-to-be-completed film projects — the kind that sound so rad over beers with friends — or ambient noise rock concept albums. It’s said that the idea behind the maple bacon donut came to a hipster in a dream, and that the dream journal of an unidentified early-2000s Bay Area hipster (accidentally left in a Starbucks and discovered by a middle-school janitor) was almost published as a novel before the discoverer confessed under pressure from his scrupulously honest wife.

In my opinion, your dream reveals little more than a perfectly normal anxiety over one day waking up and realizing that you’ve lost touch with current trends, thus leaving yourself susceptible to expulsion from polite society. All of us hipsters feel at least partway like this all the time, and it can be a healthy motivation for staying on top of your cultural game. Of course, I may have deceived you about my qualifications for dream analysis. I have, from time to time, stood accused of being somewhat arch, so take what I say with a grain of smoked artisanal sea salt. Sometimes, dreams are just freaky.