So as I mentioned a while back, I went on Paxil about six months ago as part of the whole mind-body thing. Clearly, my gut was not going to calm down until my brain told it to, no matter how much yogurt and bananas I ate. (Yes, after about a month of no substantive posting, I figured I’d jump right into the deep end. Come on, you’re with me, right?)

Going on the Paxil coincided with cutting way back on drinking, and the two together did a real number on my dreams. Drinking alcohol before bed — even a seemingly modest glass or two of wine, if it’s a regular habit — can suppress dream sleep, which means that when you quit, you may get a bounceback effect. Add to that the fact that SSRIs intensify dreams, and things got quite exciting for a while.

After graduate school, I worked for a while with Alan Hobson on the psychology of dreams. As I’ve written about before, one of Alan’s ideas is that we solve problems in our dreams much as we do in real life, we simply don’t question the bizarre. Alan also believed that Freud and psychoanalysis had led people to focus too much on the symbolism of dreams. When you stop trying to figure that out, and instead focus on the story and the emotions, what the dream “means” will usually become quite clear.

The power of a dream lies in its story, and in how that story affects you. The set and props are just whatever your unconscious mind could most quickly grab: images from the day’s business; random memories that floated up in response to this color or that smell; faces or places you watched on television before bed. This is why there’s no point to “dream dictionaries” that purport to tell you what the various symbols in your dreams mean. Dream symbols are at once universal (ever go through a computer training with co-workers, and discover afterward that many of you dreamed of the program you were learning that night?) and idiosyncratic (a cigar may be merely a cigar to Sigmund, but it might symbolize the Cuban embargo to Rosalita, or her father’s cancer to Dora, or even a penis to James).

Anyway, about a month or so after I’d been on the medication, I had a dream that nicely illustrated both the principles above and the effect that Paxil had had on on my problem-solving style.

I’d been over to a friend’s house that night to catch up on some Tivo’ed episodes of “Big Love.” (It’s a fun show to watch in batches — when you watch several episodes back-to-back, you realize that every time someone smiles, something horrible happens within 10 seconds.) Unsurprisingly, that night, I had the classic Actor’s Nightmare: I’d been cast as Bill Henrickson’s fourth wife, but no one had bothered to give me a script.

Was I anxious or worried? Oh, heck no. I have a fair amount I’d like to say to those characters, so until the directors put a script in my hand, I was going to say what I thought. (I recall telling first wife Barb, “Listen to how Bill yells orders at you! My boss doesn’t talk to me that way, and he’s my boss! A person’s spouse certainly shouldn’t bark at them like that.”) And if the director or other actors didn’t like what I had to say, well, give me the script, already, and I’ll stop improvising and say what you want.

Have you ever had a dream that used to make you anxious, but doesn’t anymore? Or a kind of dream you stopped having once certain problems in your waking life got resolved? Or a dream that makes more sense to you now that I’ve talked about the “story, not symbolism” principle?

If you’re not into the Neanderthal look, but still like to imagine yourself in an earlier time, the “Mad Men” website has some new features on their “Mad Men Yourself” site. In honor of the new haircut, here’s my latest:

Last week, I was immensely sad to read that Jorge Garcia’s dog Nunu died: “as we were preparing to all go to the airport Nunu was struck by a car as she crossed the street. She died in my arms,” Mr. Garcia wrote.

Poor Jorge! He loved that dog. His life must feel so strange now, with “Lost” over, living back on the mainland, with Nunu dead. This is one of the pains of the death of a pet — not only the loss of a companion, but the end of an era. We often get pets at times of transition in our lives, and when those pets die, that chapter in our life feels even more definitively closed. Mr. Garcia has shut down his “Dispatches from the Island” blog and started a new blog, for this new phase of his life. The Nunu years are over. Have you ever had a pet whose lifetime coincided with a particular phase of your life, whose passing seemed to be the end of one chapter of your story?

Before we all leave the island for good, I suppose I should reassess my earlier criticism of how Hurley’s alternative universe was played out. Since the alternaverses were only mental constructs, or purgatory, or a bardo, or some damned thing or other, the emphasis on Hurley’s weight in his alternate-universe story reflected his own insecurity, not the writers’ fat prejudice. I think there’s still room for criticism — was Hurley’s primary reason for insecurity really his weight? He seemed to not trust himself because of his earlier bouts with mental illness and his lack of education and acknowledged leadership capabilities — but I think a lot of character development got sloppy toward the end there, so I don’t feel Hurley got a particularly raw deal.

“I don’t believe in much, but I do believe in duct tape.”

–Miles Straum, “Lost”

The wild hecticness of the past two weeks ought to end on Tuesday night: I will have finished the Last of the Big Projects at Harvard Business School, and Mr. Improbable will (ash willing) be home.

I’ve missed him, but Milo and I had gotten into a nice routine of walks and napping (Milo)/working (me), and then in the evenings snuggling and watching movies and TV together. (I did wind up watching “Caprica.”) It’s been okay.

And it gave Milo an excellent opportunity to practice his comic timing.

He has an uncanny knack for sighing, growling, grumbling at the perfect moment when we’re watching a video, and I swear he’s getting better at it. I’m not pretending to be one of those dog owners who insists her dog understands English (even if he did, he still wouldn’t know what’s going on on “Lost” any more than I do). But he likes the attention of being laughed at, and I can’t help but wonder if he’s figured out that growling when he hears the sound of a threatening voice, or sighing when the music swells dramatically, will get him laughs.

He comes from funny people.

Other people’s fat, that is.

It’s the only possible explanation for last night’s episode of “Lost.” Apparently, Hugo Reyes has one consistent character trait, and one only: he is fat. Or so the writers seem to think.

Spoilers below the break:

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a brilliant post up about weight loss, the American food industry, environmentalism, racism, and stuff. He’s one of my favorite bloggers anyway, and this post exemplifies why; in essence, he’s trying, as always, to get his readers to look at the bigger picture and not point fingers at individuals. This is a huge part of what I try to do with etiquette, and what part of my whole “epidemic of rudeness” post was about — looking at systemic causes for why people behave the way they do, instead of just running around shrieking “Narcissism! Internet! Mindlessness! Selfish bastards!”

You really have to read the whole thing to understand how he gets from low-fat Oreos to racism, but here’s two key paragraphs:

But more than that, I understand enough to be wary of inveighing against people who eat at McDonalds–or even McDonald’s itself–of harshly interrogating the morality of flesh-eaters (I am, of course, among them.) It’s not that any of this is wrong per se, so much as it’s limited. When you’re constantly naming people for their sins of consumption, it’s very hard to get them to act against a system of consumption. More than that, it often misses the point of how hard it is to pull oneself out of the Matrix, and thus underestimates the Matrix, in that it assumes we can win by yelling.

Likewise, I think in my best writing here, in the writing that really matters, I’ve worked to steer us away from the reductive parlor game of “Is this/he/she racist?” It’s useful to a point, but ultimately self-serving. It underestimates our demons and it underestimates how an entire system warped nearly every institution in this country, and continues to warp it to this day. What I’d rather we us understand is some sense of the big system, some sense of American white supremacy as mechanized racism.

You might disagree with some of his specific points, but the overall thrust of his argument is, I think, profound.

(Also, while we are on the topic of the U.S. food system, did anyone catch “Parks & Recreation” last night? Yes, it tripped some of my body-acceptance triggers, but I thought for a sitcom, it did a damn good job of showing some of the problems of our current food system and legitimate points of view from both the liberal and libertarian sides. And all that along with a B-plot featuring an iPod/Roomba hybrid called “DJ Roomba” and a C-plot of April becoming disenchanted with her two gay boyfriends. No small accomplishment, that.)

Hardcore fans have probably already seen this, but just in case — the past five seasons of “Lost” in eight minutes.

Amusing to watch if you’re planning to view the season premiere on your own. Vital to watch if you’re going to make a social evening out of it, so you’re not That Guy saying, “Wait, so it’s the 1970s?” “Dude, I thought that guy was dead” and so on.

Last week’s episode of “The Office” was, even more than usual, a virtual seminar in How Not to Do Things, from How Not to Play Office Politics to How Not to RSVP to a Wedding (“I’ll just text you for directions the day of. And put me down for whatever’s fanciest. Unless there’s ribs.”)

However, there is one thing that Pam Beesley-soon-to-be-Halpert got right, and that she’s gotten right before: how to call someone out on bad behavior.

In this episode, Michael warns Pam that if she lies to him, her baby will be born a liar, because he will imbibe dishonesty through her breast milk. To which Pam replies, “Please don’t talk about my breast milk.”

That’s how you do it. You don’t interpret the behavior, you describe it, as neutrally and objectively as possible, in a calm voice. If Pam had said, “Please respect my privacy,” or “Please don’t say things that are work-inappropriate,” that would be an invitation — as she knows all too well — for a long digression on Michael Scott’s part as to why talking about his employee’s breast milk is not an invasion of privacy or inappropriate at work. Because anyone who will talk about his employee’s breast milk, pretty well by definition, does not understand the concepts of privacy and appropriateness. But he could hardly argue that he was, as a matter of empirical fact, talking about her breast milk.

She has done this before with Michael, most notably when she said, “Please don’t throw garbage at me.” And here’s the thing: it works. It works about as well as anything will work with the Michael Scotts in our lives. He never did throw garbage at her again after that, nor, at least for the rest of the episode, did he talk about her breast milk.

Of course, he continues to violate all norms of social conduct in every other way, because he is Michael Scott, and has the emotional development and social skills of a not particularly cool kindergartner.* This is what’s frustrating about people like that — and we all have them, in some version or another, in our lives — they never generalize to an overarching principle. Tell them not to throw garbage at you, and they’ll just put butter on your desk.

But hey, at least they’re not throwing garbage at you anymore. Sometimes that’s as good as it gets.

*I know at least one kindergartner whose empathy, humor, and sense of occasion far outstrips that of Michael Scott, so if you are the parent of a similar one, please don’t take what I said personally. That’s why I added that “not particularly cool” clause.

If you, too, are a fellow “Mad Men” addict who finds it hard to get from Sunday to Sunday (or Monday to Monday, if like us you download from iTunes), here’s a midweek fix for you, courtesy of Hulu: the half-hour “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” These were done in the late 1950s … you can imagine Don and Betty, pre-kids, kicking back in the evening with a drink and a smoke and enjoying these little tales of deception and intrigue.

They really are quite good, and Mr. Hitchcock’s mini-monologues before the commercial breaks are wonderful. The man had presence. He had issues, but he had presence. I can just imagine Don squirming in his seat and muttering to Betty, “Don’t they understand that without advertising, they wouldn’t get their programs on the air?” (A point that’s frequently made about “Mad Men” is that Sterling Cooper is an unusually behind-the-times ad firm. Even in the early 1960s, there were firms that were hiring and promoting women and Jews, and appealing to youth culture, and using irony. Mr. Hitchcock’s delightfully insulting intros to the commercials were clearly beloved by his advertisers, but I can’t imagine Sterling Cooper allowing this for one of their clients.)

I’ve always been more of a book than a movie person, and my first introduction to Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t as a director, but as an editor of a mystery magazine and subsequent anthologies with titles like “Stories to Stay Awake By” and “Slay Ride.” Nedra Tyre, Henry Slesar, Robert Bloch, Lawrence Block … ah, the names bring back happy times. I had a whole stack of those paperback anthologies as a kid. I bought a “Best Of” anthology about a year ago, to take on the train when I was going to New York to meet my publishers, which is probably what led me to start watching his show on Hulu.

One thing that hit me when I was reading the anthology last year, and that is incredibly noticeable in the show: there didn’t used to be no-fault divorce. Which meant that, if your marriage wasn’t working out, you either had to find cause, or if the divorce was agreed upon by both parties, one partner had to take the fall (I think “mental cruelty” was a common out), or else … you got creative. Which of course is where the murder mystery tends to start. It’s really astonishing how many of his stories (magazine and television) are about husbands and wives killing each other. Now, I’m hardly politically correct enough to maintain that a murder-mystery show ought to be providing us with good role models, but is it completely out of the question that, at least once in a while, the husband and wife might not be adversaries but co-conspirators? It is in the world of the Hitch, apparently.

Another thing to pay attention to if you watch the show is how, if the criminal gets away at the end, Mr. Hitchcock’s final monologue always includes the fact that they were ultimately convicted offscreen. He says this with a Severus Snape-like contemptuousness, and although Mr. Hitchcock’s default vocal setting appeared to be “contempt,” it does seem rather special in this case. I think the network, or the advertisers, were pushing him to maintain a certain morality to the show that he didn’t agree with. “But of course, they were cot and brot to jus-tisssssssss,” he spits.

At any rate, do check them out. They’re quite fun. You can start with this one, if your populist rage against bankers hasn’t been assuaged by Ben Bernanke’s assertion that the recession is over. What revenge against bankers looked like in a simpler time …