I had a bad service experience today.
I rushed to my next meeting, burning with righteous fury and started telling the first person I saw about it. And the then I saw the look on their face; 90% terror and 10% sympathetic boredom. And I realised that telling someone your bad service experience is maybe even worse than telling them your dreams.
It made me wonder why service experiences and dreams are so conversationally poisonous.
I think it's for similar reasons.
There's a sense that absolutely anything can happen, there are no logical boundaries, so there's no narrative constraint. But the experience is flooded with emotion, emotion that seems vastly out of proportion to what actually happened.
It's all in the past and there's nothing that anyone can do about any of it anyway, so there's no point thinking about it.
And, somehow, bad service experiences and dreams always seem hallucinatory in the telling - and this happened, then this happened, then this - like someone's just making things up. They're literally unbelievable.
So I've resolved not to tell you about it. But, still, grrrrr.