Don’t eat your heart out in envy of others’ slim physiques. Here at REM Diet Therapy Associates, we program you to dream of your favorite goodies so you wake up satisfied, eat measurably less in daytime, and see less of yourself every day!
Results and REM-stage content vary. Sample dreams and results follow.
Dream #1: Manhattan Break-Up
You’re waiting in the Gotham Bar and Grill in Manhattan for your future ex-husband. You haven’t ordered, but the waiter brings two plates of salmon and heirloom-carrot-and-shaved-hazelnut towers. (In your dream, Gotham still serves towers.)
Your ex-husband-to-be arrives way past the time you’d scheduled. The two of you have words – embarrassingly loud, nasty words. You quietly break up with him. He noisily leaves. You stay, reveling in entrée, dessert, and dessert wine. You aren’t charged for the second entrée, but the bill totals $80, including tip. It’s worth it. In real life you’d been married for five years before you broke it off.
Result #1
The day following this dream you feel physically and emotionally sated, as well as serene. You eat well, but not too much. In restaurants – and at home – you show a predilection for stacked foods and hefty tips.
Dream #2: Vegetable Inception
You rent a small space in an outdoor market. Vegetables materialize at command. In the rear of your market space, you discover zippered bags of balsamic-vinegar-marinated chicken breasts and apple-cherry chutney.
The next day, about to set up shop – poof – poultry, condiment, produce, gone! You search the marketplace (via telepathy and legwork), but no luck. These items were barely yours to begin with. And now you won’t have to pay rent.
Result #2
Your ability to ferret out succulents at your local Greenmarket increases markedly, and you lose more weight due to your penchant for walking miles in pursuit of wild herbs, edible flora, and other arcane ingredients for chutneys.
Dream #3: Produce Queen
You’re named Produce Queen at the supermarket where you work. This entails wearing a celery-stalk skirt and holding a bountiful bouquet of bananas and banana leaves while singing at a supermarket gala. Will you remember all the lyrics? (You have never worked in a grocery store.)
Result #3
Your colonic health improves due to a dramatic rise in your intake of fruits and vegetables – i.e. what was once quaintly called fiber. You discover a seemingly innate urge to vocalize, which, to your delight (and yours alone), leads to more time practicing “Kumbaya” and less time eyeing cold cuts.
Dream #4: Quest for Liberty
In Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell has been dismantled and a combo brothel-beer hall- cheesesteak truck has been put in its place. Many locals are incensed; many more approve, as the steak wagon-brothel-brewery brings in more bucks than the damaged Bell.
Result #4
As a Philadelphian, you’re ambivalent. You miss the element of authenticity, but appreciate the pounds you shed by running after students and tourists intent on befouling your neighborhood with, respectively, drunken howling and sidewalk cheese-food drippings.
Dream #5: Office Baking Exhaustion
You buy two packages of chicken wings and five fruit-and-nut chocolate bars for an upcoming party. Suddenly, you’re in the break room at a former job; you grab fudge cake remaining from a “bigwig” office soiree. You carefully blend cake and snapped-off chunks of the chocolate bars, secure the finished product with plastic wrap and paper towels, and hide it in the back of the office fridge. Then you mix – from tiny packets you discover in the workplace pantry – spicy mustard, soy sauce, hot sauce, and ketchup, and marinate the wings in a coworker’s washed-out cereal bowl sitting on the counter.
Before you leave, you retrieve your chocolate-fudge mixture, plus your sweet-and-pungent poultry, and input on your timesheet the “general administrative duties” code – for seven hours spent fashioning appetizers and dessert.
Result #5
You’ve spent so many hours molding chocolate and fudge in your dream that your hands nearly ache. In turn, this makes it bothersome to repeatedly put fork to mouth, thus encouraging utensil-free eating (apples, for example, and baby carrots).
Plus, it creates an aversion to simple-sugar-redolent foods. You also liberally season everything from corn flakes to rutabagas, rendering much inedible. On this day and every other that you benefit from REM Therapy, you come up winning. By which we mean losing – weight.