Dream Deflated

Apparently, I have very low standards for myself when it comes to my dreams.  You know how the rules to a dream shift to accommodate the situation?  Sometimes, you can suddenly scale fences when running a villain, other times you speak French fluently, and sometimes you end up in Sri Lanka even though the dream started in your backyard.  This morning the rules to my dream shifted a few times within seconds.  At first, I was telling my mother about a literary award I had won, then, perhaps sensing the far fetched nature of the dream, the circumstance changed.  I hadn't won the award, I was telling my mother about a contest I was invited to submit to.  And just as I had gotten used to the idea, it all changed again.  I didn't win an award, nor was I going to enter one, I was just reading a piece of commentary on an essay that had won.  What a crappy dream.  How am I supposed to reach for lofty goals if my subconscious won't even let me dream?  I just read commentary about other people's accomplishments in my dream. 

In my dream, I also got lost in the streets of Taiwan, started chatting with a roadside dumpling vendor, accidentally called the vendor 'wife' instead of 'store owner' (they're homonyms in Chinese, though one's a mainland slang and I was not in the mainland), tried to play it off like I didn't make the mistake and blame it on the vendor's hearing, and had to buy shrimp dumplings from the stall to change the topic of conversation, even though they weren't that great and I was on my way to dinner.  I really hate my dreams.