I’ve been thinking a lot
about dreams lately.
Not dreams of world peace or of
what it would be like to live in a country that laughs uproariously the very
idea of a Donald Trump presidency. I’m not that big a masochist. No, I mean
actual dreams. The kind your mind conjures during sleep.
I read a piece recently in
the health section of the Washington Post
headlined “You’re at the Final Exam and Never Attended Class. It’s that Dream
Again.” The article was about the prevalence of a certain type of dream, in
which you're either totally unready or frightfully ill-prepared to take a test
on which much seems to be riding. The gist was that although you’d think this very
common dream would be the focus of much scholarly study, apparently not so
much. So, instead, the writer interviewed a few psychoanalysts and a neurologist. Who
said pretty much what you’d expect: Such dreams reflect our fears of not
measuring up in some way, or of not being in control of some aspect of our life.
“I think those who have it
tend to be professional and were successful students,” the neurologist opined.
I don’t know about that, but I was a
successful student, to the extent that grades are a measure of that. And I suppose that,
as a writer-editor by trade, I qualify as a “professional,” whatever that
means. (Compensation-wise, compared with doctors and lawyers—the standard-bearers among professionals—I’m not even a semi-pro.) Anyway, I do, in fact, have
variations on this dream all the time.
Sometimes it literally is the exam scenario, where I’m sweating bullets in a desperate attempt to pass a test
that reads like hieroglyphics. More often, I find, the situation hearkens
back to my newspaper days, and I’m well past deadline—being hounded by an unamused
editor to turn in a story that I can’t find the words to complete. Oddly, though, I tend to be back in Savannah, Georgia—or, rather, in some odd dream-form of that city, rather than
in High Point, North Carolina—the actual scene of my earliest reporting days and my worst real-life
abuses of deadlines.
In Savannah, I most often
wrote feature stories or film reviews that carried soft deadlines—Friday, say, or
next week. In High Point, on the other hand, where I worked for an afternoon
newspaper in the days when those still existed, my deadline usually was five or
10 minutes ago. I struggled constantly, in my one-finger typing mode, to condense
into a concise and coherent 15- or 20-column-inch story the highlights of a
city council meeting, or of a five-hour planning and zoning commission meeting
that had droned on well past midnight. (To this day I shudder at the words “public hearing,” envisioning 10 or 15 citizens lined up behind a microphone to repetitively,
and at great length, rail against what they deem tyrannical government
regulation. All this for the clear purpose of denying me the chance to spend even a fraction of my evening at home. My attitude toward this form of participatory
democracy wasn’t sterling.)
Of the two cities, Savannah
was where I felt more displaced, though. So perhaps that makes it a better
setting for anxiety-related dreams. Although I made some lasting friendships in
Savannah, I found it to be an insular city with horribly oppressive heat and humidity
where I never really felt comfortable, emotionally or literally. My time there
was mostly unhappy until Lynn rescued me. I was in my early 30s, with no
plans or prospects beyond perhaps moving on to another newspaper that was less
bad and maybe paid a bit more. Whatever deadline pressure I might have felt in those
days was psychic: Was this all there would be for me at age 40? At 50? How could I
possibly write a new chapter? How would that story even read?
In other words, if the “final
exam/test” dream and its fellow travelers reflect our fears of not measuring up
or being in control of our life, Savannah is the perfect setting for them in my
case. And I can guess why such fears continue to dog me into late middle
age. While I do feel in control of my life now, in no way do I feel deserving
of the cozy space in which I find myself.
If you’d have told my 33-year-old
self in 1991—the year before I married Lynn and moved to DC—that in 2016 I’d be
living the good life, by most emotional and economic measures, in Bethesda,
Maryland, I might have retorted, “Yeah, right! And I suppose OJ Simpson will get
away with murder, terrorists will topple the World Trade Center, and people
will deem it necessary to record every last moment of their narcissistic lives
on electronic devices.”
Do I measure up to my current
station in life? Am I worthy? Not a chance. I mean, I’m incredibly grateful to
be where I am. But my subconscious would seem to be rendering judgment. It’s
screaming, “Imposter!”
So, again, dreams. “They” say
we have them every night, whether we remember or not. I seldom do. And even then,
it’s mostly skeletal details. This in itself no doubt says something unflattering
about me. That I’m hiding something from myself. Or, maybe, that I lack the cerebral
tenacity to yank my dreams from the recesses of darkness into the bright light
of day.
I wonder, though, if my poor
recall isn’t a defense against boring myself. Because the fact is, when I’m not
worrying about failing a test or missing a deadline, the bits and pieces of my dreams
that I tend to remember typically are maddeningly mundane.
The very word “dream”
connotes “not necessarily real,” right? And “flights of fancy encouraged,” yes? Other
people’s dreams sometimes involve actual flight—as in, “Look at me! I am soaring
through the sky, using my arms as wings!” People dream about achieving orgiastic
heights in sexual bacchanals, or of doing fantastically noble and heroic things
that earn them global acclaim.
Me? I dream about things like ... going to the store. Or mowing the lawn. Or walking down the street. These are Things
That I Really Do. Things That Are Not Interesting. I mean, the store I
patronize in the dream might not be one I’d ordinarily enter. The lawn might
not be MY lawn. The street might not be one I recognize. But, so what? Where’s the
fantasy? Where’s the excitement? For chrissakes, I’d settle for a touch of whimsy now and then. Am I really such a
dullard that even my subconscious is utterly
pedestrian? It’s pretty depressing.
The other night, though, I
had a very disturbing dream. Uncharacteristically, I woke up remembering a lot
of it, which I immediately wrote down. Basically, I had the sense that I was
out West somewhere. I was staying at a hotel, as was a high school friend of
mine and his wife. Only, the wife was an American woman I’d never seen before,
as opposed to the German woman to whom he’s actually married. I have no
idea why we were there, other than that we were going to run together on a nearby track.
But then somehow I got lost
and separated from my hotel. I grew increasingly panicked as I tried to find my
way back. At one point I thought I had, but I’d arrived at the wrong hotel. Somebody
told me the one I was looking for was four and a half miles away. I crept
unseen into the back seat of a car that seemed to be headed in the right
direction. The driver freaked out when I announced myself. He pulled over. He
may have kicked me out, because later I was in another car, with a couple who
brought me back to their place. They were asking me what I wanted for breakfast
when I bolted from their house, desperate to get back to where I needed to be.
Finally I was so disoriented
and distraught that, when I saw a car coming toward me, I decided I’d end my
misery by jumping to my death in front of it. But then some self-preservation
instinct must have kicked in, because I told myself, in the dream, that this
situation might not be real, and I advised myself to try waking up—as opposed
to imprinting my skull onto an automobile’s grillwork. Whereupon I indeed
awakened. In a cold sweat. Never having been so happy to be in my own bed.
I’ve no idea what, of
anything, all of that meant. It strikes me as a variation on the test dream, in that I wasn’t in control of anything. Perhaps this was just me,
again, feeling like I don’t measure up to where I’ve ended up in life. Who the
hell knows? Is there even consensus on whether dreams are truly significant? Is
a dream sometimes—most of the time—just a dream? (Note to self: Try Googling that sometime, instead of the name a bad
horror movie you watched for 20 minutes while doing crunches.)
What I do know, though, is
that I’m due soon to fly to Spokane so I can cross Washington and Idaho off my list
of states in which I’ve run for one uninterrupted hour at least once. I’ll note
here that Spokane, in juxtaposition to Bethesda, definitely is out West. I’ll
be staying in hotels. And, of course, I’ll be running—though on
streets, not on a track. All of which is a little eerie, and makes me a tad nervous, in an I’ve-probably-watched-too-many-Twilight Zone episodes kind of way.
So, what might happen at the
4.5-mile mark of one of my runs in Washington state or Idaho? There won’t be an oncoming car
involved, right?
I’ll hope for an
outcome every bit as workmanlike as my dreams tend to be.
