Awake to the Possibilities

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.