Let it be known that I do not have dreams with happy endings. I generally don't have what could be called nightmares, either, but the only dreams that I remember are anxiety dreams. The most common one involves my trying to get somewhere important--to campus, to a conference, to the hospital--but running into obstacle after obstacle as it gets later and later and later. Or I arrive somewhere, discover that I'm completely unprepared, and have to wing it--whether "it" be a class, a job interview, or even a social encounter. Infrequently, but maybe once a year, I have a dream in which I'm getting married: I'm actually at the church when I realize that this is absolutely the wrong move and the wrong person, and so I run around trying to figure out if I can stop the process.
I have dreams like this ALL THE TIME, regardless of what might be going on in my waking life or whether there's even any conscious source of stress. And really, unless there's a particularly novel twist, I don't think about them much; they're just psychic wallpaper.
But in the last few weeks, many of the dreams that I've remembered have had some kind of unexpectedly happy ending--they start out as anxiety dreams, but at the last moment, things get resolved. I do get to wherever I'm going, and in just enough time. I do manage to change someone's mind about an important decision. I do avoid marrying that seemingly great but inexplicably wrong guy (in last night's case, one of my colleagues [!]).
I don't believe that dreams have any predictive power, but I do wonder what these particular ones might reveal about my subconsciousness.
I mean. . . it has to be good, right?
5 comments:
Oh yes, it has to be good.
D. regularly has dreams that would normally be nightmares -- often featuring zombies -- but then in her dream she figures out the way to neutralize the zombies or whatever and it becomes quite a pedestrian dream of easy accomplishment. I envy her those, since my anxiety dreams always stay pretty anxious.
WN, somehow that sounds just like D. Not even zombies faze her!
I mean, in my dreams, I can't manage to show up for the first day of class on time with complete, photocopied syllabi. And D, when faced with the undead, saves civilization. Hats off.
No quesiton this is good news. Suggestions:
1. Your unconscious is settling into the fact that you have a good job, you are doing well at it, and you are moving ahead with your writing. In other words, in relation to some of hte big stressors of the last 8-10 years, you are finally OK. People appreciate you and they demonstrate it by giving you jobs and publishing your stuff.
2. Unhappy as it is, the GWB situation has clarified. Would I be wrong that the break up was preceded by a period of knowing something was adrift in some way that was hard to pinpoint? It might or might not have a happy surprise ending, but you were waiting for the relationship "shoe" to drop, even as you were probably doing a great deal to shore it up and be reassuring. It has dropped, and you lived. Whatever happens next, that has got to give you a feeling of competence.
That's all!
TR
Well, we all know what Freud would say! /nod And Lacan would say it in French.
But I think it's a good sign :)
I agree that it is most definitely a good sign. You can now imagine yourself being successful, which almost nobody can. I mean, we can all imagine the challenges, and imagine what life would be like after them, but getting from A to B? That's the impossible part. So if you were wondering whether your decisions are the right ones--now you know!
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