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On dreams and nightmares
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On dreams and nightmares
  I like dreams, and pay attention to the ones I remember. Even the nightmares can be very instructive. I’ve come to understand most of the dreams I have, and am able to translate most of them from the symbolic and representative language of dreams to the real-life problems I was trying to hash out while I slept. I’ve identified three distinct types of dreams I have. The symbolic dreams are usually the most interesting, like the one I had just before the birth of my first child: I dreamed I had already delivered the baby (in the dream it was a boy, although we didn’t know that beforehand) and I was carrying the baby down a street in the dark, and it was very cold. I was wearing a big coat, which was wrapped around both me and the baby. I called out to everyone I saw to help me, my baby was cold.  Biblical references aside, that dream told me that, as the time to deliver the baby neared, I was scared. I had cared for him for nine months without really having to do much except eat right; the prospect of caring for him once he was a separate human being daunted me.  Once I realized I was scared, I stopped being scared. The baby was a boy, who is now a man and a foot taller than me. We did OK. Then there are the dreams that I don’t believe mean anything at all, but are simply my brain getting bored while I’m sleeping, and making up stories to amuse itself. I sometimes wake Micheal when I have these dreams, by laughing in my sleep. One I remember involved my tying my own shoelaces together, and someone else asking what I was doing that for. “I’m just playing a little joke on myself,” I answered, and woke up laughing. The third type of dream is the kind prompted by something in real life. Examples are work-stress dreams, which are peculiar to whatever job it is that has you stressed out: You might dream you’re on an assembly line and the belt is going too fast and you can’t catch up; or that you’re doing a simple plumbing job but every time you tighten a pipe connection, another one loosens and sprays water.  My reporter’s stress dream was that I had an interview with someone who wasn’t really identified in the dream but was nonetheless Very Important—one of those interviews you wait for years to get, that some reporters never get. This Very Important Person is talking a mile a minute, and saying Very Important words, quotes any reporter would kill for. In this dream I can’t stop the person from talking, and I know they will never repeat any of the Very Important things they’re saying, and I can’t find anything to write with. I still find it disturbing—makes me all sweaty thinking about it. Micheal dreamed once of moving through time, being present at every critical moment in the history of the world, and having his camera malfunction at each event.  I did begin this column with a point, of sorts. Friday night I had a nightmare. I was working on the Journal, and there wasn’t much time and I had a lot of copy to write and edit and post, and I was trying to hurry, but there was something wrong with my computer. The keyboard was sluggish and hard to type on—instead of the light touch it normally requires, the keys had to be struck very, very hard. They felt mushy. My fingers began to hurt, then my wrists and arms and elbows and shoulders, and the keys just kept getting harder to push. “It’s because it’s cold,” I said to no one in the dream. Then I unlocked a large door in my computer and swung it open (I use a laptop and it has no doors of any size whatsoever, but dreams often ignore logic and reality). The interior of my computer was filled with peanut butter, and it was excessively thick because of being cold, and I knew I had to warm it up to make the computer work right again, and that this was a very tedious, difficult operation.  It sounds laughable. Dreams usually do when you relate them. That doesn’t mean that, in your dream state, the threat isn’t very real. I was quite distraught in that dream, over being late and having to take time to warm up the peanut butter in my computer. Believe it or not, that dream has sound logic and reason behind it. I know exactly where it came from. Micheal’s computer caught a virus last week. It was a nasty, nasty thing that spread through the operating system like wildfire, disabling one application after another, starting with the anti-viral software that would have stopped it.  An aside: I support the death penalty for people who write programs like that and loose them on the Internet. Another aside: You know the flu-like illness we all had a few weeks ago? That was easier to get rid of than the computer virus.  The Journal was threatened—when we went to bed Friday, we weren’t sure we could get the Journal up on time, or at all. Lucky for us both our sons are very handy with computers. That explains the malfunctioning computer in my dream, although my Mac wasn’t affected by the virus. Knock wood. And the peanut butter? Also easily explained. I get e-mail alerts from the FDA of recalls and food-related dangers. For weeks now, ever since salmonella was found at the Peanut Corporation of America plant, my e-mail box has been filled each day with a couple of dozen new recalls issued by companies who used peanut butter or paste from PCA in their own products—ice cream, frozen entrees, candy, granola bars, you name it. See? My computer’s full of peanut butter. Classic work-stress dream. Malware and cold peanut butter both make messes that take time and patience to clean up. Peanut butter from PCA could give you a nasty illness. I am so grateful no one’s thought up a way to write malware that sticks in the roof of your mouth. Knock wood.  |
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