It’s 3 o’clock in the morning and I am at the office. I’m not there because I’m working late, at least not that late. I’m there because I just woke up from a dream.
Night after night I’ve been waking up several times just after having dreamed of being in a meeting, going over my schedule of appointments or list of things to do, driving to work, emailing someone about something important (or so it seems), and impatiently waiting for a reply. Then the following morning, I come into the office and the same thing starts happening all over again, only now it’s in real life and real time. When people feel busy, they often complain they’re working 24/7. In my case these days (and nights), it seems that’s what’s happening to me. And there’s no comp time for dreaming of work.
It’s been so long since I’ve dreamed of anything but work that I’ve sometimes found myself humming “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” even as dozens of yellow-headed daffodils are popping up outside in my garden. A white Christmas on Easter would at least be a change of scenery.
I’m feeling so desperate that I’ve resorted to setting intentions just before I go to sleep. I ask whoever or whatever might be listening (and this is a real question for me since I live alone and have no pets) that I be visited by dreams of a sunny beach, the open road, a night on the town, falling in love—anything but a day at the office in the middle of the night, please. No luck. If there is a God, my requests are either falling on deaf ears or being ignored. I feel like I’m trapped pacing up and down the middle aisle of an all-night convenience store.
I am not having the same dream. This is not my own version of Groundhog Day, the hilarious movie in which the character played by Bill Murray wakes up each morning only to find it’s the exact same day as the day before. Each night my dreams are different. What’s the same is the theme: Work and more work. This is not funny. When I’m on vacation, I never dream that I’m on vacation. I sure hope that when I’m on my next vacation I am not still dreaming about work.
Buddhists speak of the “non-self” not as lack of identity but as an identity that is fluid. “It appears that human beings are wired to create a separate self,” writes Polly Young-Eisendrath in her book The Resilient Spirit: Transforming Suffering Into Insight and Renewal. We grasp onto a passing quality and make it, she writes, “into the essence of who we are.” What Buddhism teaches is that the idea we have of a separate unchanging self, of seeing oneself apart from others, is a fundamental root of our suffering. “We do not allow ourselves to be fully who we are; we want a definition of a self that exists and continues,” she writes.
In dreams, too, there is a sense of having this Buddhist “non-self” because you cannot tell your mind what to dream for you, as much as I’ve pleaded for that to happen. In our dreams, we don’t have a “definition of a self that exists and continues.” Your mind goes where it wants to go and you become who it wants you to be. And you can learn and grow from where you go and what you do in your dreams.
“People go to wild places in search for their true nature,” the Zen teacher John Tarrant said at a recent Omega program, Mindfulness, Love & Relationship, in New York City. “Where is my true nature?” he went on to ask. This is what he called a koan, an ancient Buddhist practice of posing a question that has no definitive answer because it has aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding. Here’s a koan of my own: Of all the things my mind can conjure up when I am dreaming, why in the middle of the night does it take me back to the office I just left a few hours before, and will return to a few hours hence?
Maybe I can train myself to have lucid dreams. “A lucid dream,” according to the website luciddreaming.com, “is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. This awareness is referred to as lucidity or being lucid.” When you are having a lucid dream, you are supposed to be able to manipulate the experiences you are having in the dream. I think I like this idea. If I could lucid dream when I am dreaming about work then maybe I can see myself out of the door, get into my car, and drive home to a wonderful wife who’s just prepared a wonderful meal. We are sitting outside, the weather is warm, blue birds are singing in the trees, and the beads of condensation on the glass of a tangy Sauvignon Blanc are picking up the last salmon-colored rays of the setting sun. Talk about dreaming.
Then again, it seems to me that if you lucid dream, you miss the whole point of dreaming. Dream images come from the unconscious and, as such, have much to tell us about our lives—our desires, needs, problems that need to get resolved, even illnesses. I remember in a psychology class when I was a student at Union Theological Seminary the teacher, a psychotherapist, told a story about a man who kept having a dream of seeing a huge pumpkin on the side of the road he was driving on. Turns out the man had a huge cancerous tumor in his stomach. The moral of this story, the professor concluded, is that the man’s recurring dreams were trying to tell him something he needed to know in the symbolic language in which dreams speak. As much as I don’t like dreaming about work, I really don’t want to tell my dreams what to do. I’m thinking that lucid dreaming is just another control issue that I really don’t want to deal with right now.
“No one on his deathbed ever said ‘I wish I spent more time at the office,'” the late U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, Paul Tsongas, once said. So perhaps what I need to do is let a little reverie into my life, to take a moment or two out of my day or night to give myself what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called a “psychic détente.” Instead of burning the candle at both ends, perhaps when I wake up from a dream in which I am at the office, I need light a real candle and gaze into its flame and soft pool of light for a while.
“There is no well-being without reverie, no reverie without well-being,” Bachelard writes in his On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. “We discover, by reverie, in the first place, that being is good.” And a lit candle can take us there. “One may well be interested in the inner swirls surrounding the wick, and see in the depth of the flame stirrings where shadow and light struggle,” Bachelard goes on. “But every dreamer of flame lifts his dream toward the summit. It is there that fire becomes light.”