I used to tell my students that dreams were one of the greatest gifts we received—free life. I’d tell them that I knew exactly how it felt to be shot because one time I had—in a dream. I had experienced, close up, in an open field, the power of a hurricane. (If I was on my game, I’d play-act one of them in front of the class). Some students would tell us about their dreams, and I’d smile sympathetically at the ones who said they didn’t dream.
That was a cavalier attitude. I’ve come to realize that dreams have a whole lot they would like to teach us. Most of my dreams are not like the above adventures—few of them are. Most of them are familiar—people I’ve known, places I’ve been, situations re-imagined. I don’t come off very well in my dreams. I’m frequently stressed, seldom in control, and usually pessimistic about what is going on. But not always. I loooove those dreams where you wake up and you want to go right back to sleep and rejoin the movie.
Sometimes those are boy-girl dreams. It is fun to find yourself with a girl in a dream—and you like being with her and she likes being with you. Mine can go two ways? I will realize (in my dream) that I am married, and be hugely disappointed and realize I have to get out of there—or the dream is pre-marriage and things progress until I wake up. I don’t dream of my wife romantically that often (not as much as I used to); when we appear together we are usually in some semi-apocalyptic setting or at a family reunion or something like that. Rarely, I will dream of her with someone else—that is very unsettling.
I smoked cigarettes from the time I was 16 to 32. Since then I have only smoked one cigarette. But I have smoked hundreds in my dreams. I woke up with the cold fear that I had started smoking again.
Do you have nightmares? Those are the worst. I will wake up and not want to go back to sleep. Sometimes I will snuggle up next to Karen, even though she is sound asleep with zero interest in physical contact. Often I will pray. On bad nights I cannot go back to sleep even then.
A strange phenomenon occurred just after I retired. I started having school anxiety dreams—like four or five times a week! It was very disturbing. My career was an area of satisfaction for me. I enjoyed what I did and felt good about doing it. So why those horrors? During my career I think it was easy for me, as it is for most teachers, to bury the stress and plow forward. That’s the ticket to survival. Buried but not dead; just dormant. My theory sags when I realize I have a lot of retired teacher friends who are not tormented by these dreams. (To any teacher friends reading this, I’d love to hear your theory.)
Another distressing element is that the Lord has almost zero presence in my dreams. I feel certain that I will call upon Him as any distressing circumstance arises in my waking life. Why should it be any different in my dreams? True, my chronology is always shape-shifting. I am frequently living in an age before I became a christian. But even my elder self ignores Jesus.
I believe that dreams are factories of experience and repentance, fueled by memory and hidden feelings. I receive insight into the person I was or would like to be in a given situation. That is experience. I too often awoke relieved that it was just a dream. That is repentance. The product the factories are trying to produce is self-acceptance.
Six years on, I’m still have school anxiety dreams, but more sporadically. I look forward to dreaming, and I try to write something down when I wake up. If I don’t do it then, it is gone. (Most of the time, it is gone.) My wife and I sometimes share our dreams, but often we don’t. I suppose it is better that way. I always liked what Bob Dylan said through his apocalyptic psychiatrist in “Talking World War III Blues”: “I wouldn’t worry about it—those dreams are only in your head.”
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