In some dreams, I’m trying to put out the paper on outdated technology like this, and strugglng to log into systems I used 40 years ago.
I have this vague memory from the psychology classes I took in college that Freud (or someone) described dreams as being about “wish fulfillment?”
Googling just now, I find that my memory was a bit off, but not entirely. And he explained, apparently, that sometimes your dreams had to be interpreted (I suppose by a guy with a couch) for us to see how they involved such satisfaciton. But explaining all that is not my point in this post, so I’m not going to break it down further. I’m just interested in asking this question: Do any dreams involve wish fulfillment?
Do yours ever involve that? I’ve read of people being disturbed because they are awakened from dreams that were so pleasant they hated for them to end. Well, good for them. I don’t have those, at least not in a long time.
Oh, occasionally I have one that might fulfill some people’s wishes, but I generally find something in them to worry about. I wrote about one of those back here.
But mostly, they’re just about stress. They’re not nightmares, not the kind of things where you wake up in a sweat and are afraid to go back to sleep. I occasionally had one of those when I was very young, but that was decades ago. No, these are just stressful, in a way that exceeds the stress levels of everyday life, but not by much. Mostly, they’re just irritating, something I could do without (as least I think so — perhaps they serve some purpose that eludes me, lacking the Freudian “interpretation”).
I’ve touched on this topic before, but I return to it now because I was particularly irritated last night, but it’s hard to describe why — beyond the fact that they woke me up repeatedly, and when I went back to sleep, I’d return to the same stupid dream (which didn’t have much plot, beyond having constant trouble performing a particularly silly task). That was unusual, and frankly I think it was drug-related. I’ve got a cold, and trying stave off chest congestion, I took something we had bought in Amsterdam when I had mild COVID during our Europe trip last year, because we couldn’t find the more familiar guaifenesin.
I’m not taking that again, at least not at night.
But that still leaves all those other, “normal,” every-night stress dreams.
So what am I talking about here? Well, there are several categories, most of them themes that I’ve visited many times:
- One huge category involve riffing on the common dream that you’re in college, and it’s time for the final exam, and you’ve never been to the class, and you don’t dare ask anyone, so late in the game, where the class is. For me, these seem to be only a slight exaggeration of my first couple of years in college. But I hear almost everyone who’s been to college has them. And there are variations, such as: I’m at a conference that my work sent me to, and it’s the last night before i fly home, and it occurs to me that while I have socialized with the other attendees in the evenings, I haven’t been to a single work session.
- This may occur more than any other sort — so often that I think my lack of imagination regarding regarding plot is worse than Hollywood’s. These are newspaper dreams, which is understandable. But I haven’t had a newspaper job in 16 years. I’m aware of that in the dream, but the plot twist is that I’ve been asked to come back (frequently to the most stressful paper I ever worked at, in Wichita) and do stuff I used to do. Specifically, I’ve been asked to work late nights or weekends, which means I’m entirely responsible for everything that happens. And things don’t go well. I get way behind on reading all the copy; baffling technical problems arise, etc. Routine stuff, but it’s all happening on the night I’m in charge, and I’ve still got to get the paper out, as always. Anyway, I know exactly where all this comes from; I just don’t know why I’m still having them.
- Variations on details of those previous categories. For instance, it’s often the night before I have to return home from a trip, and my hotel room is unbelievably strewn with enough clothes to fill the Belk men’s department, and most are dirty, and I can’t figure out how to pack them. Or speaking of technical problems, some dreams are about nothing else: I need to look up something simple, that would be easy in waking life, but I can’t get to the right page on any device. Which is weird, because all my life I’ve loved technology, and helped my coworkers learn it. Knowing that makes it even more frustrating….
That last word might be more apropos than “stress.” I should refer to a lot of them as “frustration dreams.” But that doesn’t describe all of them, so I’ll stick to “stress” as a catchall.
I’m not looking for diagnosis, advice or a cure. I can live with these things; I’d just rather not.
And I’m wondering: Does everybody have these, all the time? If you have satisfying dreams about wonderful things, cheer me up by telling me about them. No, don’t. I might start having “envy” dreams…
Related Posts
On that last point: Sure, even I dream about “wonderful things.” I can fly, or I find myself living in a huge house of appealing, engaging design. But flying isn’t all that great: I haven’t fully learned to control it. I’ve been to the mansion before, and I want to return to a particularly interesting room I had seen before, but can’t quite find my way.
Mark Twain wrote a story late in life that featured a terrifying figure called the Superintendent of Dreams. It’s like I’ve got one of those, and he employs an assistant whose entire job is making sure I don’t fully enjoy the fun stuff that comes along in the dream. He’s all like, “How do we make this less fun for him?”…
It’s not a big deal, but it’s tiresome…
Absolutely, I have dreams like those. Almost all of the dreams I remember involve some sort of frustration: trying to find someone, or trying to get back to them: trying to get to (or back to) a certain place. I don’t remember ever reaching my goal.
The only recent dream I can remember that wasn’t about frustration involved my being charged at by a scary dog. I reared my leg back and gave him a good kick, whereupon I was awakened by my poor dog yelping because he had been kicked off the bed.
Yikes!