Had some profoundly vivid dreams last night, after a good long while of vagueness and reprieve from the dreamworld. It’s no surprise, given that I slept for a significant amount of time for the first time in recent memory. Probably the first night over 6.5 hours in weeks. And that, not surprisingly, was due to a major migraine, also the first in quite a while. And that, in turn, was due to insufficient coffee intake in the morning because I was running late.
The world, in short, makes sense.
But dreams themselves do not often make sense, as was the case last night. Or at least they cover the bizarre and fanciful, even when they might be able to be linked or traced to larger themes of relevance. In the first dream, earlier in the night, I was somehow trying to juggle seven or eight part-time jobs. Most of them were jobs I wouldn’t consider in real life – sales jobs and store reception – as well as a couple jobs that resembled actual work I’ve done, such as library positions. And it was all somehow mixed with me leaving Glide or cutting down hours and keeping my options open. Somehow in the dream, showing up to any one of these jobs once a week would clinch the employer’s interest in me in carrying over for the next week or month or so. But it was very difficult to track the schedule of all of these disparate jobs, which ended up boiling down into feeling like any number of school schedule stress dreams. These are a common theme in my dream repertoire, wherein I don’t know when and where my classes are, and I’m usually on the verge of being automatically failed if I miss any more classes. These can be high school or college and fill a truly disproportionate amount of my dreamlife. And compared to a lot of my nightmares, especially more historically, they’re not so bad at all.
The second dream felt better moment-to-moment at the time, but was holistically much more disturbing in retrospect. In this one, I was apparently a baker of all manner of pastries and breads. And the world was about to go to war. It was definitely 2008, and all of my bakery’s machinery reflected this fact. But most of the combatants were historical figures, mostly circa World War II. Each of the combatants came to visit my bakery and arrange indefinably large shipments of my goods to their soldiers who were about to be fighting in this war. The impracticality of shipping huge quantities of perishable food across the world to troops in conflict seemed not to faze anyone, let alone really occur to them (though it was in the back of my mind). Two themes needled me in the back of my mind profoundly – one that I was selling to soldiers, who would clearly be committing violence that I disagree with. The other was that I was unabashedly (though not openly to any given buyer) selling to both sides of the war, to soon-to-be-declared enemies. It was clear that Japan and Germany were going to be opposing each other in the war, and shortly after the anonymous Japanese diplomat left, in walked Hitler.
Hitler was not only the first actual personage I could recognize and name in the dream, but he entered the full-color world and mainframe of the dream in a sepia-tone. He was fully illustrated and visible, but he was completely sepia-tone, as though stepping from a faded newsreel and into my 2008 full-color life. He was officious but not unfriendly and ordered a million cinnamon rolls and a million items that I called muffins. He insisted that they weren’t muffins, however, and began to argue. I suggested that they might be a little more akin to biscuits, if he preferred that word. He said clearly that they were “bread” as though this word had just occurred to him. I conceded that they were a type of bread, but this was unsatisfactory to him. At this point, he began to extrapolate on how long the war would last and that if I played my cards right, there would be orders of far more than just a million cinnamon rolls and a million pieces of bread, but that could all be jeopardized by me insisting on calling bread a biscuit or a muffin. Okay, Mr. Hitler.
At this point, it was clearly disturbing me greatly that I was doing business with Hitler, but at the same time, I didn’t really see a great distinction between this and selling to other armies and other combatants. Indeed, the fact that I was selling perishable items to them and to both sides of the conflict gave me a small secret satisfaction that I was somehow thwarting their efforts and diverting money away from weaponry and into my ability to do some good. Beating swords into rotten bread, and in turn perhaps into plowshares.
The dream ended shortly thereafter – I signed to the deal after convincing Hitler to buy two million cinnamon rolls to go with the original order of “bread”. He went on his way and I distinctly remember a little bell ringing over the top of the glass door as he exited the building. The smell of fresh baked bread filled my nostrils as I sighed heavily and wondered what I was doing with my life.
Is there a message for me in all this? Clearly the compromises and the deferring of my time expenditure I’m making now in no way compare to signing pastry deals with Hitler. But was my subconscious trying to use some extreme illustration to wake me up? I clearly am starting to feel a good deal of guilt about my use of time, somewhere. Especially given that so many of my dreams tend to revolve on me doing unthinkable things in my dreams and wrestling with myself about why I don’t feel enough remorse to stop. The classic among these is, of course, eating meat – I’ve had thousands of dreams in the last 11 years where I eat meat and feel awful, and lately mostly disappointed, with myself. Generally there’s something in these dreams about realizing that I haven’t actually been a vegetarian for the last 11 years, yet haven’t realized it till just now. Waking up to reality is always reassuring in these situations, though it often takes some time to recall that the dream-bacon wasn’t real.
Waking up this morning was less reassuring. Again, I stress that I have no misgivings about my actual job or work or use of time on an absolute scale. It’s only on a relative scale, that in comparison to writing full-time, that I have questions or doubts. Especially since that was going to be the plan for a while, before the latest promotion swooped in and convinced me to stay.
Dreams derive most often, they say, from one’s own hopes and fears. (In my case, pretty much universally fears.) I can’t rule out that there are sometimes larger messages or warnings in dreams, but even they may be from one’s own internal sense of impending doom or difficulty. And clearly this issue has been bothering me lately. The only thing that really shakes me, deep down, is what was happening exactly three years ago around this time. The same misgivings, the same warnings were creeping in all around. And those proved dangerously unheeded. I pledged to not make the same mistake again. And while personal safety was clearly more abundant an issue at Seneca, making the stakes higher, I have a quality backup plan here and now, which I didn’t then. Call it a draw, I guess, which doesn’t make me feel much better.
Muffin?
