Breaking the Dream Cycle

I feel fairly certain I must have had dreams like this even earlier, but from the time I was entering seventh grade, I have periodically had huge, anxiety-driven dreams about going back to school. The first that I remember must have happened in the weeks before seventh grade started. It was a huge change, going from a neighborhood K-6 elementary school to a new school (in a very old building) that collected the entire district into one seventh grade class, organized into “teams,” where I would go from knowing everyone in our class of 30ish to knowing only those 30ish in a class of 350 or so, where I would go from a building I knew every corner of to a building I’d never even been inside. And all of that unknown manifested itself into one of those crazy dreams where I had to get to a particular classroom but I could never quite get there, despite going through all kinds of rooms, tunnels, crawlspaces, even through the house my great grandparents had lived in (in fairness to my unconscious mind, it was on the way to the school). A classic “I’ve got to be someplace and can’t get there” dream, one that I still retain some visual memory of to this day.

Then for years it seemed to repeat in the weeks before school would begin – multiple dreams about trying to get to school, to get to a classroom, or getting there and having to leave, or any variation on those themes. Right through college, those continued on the regular.

So one might like to think that once my schooling was done, or at least once my grad schooling was done, those dreams would cease. After all, September was no longer the true start of a new year for me . . . I was out in the world, making of myself what I would. But no. Instead, those dreams morphed into a new anxiety: the “I have to go back and finish my degree” dream.

Now: this one I brought on myself, in the sense that, on first try, I didn’t entirely complete my bachelor’s degree. I was not only a burned-out bitter drunken mess, I was a misinformed burned-out bitter drunken mess who believed he had not met the graduation requirements and just said “fuck it.” A couple of years later, once I had gotten sober, it turned out that I had been, in fact, misinformed. I had completed all the requirements, and essentially had to file paperwork and I would graduate. So, that dream had a reason to be. And it seemed like it would always have a reason to be. Less of an August/September thing than the original back-to-school dreams, nevertheless I would periodically have some sort of dream about not having completed my degree and having to go back to college (or even high school), sometimes decades later.

That even expanded to jobs. Not six months ago, I dreamed that for reasons I could not divine, I had to return to work for the State of New York, back to DEC. It was clearly a temporary assignment, but still pretty terrifying.

But a couple of weeks back I had the strangest dream, one that might finally, 50 years later, signal a turn-around in my psyche. It had an odd twist in two ways. First, I didn’t dream that I was back in school, exactly, but that I was back at a two-week summer program, the School Press Institute, that I attended while I was in high school. I was me, present-day me, well aware that I was the only late-stage adult in the program with a whole bunch of high-schoolers. We all had two huge projects to finish before the end of the program (historically accurate – that SPI program produced both a newspaper and a “yearbook” in less than a fortnight), and everyone was freaking out a little bit (also historically accurate). For most, it was their first real high-pressure deadline scenario, and the outcome mattered. And at some point in the dream, I just realized that for me, it didn’t. I just didn’t need to get my project done – mine didn’t affect anyone else’s, and it didn’t matter one way or the other. And so, I just didn’t finish it. It was fine.

I could take a light interpretation, that these anxiety dreams no longer have the impact they once had. I could also take the dark interpretation – even my anxiety is giving up. Either way, it was a pleasant relief after so many decades to have a dream where the real-life situation conquered the urgency of the ridiculous premise of the dream.

Since I started writing this up more than a week ago – interrupted by several real-life projects – I’ve had another dream of the sort. This one was more of a “torn from today’s headlines” dream, since it was about one of the projects I’ve been working on, which I’ll be able to share soon. Since my last birthday, when Lee gave me a wonderful present of a Kala U-bass, I’ve been learning how to play the bass. When my music school was forced to cancel this month’s performance due to the latest COVID spike, they changed it to a video project and watch party. I had wanted to just do a quick singing video like I usually post on Instagram, but somehow it morphed into a need to record piano, vocals and bass, and that necessitated recording individual tracks, re-learning Ableton Live, shooting a bunch of video on my phone, editing that all in Premiere Pro – it became a whole thing. And while I’m relatively happy with the outcome, it did lead to a very vivid dream where I was trying to get this recording project done, and my beautiful new bass just came apart on me – it delaminated, the neck came off, the strings were everywhere, and I was still trying to play it in its deconstructed state so I wouldn’t have to redo the take. But – and here’s the improvement – it was okay. It didn’t create panic, fear or anxiety. I was sad that my beautiful gift would now have to be taken in for repairs, but that was the extent of it.