Awakening

Chapter One

AWAKENING 2023

I had the most wonderful dream last night. Wonderful in the sense that I can never remember having a dream like this one. For most of my life, my dreams have been those of anxiety and frustration, of being lost or thwarted. In this dream, that was not so.

I am walking around the yard that surrounds a house I have just moved into. The house is a cottage, an older home that is settled with rounded edges inside and out revealing a past era, a bygone age, and a life well-lived within. The cottage sits on a triangular piece of land, big enough to be comfortable. The land is grassy and peppered with a few shade trees. The green carpet of grass is punctuated by color: flowerbeds surround the house filled with yellows, blues, whites, while pinks appear beneath the windows. Lovely flowering bushes are scattered around the yard, fragrant lilac and bridal bouquet. There is plenty of room for my dogs, but I wonder if I should get some chickens. The lawn will need upkeep—perhaps I should get a goat or a donkey. I wander around the ample yard making plans for the future.

The nearby highway hums with life: cars and trucks fly past the little hamlet in which my cottage sits. Not far away is a town of sufficient size where shops and a hospital and a library can be found. As I stroll around my little village, each new neighbor waves at me. They all seem to know me. I feel that they care about me and accept me. I don’t yet know their names, but I will. I know am welcome here. I am safe. At last, I sense I am home.

The morning light turns the windows in my room a soft gray, awakening me from this dream slowly. I roll over on my pillow. There is no yellow sunlight yet, only the promise of a morning from the sun as it peeks over the hill outside my bedroom. Waking up from this dream of the cottage in the village is pleasant, and the images linger in my mind and put a smile on my face. I can’t remember ever having a dream like this, not in my entire adult life.

My dreams are always those of frustration and anxiety. I awaken breathing heavily, in a panic, anxious. Perhaps it is my theme park dream: when it’s time to leave, I can’t find the entrance. I am separated from everyone I came in with. Where are they? There are too many people—I search a sea of faces. From atop a scaffold of stairs, someone calls down to me and gestures for me to follow them onto the ride. You can catch up, they say. We’ll meet at the end. But I get trapped on the ride alone. Sometimes the ride is a dark tube I must enter feet first, but once I am in, there is no way out. Sometimes water floods the tube as gravity carries me down, but I am trapped in a tight spot where I cannot breathe nor call for help.

In another dream, I am wandering in a huge, unfamiliar house. I walk from windowless room to windowless room, desperate to find my way out. Each doorway leads me further in rather than back to an exit through which I can escape. When I try to backtrack, one hallway looks familiar, but as the staircases in this ancient house ascend, each passageway becomes increasingly narrow. I cannot squeeze through. I am wedged halfway in and halfway out with no means to advance or retreat. I am stuck in a stairway to nowhere.

My worst dream is post-apocalyptic: I am driving alone on a long journey on a familiar road that suddenly vanishes into a large body of water. It looks like the result of an earthquake or an act of war. People are walking into the water without apparent concern, oblivious to the danger. They follow a twisted railroad track or pick along leftover bits of concrete that were once the road. I stop my car and begin to walk with them, although I don’t know where we are going nor how we can travel on a road that is no longer visible. Sometimes I gun the engine and drive into the water, falsely believing by pressing on, I can power through all this, believing that the momentum of the car will propel me across the chasm, believing I will emerge victorious. I keep moving forward because I cannot go back. I have to keep going.

When I awaken from one of these frustration and anxiety dreams, my heart is pounding, and I gasp for air. I look around me and blink myself awake. I am in my own room again. I try to consciously slow my breathing down. Gradually, I realize it was only a dream. Waking should bring a sense of relief flooding over me, yet the deliverance from danger sensation seldom arrives. For most of my adult life, I have had these dreams. In each of them, the message is the same: I am alone. I am trapped. Something isn’t right. There is no way out.

The idea of the dreamwork was introduced by Freud: he alleged that the things with which we could not contend in the daylight, within our conscious selves, we would wrestle with during our sleep, within the darkness of our dreams. Dreams were the conduit by which the subconscious or unconscious self would work out the unspoken struggles of the conscious self. Dreams are us coaching ourselves, working out problems, finding solutions, identifying patterns. Dreams are the red flares sent up from the depths of our hearts to draw the attention of the conscious self to that which is hidden in the daylight. A dream is a message in a bottle.

The beautiful cottage in a village dream I had left me feeling contented, included, loved, and safe, standing in stark contrast to my decades of dreams where I was thwarted, trapped, and helpless. Those were nightmares, but they didn’t seem like it at the time. There were no goblins or monsters; they seemed like dreams of everyday life. Nothing you have slowly become accustomed to as normal seems like a nightmare.

Now I realize those decades of dreams were me speaking to me.
My subconscious self must have known I was trapped and alone. My dreams of desperation were trying to tell me I actually was desperate. But I didn’t know it. I couldn’t see it. I was too invested in the life I had crafted and the mask I wore. Besides, how do you awaken yourself from a nightmare? Does the awakening word come from within, or must you be touched from the outside? In a fairy tale, the princess is awakened by a kiss, but I wasn’t in a fairytale. Far from it. When you are in a nightmare, can you wake yourself up or must you be awakened by someone watching you from the outside? And how can you wake up from a nightmare if you don’t even know you are asleep?
My awakening was gradual.

The words that pierced my nightmare began a cascade of awakenings. The words came not from my mother nor my father, not from my children, but from a friend who lived two thousand miles away. Despite the distance between us—we saw each other rarely--she saw me clearly. She sensed that I had changed, that my life was worse, that I was struggling. The simplicity of her words, even today, take my breath away. Her genuine concern and her persistence to uncover the truth touched me where no one else could have. Her words were unrehearsed, far from elegant, yet powerful. This one sentence shook me awake and changed everything. All she said was this:
What is wrong with you?