My brain confronted me with a puzzle the other night.
I dreamt I was with a large group of people in a restaurant’s side meeting room, one of those wood-paneled spaces that groups can rent for private functions. It was a casual group of people who seemingly all knew each other, though I don’t remember feeling I knew much of anyone other than my wife, who sat next to me at a small table.
On a low stage at the front of the room, everyone watched a game a little like “The Newlywed Game” in which a couple would be called forward and questioned or presented with facts about themselves.
I was called up — but not with my wife. The woman I was paired with was someone I apparently had once been seriously dating. I say apparently because I had no memory of her. None at all. Yet everyone, including my wife, knew us as a former couple and saw nothing unusual about the pairing.
I hesitated when our names were called, staying seated and uncertain I should go forward, but finally I followed this woman to the front and sat beside her.
In the dream I could see her quite clearly, yet hers was a face that did not and still does not remind me of anyone I can recall. She seemed nice and pleasant, average height and weight, round face, a nice smile, light-brown hair with tight curls.
I looked at her and tried to remember, but I also tried to act as though I did remember.
As the game began, an older woman in the front and to my right, a relative of my former significant other, stood and said something about quitting. The room erupted with laughter. The implication I gathered was that we had simply quit. My former girlfriend laughed self-deprecatingly, acknowledging the nugget of truth in the cutting joke. Her eyes shined. She was not angry or bitter.
I woke around that time.
What in the world was that dream about?
Don’t say, “Quitting.” Perhaps “quitting” is part of it, but quitting what?
I once read a theory of dream interpretation that said every person in your dream is actually you. Any significant person in the dream represents something about yourself, so you should look for the quality that the person represents. Looking at dreams that way has often helped me find a meaning.
But this time I’m a bit stumped.
What would that woman represent about me? Aside from being pleasant, she was a brief cipher, not a force. She never spoke or did anything but walk to the front.
What about myself do I feel I’ve “quit” so much that it’s a forgotten part of myself?
And what’s going on in my life now to make me feel this way?
Or, to use a different dream-interpretation theory, maybe my focus should be on the feeling the dream produced. Maybe the dream means I’m afraid there is something about me that seems obvious and funny to everyone else, including those closest to me, but I’m blind to it. That feels like a possible answer, but it also feels so universally true of people that it’s too easy an answer.
At 3:18 a.m., I rose from bed to begin writing this. That awakened my wife, who has trouble sleeping anyway, and she went downstairs to heat some coffee. I listened to the clank of her mug on the counter, the thump of the coffee pot and the beep of the microwave oven as I stared at the computer screen and tried to remember details of the dream.
Struggling with the dream and unable to make sense of it, I thought hopefully that maybe it was just an effect of a couple of pepperoncini peppers I ate with my beef dinner. I thought of Scrooge telling the ghost of Jacob Marley, “There is more of gravy than of grave about you.” It took three more visions before Scrooge not only recognized but accepted what he was being told about himself that night. Perhaps I’ll get three more cryptic dreams that will line up.
But I doubt that’s it either.
The one thing I know for sure that I quit was that night’s sleep.
Newsroom With A View 