Mr. Sandman, Bring Me An Incomprehensible Series Of Dramatic But Confusing Events

I am not sure what to make of the dream I had last week, except that there are several possible interpretations.

In my dream, I witnessed a pedestrian being struck by a speeding car. I was standing on the sidewalk, and I watched as a woman entered the crosswalk nearby. Then a car approached, and I could see that it was not going to stop at the stop sign. And then she was hit. It was not bloody or anything, but I remember calling 911, and being stymied by the operator, who promised to connect me with either the police or paramedics and never did. I ended up calling back again, and the same thing happened.

Flavor Flav was right.

I later went about my way, heading somewhere else with whoever I was hanging out with. It was morning, and we were in some leafy college town, possibly Berkeley, Portland, or Madison. I soon got a call from an unknown number (while I was still on hold with 911). The call was from the victim. She said she had asked the other witnesses, Who was that guy who saw me about to get hit and said nothing, just stood there, didn’t yell "Look out!" or anything, and they told her it was me. I protested briefly, but her moral indignation came through. I was a terrible human being. Then I woke up.


Watch out, indecipherable symbol from my disturbed unconscious!

I told this story to a group of co-workers as we went for coffee the following afternoon, and one told me that the emotion you feel in a dream is generally the emotion you are feeling in real life that creates that dream. This may or may not be true, but that is what she told me, and who am I to question someone who chose our employer's more costly PPO over the freebie Kaiser plan because it would pay for her therapist?

What I felt coming out of this dream is guilt. More specifically, I felt guilt over my failure to prevent someone from being hurt, and over the fact that I could have done more to make things right. I see two real-world scenarios that could be the cause of these feelings, and hence this dream.

The one that springs immediately to mind is my relatively recently failed relationship. Not surprisingly, I feel bad about being a source of pain for someone I care about, and for temporarily ruining her life. I had seen for a while that things were not going well, and since deciding to end it several months ago, I’ve been wracked with guilt that I didn’t do enough to try to turn things around, or that I should have figured out long ago how our relationship would end, and dealt with it back then instead of letting the situation get worse. So to get all Freudian, you could say the woman in the crosswalk was my former girlfriend; the car was the impending end of our relationship; the 911 call was my too-little-too-late attempt to fix things (by dumping her), which failed -- hence the inability to summon an ambulance; and her follow-up call was my own guilt.

The other possibility may be more likely, if only because it is more timely, and more connected to my actual life obsessions from the last few weeks. The union where I work is currently embroiled in a nasty battle with our international affiliate, which (to make an extremely long and wonky story short) is attempting to rip 65,000 of our members away from us and shove them against their will into another local union that has crummier contracts. If this fascinates you, I encourage you to check out www.seiuvoice.org for a whole bunch of propaganda that I wrote about this issue. Anyway, while myself and all my co-workers are fighting hard to prevent this travesty, the reality that we may very well lose has been lurking behind everything we do, since the deck is stacked against us. So it's possible to see the pedestrian as my beloved union members, the speeding car as the International Union that is about to ruin everything, and the 911 call as my frustrated attempts to stop this disaster, which it may be beyond my power to do.

There is also a third and more unsettling interpretation. What if my dream was not about guilt at all? What if it was actually about fear -- fear of something that may happen, or be happening right now? What if the dream was more about me? It was, after all, my dream. And this is, after all, my blog. So what's happening in my life that could spawn a dream like this one? Perhaps it is my uncertainty about my own direction in life, what with graduate school and failed relationships and part-time work and possibly unattainable goals.

I've always been rather culturally conservative with my own life -- I work office jobs, I don't take a lot of risks, I stay in one place and do the same thing for long periods of time. However, in the past 18 months I've changed careers, moved 400 miles, dumped my girlfriend, and gone back to school. I also turned 30. These things have a way of making you think about the big picture of your life. So maybe the woman in the crosswalk wasn't someone else. Maybe she was me. Maybe the dream is about my fears of what may happen to me after shaking up my previously placid and predictable existence, and how I might not be able to see it coming, or stop it, or get through to someone who can help me after it happens. Whatever it ends up being.

This is why dream interpretation is bullshit.