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Most
Recent
|
The
Dream
January
20, 2016
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Most people dream.
Scientists say that in fact everyone dreams, just not everyone
remembers dreaming.
Of the ones who do remember, a
small percentage will tell you that they have reoccurring
dreams.These are the same or similar dreams that return to us,
unbidden and seemingly without a waking connection, hijacking
our regular night time programming.
I'm not sure what
opens the door to our subconscious and lets out reoccurring
dreams, but no doubt something from our waking hours has touched
us. A hope or a fear that we've given thought to, or perhaps a
reminder from our past has sent an unseen signal that calls for
a rerun of The Dream.
Psychologists say that dreams
are unresolved issues that our minds are dealing with in the
'Safe' mode. Whatever the trigger, our subconscious schedules
our familiar dream to visit us once again when it deems us in
need of it.
I have a friend who was raising a very
large family in the '90's. In spite of the good salary he was
earning things were pretty much hand to the eleven mouths he was
feeding. Without warning and in the midst of a long and
successful career, he got downsized and he suddenly faced the
task of keeping his family together without an income.
He
persevered and found another way of making a living and keeping
his family clothed and fed, but now years later he is visited
regularly in his dreams with a replay of that stressful time in
his life. At least once a month he will tell me during one of
our phone conversations, 'I got fired again last night'.
The
thing is, when these old and worn dreams come to you in the
night, they are brand new to your sleeping persona. It is only
later, upon awakening that you realize it was just your familiar
rerun inflecting itself on your defenseless sleeping self,
complete with the power to upset you all over again.
But
not all reoccurring dreams are nightmares. I have my own little
vignette which comes to me every few weeks and I mention it here
only because I find it interesting. The Dream does present me
with a conundrum while I'm asleep, but I think I understand it
enough for it to have a positive effect on my waking hours.
Like my friend's drama about getting fired, my dream
also concerns my livelihood, and to understand it I need to tell
you a bit about my work history.
When I was a young
man before starting my flying career, I worked for five years a
salesman for the US Rubber Company, selling Keds tennis shoes to
retail stores. Later I worked for Cessna Aircraft Company as a
Multi Engine Demonstration Pilot, also for five years. For
almost all the rest of my working life I've been self employed,
involved in selling aircraft all over the world. It is these
facts that makes The Dream interesting to me, and this is how it
occurs.
Night has arrived and as is my custom after
going to bed, I have read until I can stay awake no longer. I
take off my reading glasses, rub my tired eyes and lay my book
on the night stand as I turn off the light. Random thoughts flit
by like feeding bats, then slow as I sink deeper and deeper
toward slumber. Night sounds move farther from my consciousness,
my breathing slows. I sleep.
The Dream bubbles up,
again to be billed as this night's Main Feature. Once again I am
working as an employee of US Rubber Company. Or of Cessna, for
it changes and they seem to have worked out a schedule for
sharing me.
In The Dream the time is the present and I
have been working for this company for the past forty or fifty
years, but now there's a problem. Many years ago Personnel had
somehow lost my records and apparently had forgotten all about
me. Through a glitch however, the company had gone on paying me
and I had dishonestly failed to bring this to their attention.
They had been faithfully sending my salary to me, but there had
been no other contact with me at all. No communications, no
meetings, no supervisor. Only the paycheck, arriving month after
month, year after year.
Of course the inevitable
slowly happened. Without someone to report to or reports on my
work to submit, I had over the years gradually slackened my
efforts until the duties that I was responsible for are now only
dim memories. I haven't really worked at my job for decades and
have grown accustomed to the faithfully appearing paycheck. I've
settled comfortably into a lifestyle dependent upon 'mailbox
money' in exchange for no effort on my part.
Now
disaster has struck. Someone in accounting has discovered me. A
person who wasn't born when I was hired has asked, 'who is this
guy and why have we been paying him for nothing for forty
years?'
I am shocked. How could I have let this
happen? I had forgotten to do what I was being paid to do and
now I would lose my livelihood.
Perhaps I can pull off
some great coup d'é·tat and I'll be allowed to keep
my job. The resulting scramble is pathetic as I frantically try
to find a shoe store that still sells Keds, or to find a dealer
for Cessna twins that haven't been produced in a quarter
century.
There are slight variations of this, but it
stays pretty close to the gist of this scenario. I do understand
the meaning of the dream though, and it serves me both as an
affirmation of my chosen profession and a warning to always
appreciate it.
I
am one of the lucky ones who has always loved my life's work. In
a sense I feel as if I've never really had to work to make a
living. I've just always done what I wanted to do and enjoyed
the airplanes, the travel and the people I've worked with and
the living just seemed to take care of itself.
I think
The Dream is to remind me of that, and most importantly to
caution me to never, ever take it for granted.
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