Though it’s been decades since I graduated from college, every couple of months or so I have the same dream: It’s finals week, and I suddenly discover there’s a class I’m registered for (usually some kind of science class) that I forgot to attend all semester long. I have the textbook—a big one—but there’s no way I can read it, make up all my missed work, take all the tests, and hand everything in before the final, and of course, it’s too late to drop the class, so I’m going to fail. In a variation of this dream, I realize that the class I forgot to attend is the same class I forgot to attend the semester before (thus blowing my chance to replace my “F” with a better grade), and I can’t believe I forgot to attend it again! I always wake up from this dream in a cold sweat (although, now that I’m menopausal, I seem to be waking up in a cold sweat a lot nowadays).
Does this dream sound familiar? It seems to be a pretty common one. As is the one where you’re standing at the pulpit, about to give a talk in sacrament meeting, when you look down and realize you’re in your underwear—or worse, you’re naked. Or the one, common among RMs, where you get called on another mission, but hello, you now have a husband and four children and how are you going to leave them for eighteen whole months? Then there’s the one where you realize you and your husband never actually got married but you’ve been living together all this time and you have four children and how are you ever going to explain this to the bishop? (Or am I the only one who has this dream?)
Studies show that we dream, on average, four to six times per night. My husband has exciting dreams that involve speeding car chases and hijacked airplanes, espionage and karate fights and saving the world from alien invasions. My dreams—at least, the ones I remember—aren’t nearly as fun. What does it say about me that a lot of my dreams lately leave me with clammy palms and a pounding chest?
Take this one, for example: My family and I are trying to make it to the airport, but I can’t seem to get everything packed, and no one is cooperating or helping. I’m running around, gathering clothes, stuffing them in suitcases, but I just can’t get it all done, and then I look at the clock and realize with a sinking feeling that the flight is leaving in ten minutes and there’s no way we’re going to make it. Or there’s this variation of the dream, which has popped up in the last couple of years since we’ve been having financial challenges: We’re about to leave for a trip when I look up and notice our ceiling is leaking. At first it’s just a drip, but then the water starts seeping through the ceiling, running in rivulets to the corners and down the walls, and then the ceiling starts to crack and water pours into the room. I’m trying to find my husband to tell him about the leaking roof—and remind him that we’re late for our plane—but he’s nowhere to be found. I finally find him in the yard, chopping wood (a man who has never chopped wood in his life) and when I tell him the roof is leaking and we have to FIX IT RIGHT NOW and WE’RE GOING TO MISS OUR PLANE he tells me not to worry, that everything will be okay, and goes back to chopping wood. Meanwhile, the house is filling with water and the plane is taking off—and then I wake up in a cold sweat.
I’ve found that most of my vivid or recurring dreams seem to reflect current stresses, worries, problems, or life stages. If we pay attention to them, dreams can help us work through our fears, pinpoint our stresses, identify and resolve tensions in our relationships, and maybe even help us shift directions or make a life change. When I told my husband about the leaking ceiling/missed flight dream, we both realized that I felt he wasn’t paying attention to my concerns, so we had a discussion about that, and I stopped having that dream. Several years ago, when my four children were younger and the only writing I did was compiling grocery lists, I dreamed I was standing on the shore of a wide river, and I saw two friends who graduated with me from the master’s program at BYU—both of whom went on to get their PhDs, while I got married and had a baby—floating down the river in a big raft, laughing and sunning themselves, and I watched as they passed me by. It didn’t take a dream specialist to decipher that one. I knew I needed to find some time to devote to intellectual pursuits, and that started me on a path that, among other things, landed me here at Segullah.
In her memoir, Traveling with Pomegranates, Sue Monk Kidd says, “I think of [dreams] as snapshots floating up from a mysterious vat, offering metaphoric pictures of what’s going on inside. Sometimes the images suggest where my soul wants to lead me and sometimes where it does not, giving me input and guidance about choices I might make.” Kidd keeps a dream journal, a notebook in which she records her dreams and studies them, watching for significant patterns.
So I’ve decided to keep a dream journal too. It takes time and practice to decipher dreams, and writing them down is the first step. And maybe, with enough analysis and some shifts in my thinking and behavior, I’ll finally remember to go to that college class.
And now it’s your turn. What are your recurring dreams? Do your dreams shed light on your struggles and concerns? Do you keep a dream journal? Do you like to analyze dreams? (If so, what does it mean if you’re chewing a huge wad of gum in your dream and you can’t spit it out? Just curious.)
*For a fascinating look at dreams as spiritual gifts, see Barbara Bishop’s essay, “Dreams as Gifts of the Spirit,” in the Summer 2009 issue of Segullah.
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