A Pilgrim’s Digression

I finally went to the doctor yesterday concerning my sleep problems.
She said its difficult to diagnose the origins of sleep disorders, and
then its also difficult to cure them. Insomnia can be caused by any number of factors including diet, health, age, mental wellness. Have I been depressed? She asked. What’s my caffeine intake during the
day? What triggers my waking in the middle of the night? And what
prevents me from falling back asleep? On nights that I do sleep all
night, do I wake up but then fall back asleep? If I do fall back
asleep, is there something I am consciously doing that achieves this
desired result? Conversely, when I can’t fall asleep, am I doing
something mentally that prevents it?

Good questions, all. I have little hope of answering them. She took
my blood pressure, and it was normal. She said most likely my high
reading last week was triggered by lack of sleep, rather than vice
versa. Same with the headache. The doctor prescribed nothing, but
told me to go to Health Services at work three more times this week
for blood pressure readings, and I am to return to the doctor with the
results on Friday.

Last night, ironically, I slept well all night. I dreamed I was back
in High School. I left my books in my locker; I showed up late for
class. I put my head down on my desk in bored diffidence, and my
teacher asked me to raise my head, which I did with the characteristic
teenage sigh and eye-roll. I was cool. Freud would call this a
wish-fulfillment. All dreams were wish-fulfillments to Freud, a
theory which I have never quite understood. Interpretation of
Dreams is a good book to read for Freud’s descriptions and
interpretations of the dreams of his patients. I don’t find it as
helpful for interpreting my own dreams. But in the case of last
night’s dream, it probably was wish-fulfillment. In my dream, I even
had a pretty girlfriend, a composite of my wife and some other girl I
knew in High School. Obviously, my subconscious carefully elided the
fact that I was having a pleasant dream about a woman other than my
wife by giving some of her features to my dream girl.

Let us probe deeper into this matter …

The dream girl, whom I will call Sandy Cheeks, had features of my wife
but also of a girl I went to school with, whom I saw just recently.
When my wife and son and I were in West Virginia visiting family, in
July, we took my son to the public swimming pool. There, I saw this
woman, Sandy Cheeks, for the first time in over ten years. She laid
her towel right next to ours, actually, but steadily ignored us. I
never even said hello to her because she refused to look at us, even
though she was sitting so close that a observer might have thought we
were all together. I mentioned to my wife after we left the pool that
I had known her.

My wife said, “Well, she practically sat on top of us and then ignored us the whole time. Why didn’t you say hello?”
I said, “She seemed to be pretending that we weren’t there.”
My wife said, “Then why didn’t she sit somewhere else?”
I said, “I don’t know. Maybe she wanted me to know that she was ignoring me. I kept waiting for her to look at me and acknowledge that she recognized me. Then I was going to say something.”
My wife said, “That’s a strange answer. Why would she want you to know that she was ignoring you? How well did you know this girl in High School?”

I could now see where the general trend of questioning was going, so I said, “I only knew her from afar.”
My wife said, “Are you sure? Then why would you recognize her immediately after more than ten years? And why would you remember her name?”

We were headed down the slippery slope now … I had to cut this short. But how?

I said, “I remember her because she had a bad reputation in school.
Rumors were, she was really promiscuous.”
“Uh-hunh, so that’s how you know her,” my wife said.

“D’oh!” I said.

We didn’t really argue, my wife and I. We were going back and forth
more in a half-joking manner, really, but the incident must have stuck
in my mind. Seeing that face from the past there at the pool, so
unexpectedly, I thought to myself, “She seems attainable now.”
That might seem like an odd thought to think about someone who is determinedly ignoring me, except that I knew that if I had wanted, and if I had been free, I could have spoken to her and gone on from there. Twelve years ago, I would never have been able to look at her straight in the face. Today, I am not the boy I once was. It helped that to me, in terms of her attractiveness, she seemed perfectly average now, whereas ten years ago, she seemed definitely out of my league. Of course, you’ll remember that up to that point, one of my few romantic achievements in “my league” was going steady with a one-eyed girl in grade school (see Young Love in the archives).

Thus in one way, my dream was a wish-fulfillment in the sense that I
was having the chance to relive High School with the extra ten or
twelve years of experience I have accumulated since 1991. I was bold,
I was non-chalant, I was cool. In some ways, probably every man
wishes he could do the same, not just correct the mistakes of the past
but correct himself. Why? Well, as with everything involving men, it
comes down to sex, really. Every man knows that armed with the
experience of a thirty-year-old, his fifteen-year-old self would be
quite the ladies’ man. Would a man really rend asunder the fabric of
time itself in order to have had more and better sex in High
School? That question is best left unanswered.

In another way, my dream was occasioned by my own son starting
pre-school yesterday. Actually, his first day was Friday, but it was
just a “transition” session, only an hour, and I attended with him.
Yesterday was much more difficult. When his mother and I left him, he
cried so hard. He grabbed his mother’s shirt and wasn’t going to let
go. The teacher had him around the waist and was trying to pull him
away, but he had a good grip, and all the while the tears were
flowing. We stood outside the door until he stopped crying, which
only took about a minute (the teacher asked him if he wanted to feed
the class Guinea Pig). His mother was crying, too, and I felt sad
myself.

I worry most about how he will get along socially in school because I
myself felt like such an outcast. Thus perhaps my dream can be
interpreted as a wish for his happiness in school. That may be
slightly incorrect; I don’t know that anyone is really happy in
school. As for myself, I hated it, which does not explain why I later
became a teacher for a time. Or perhaps it explains everything, I
don’t know. Perhaps what I should say is that I wish him happiness in
his relations with other children. That is a good thing to wish for,
I think.