2020 Is Hindsight

Have you ever had a lucid dream?

I’ve heard them called vivid dreams before. 

It’s when you are conscious of the dream that you are dreaming. Instead of waking up, you continue to observe your dream from a distance. Sometimes your conscious mind, the one that wakes you up, makes decisions in your dream—a subconscious avatar of sorts. It is a surreal feeling. 

I had one last night. 

I’m not sure what lead up to my sitting upright in bed at 2 in the morning. But there I was, fully awake and a little panicked. Then it happened. I lay back down. And travelled down, down, down. I was falling. Somersaulting as I fell. Down I went. I needed help. I screamed for it. 

My conscious mind, the one that sat me upright and knew that I was dreaming, heard my scream. It was a whisper. Help. I was falling into a mental black whole and could only muster help me in a choking gasp. 

Quite the experience. 

When I opened my eyes there was the ceiling I knew. Only it was arrayed in a pattern of dull color. I blinked and the pattern changed. Blinked again and it changed once more. I had to stand up and stumble to the sink for a glass of water before my conscious mind could fully take over. 

Now, when it comes to dreams, I’m much more of a Jungian than a Freudian. 

Freud saw dreams as a gateway to unlock repressed memories that live in our subconscious and haunt our waking hours. They were retrospective occurrences, always looking backward or intensely inward. Jung saw more in dreams. He saw them as mere symbols in a story of our minds. Often, Jung believed, dreams could look forward, into the future. To Jung, dreams were prospective, potential catalysts for psychological and spiritual renewal. 

And then there’s me, falling, hurling a scream into the abyss that surfaces in my conscious as a whisper. 

It’s hard not to take the Freudian approach. Much of my life was marked by the inability to ask for help. When I was falling twelve years ago, unable to control my drinking and drug habits, I had a precise issue with this. It was never a drinking problem. Sure I had problems while drinking, but I usually blamed a drink. At different times in my drinking career, I swore off vodka or jagermeister, blaming those liquors for the catastrophes of my drinking. I’ve blamed the people I was with or the places I frequented, without considering that I was the one who chose to be there with them. 

It was a long haul to finally ask for the help I needed. 

The first time I admitted I was an alcoholic and addict was a Freudian slip. Not one of those moments in conversation when you say smother instead of mother, but a complete subconscious statement. “My name is Mark and I am an alcoholic.” It was an accident. I didn’t expect the words to leave my mouth. My problem then was that I couldn’t read the prayer they gave me to read in our morning meditation circle at rehab. I wanted the attention off of the fact that addiction and fatigue made me illiterate. 

Freud was right about some things. 

My help me dream would have made better sense when I was incapable of asking for help. But that is in the past. I no longer cling to the ideal of the stern and emotionally infallible man. I know better. I’ve come a long way in that regard and now see my emotions as an asset, not an enemy. 

But the dream makes me think. Am I still falling in that abyss, afraid to speak up about it?

Maybe. Maybe. 

I’m a literature guy. 

I work best in worlds of words. It’s like Sesame Street. When I need answers, I turn to a book. I know and understand what Thoreau meant in Walden: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I’ve felt the twinge of antsiness, the gnaw of want for more. Shoot, I’m a literature guy who is now just as apt to quote Sesame Street as he is a transcendentalist. Parenting involves a slow and constant suppression of our more visceral senses. The work place does the same. Social media? Not exactly sharpening our better instincts. In fact, most of the modern experience, it seems to me, dulls and retards the human experience. When T.S. Elliot wrote “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” in his poem The Hollow Men, I feel him. I know exactly what he means. A collision of asteroids may have been God’s way of creating the world, but a soul’s decline feels like a slow suspiration of breath, a gradual decline by degree, a check of the email again, and again, and again. 

How do we, men and women, combat the lures of boredom and mediocrity?

I called my sponsor. 

I didn’t tell him about the dream, but I did work through some things in my life. Since, I’ve been waking up earlier to write and I’ve been back to the mundanity of tasks with more clarity and purpose than before. 

While this post will be published, as usual, the second Monday of the month, this is the first writing I’ve done in the year 2020. 

It is 2020. And so is hindsight.

It’s the year of looking back with clarity as to how to move forward. And while that may not be the story in the spotlight on your news feed, it could be the story of your recovery. Your recovery from drugs, alcohol. Your recovery from stubborness. From anger and jealousy. Your recovery from the cruelty of your childhood or the mistreatment of your adulthood. Maybe you’re in recovery from eating chocolate or from the resentment of a diet. 

Whatever your journey, we’re all in recovery from something. And sometimes the best way to move forward is by looking back, not to wallow in how little you’ve journeyed, but to marvel in how far you’ve come.