Sigmund Freud said our dreams reflect the unconscious. If that’s the case I must be considerably more worried about things than I’m aware of when awake. The dreams that I remember are certainly anxiety dreams.

For instance, once I dreamed I was in the old Herald newsroom, where it has not been located for decades. It was on the middle of the north side of the present building. So there I was, about to write a story about an event I’d covered, and couldn’t find the notes I’d written down about it. A frantic search through the papers on the desk didn’t produce them, and here was deadline approaching. So I decided to write the story from memory.

I got started and all of a sudden I couldn’t recall the speaker’s middle initial. A scramble among the papers again, but the notes didn’t appear. A heightened feeling of frustration at not being able to finish the story before deadline. So at that point I woke up still feeling anxious, but then tremendously glad to find it had been only a dream.

A lot of times the dreams involve travel of some sort. Driving a car, looking for a specific location. Suddenly there’s the location I’m looking for — but it’s on the opposite side of the thruway, and I can’t locate any way of getting across, either by exit ramp or across the median strip.

Sometimes I’ll be upstairs in a large house and have to go down to the kitchen. Door after door is opened, descending stairway after stairway as halls loom on either side. But the ones I choose to take don’t lead to the kitchen.

My parents and grandparents died years ago, but often when I’m dreaming about driving, one or more of them will be in the car with me. None of us express ourselves as being astonished at seeing each other after all these years. They are just there as part of the scenery, rarely talking and when talking uttering mere commonplaces that a person would if he was really a passenger. The dominant feeling at such times remains the sense of frustration at not being able to locate what I’m supposed to be taking these people to see.

Once in a while the dream will be about a gathering like a picnic, and there the problem is that the basket containing the picnic material doesn’t have all the items that were supposed to be in it. Where are they? Someone in the party makes a suggestion, but when I follow that suggestion, the items still don’t show up. In such dreams nobody else volunteers to look for the missing things. I’m always the only one who has to do it.

Curiously enough, the other people I dream about are never people who are still alive. I don’t recall ever having a dream about the neighbors who are still here, or about the people now working at the Herald. The ones who inhabit my dreams have gone long since.

I suppose in a real analysis it would bring out what in my nature leads to the persistence of such anxiety dreams. But as it is, I’m just as glad to be away from them when awake.



Kendall Wild is a retired editor of the Herald.