Rex

I had a dream with a talking Tyrannosaurus Rex walking around in a food court.

(I know there are many things wrong with that sentence. Just accept it. We can talk about how weird and jarring dream images can be some other time.)

Might as well call him Rex. Rex rushed around the food court in a panic, his right hand folded over his neck in a way that made it look more like a flap than a hand. (Even though he was a T-Rex, he had long, thin arms in my dream. Again, just accept it.)

Rex had just come inside after trying and failing to hunt down a group of humans — the whole dream had a major Jurassic Park vibe, but we don’t need to go into that here. The point is that Rex was super hungry, rushing around past all these tables full of cakes, pies, meat, candies, and sandwiches, muttering to himself all the while, “What am I gonna eat? What am I gonna eat? Oh my God I’m so hungry I’m gonna starve! What am I gonna eat?”

Obvious solution, right?

Right.

But Rex didn’t catch on. Hell, I didn’t even catch on until after I’d woken up and written the dream down. He’s rushing around, frantically searching for a solution, with a perfectly viable solution literally within his reach, but because the solution doesn’t one hundred percent line up with his preconceived idea of what a solution would be, it doesn’t even register.

Surrounded by perfectly good food and he thinks he’s about to starve.

Now, why am I mentioning this? One dream is all good and well, and it’s a suggestive image, but one dream is only one dream, after all. Doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

But this is a recurring pattern in my dreams. Someone or something (or me…) putting up abstract barriers between themselves and the perfectly obvious solution to their problems. Or even creating problems that don’t exist — mostly for the sake of having a frustrating problem to work on.

Something about getting a perverse enjoyment out of feeling frustrated and anxious over not getting what they want — possibly in order to hide from themselves the fact that they’re afraid of getting what they want.

Anyway.

It’s a definite pattern in my dreams. The T-Rex dream was from about a week ago, but the reason I’m writing about it now is another dream I had last night.

And before you ask, no, I will not be talking about that dream. There are some things even I won’t talk about in public — or with anyone at all, under any circumstances, ever. Period. Let’s just say last night’s dream was a little more personal, a little more direct, and a little more on the nose.

(Or a lot more of all those things.)

I know some of my readers might think it’s silly (or at best misguided) for me to take dreams so seriously. But they do have a way of revealing our own foibles and behaviors to us over time. And they have a certain artistic coherence of their own — every bit as worthy of study and interpretation as a poem or any consciously-produced work of art. Plus — who knows? — with enough dedication, the gods themselves may even speak to us through our dreams.

With this particular pattern in my dreams, I see two things I do all the time: creating problems for myself and dismissing perfectly acceptable solutions because they aren’t the perfect solution.

Probably everyone creates problems for themselves at some point in their lives, either out of boredom or because they secretly enjoy feeling angry, anxious, or frustrated. Plus there’s a whole self-destructive undertone here, because if you create enough non-problems for yourself, you can fix your attention on them for long enough that your real problems will come and clobber you. (Which may be the root of a lot of anxiety — steadily-mounting dread over the day when all the realities you’ve dammed up flood over and drown you.)

But if you’re an anxious type you already know that on some level, and that self-destructive aspect is why you secretly enjoy your anxiety.

So: I create problems for myself because I enjoy creating problems for myself. That in itself doesn’t have to be a problem, though. What’s the writing of a novel if not the creation and gradual resolution of a big, complicated problem that doesn’t really exist? There are ways of redeeming all these evil tendencies by putting them into the service of life — allowing me to obscenely enjoy all the anxiety and self-loathing on a symbolic level while (gradually) learning to attend to the demands of everyday life without overindulging those nasty tendencies in real life.

Sublimation, rather than repression. Because repression never, ever works in the long term.

Then there’s the second point: perfectionism. But perfectionism isn’t really a separate problem so much as a rationalization for not taking action, or a petty rebellion against reality on the grounds that “it’s not perfect!”

(And believe me, when it comes to rationalizations for not taking action, I know all about that! Practically wrote the book on it. Or, rather, maybe I should write a book about it…)

The point is, neglecting what’s good because it isn’t perfect is a recipe that keeps you away from both the good and the perfect. So congratulations. You played yourself.

And now that I’ve written all this I’m starting to feel a lot of bad conscience, because the last thing in the world I have any right to do is get on a moral high-horse or preach to people or tell anyone how to live their lives. All I’m doing here is working through my own stuff, and I don’t want to impose my view of the world on anyone. I like giving advice even less than I like receiving it — even if I have been working to get better about receiving advice because there are a lot of people out there who know things I don’t know and understand the world a hell of a lot better than I do.

So I’m just talking about myself here. My own personal dreams, tendencies, and efforts. Your mileage may vary, as the saying goes.

But for the life of me I can’t figure out why the dream was about a T-Rex…