One Dream-Free Night...that's all I ask

Big, crazy, jam-packed week ahead. I don’t have as many of them as I did twenty years ago, largely because I work a lot smarter now than I did then. But this week will be like the bad old days.

I’m not sleeping well lately. Those of you who know me well will recognize this complaint as it has been a lifelong problem. In the past it has been an inability to fall asleep. But now it’s just that I wake up several times during the night, and spend the rest of the time dreaming, not the good kind of dreams, but rather the exasperating ones. These are not nightmares. No one gets shot, there are no monsters. These are the kind of dreams where you’re trying to do the most mundane of tasks but can’t quite get it done. A few nights ago I dreamed that I had a tee-time with three other unrecognizable guys at Pebble Beach. They were standing on the 1^st tee and there I was in the parking lot trying my best to get my act together. First, I couldn’t get my clubs out of the trunk, then, I couldn’t find my shoes. Once I finally found them, I naturally broke a shoelace putting them on. All the while, my friends were yelling for me to hurry or we were going to lose our spot. This went on seemingly all night. When you wake up at 5:15 with this sort of frustration, you’re not going back to sleep!

So, last night I dreamed that one of my best clients was sitting in the reception area of the office waiting to meet me for his annual review. Meanwhile, I was making the interminably endless two and a half mile journey from my house to my office, facing one supernatural obstacle after another, while constantly glancing at the clock, knowing that with each new five car pileup, each new flooded road and each new Biblical plague, I was falling further and further behind schedule. When I finally pull into the parking lot, the dead locusts that had encrusted my car had jammed the door shut. I woke up feeling like I had run a marathon in army boots.

I’m sure that a Psychiatrist would have a field day with all of this. I don’t have a lot of confidence in dream analysis, I rather believe that dreams have chemical origins, not sub-conscious ones. All I want is a dream-free night.