“Servus James!” said my local shopkeeper, who occasionally likes to slip into German. “Wie geht’s?” (Hello, how are you?)
“Prima! Ausgezeichnet! Lebend den Traum!” (Champion, top notch, living the dream!)
But I sincerely hope I’m not living out my dreams. That might be more like lebend den Alptraum. Living the nightmare. My dreams, at least the ones I can recall, are not to be envied. I once tried to delve into them by reading Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, but I abandoned the book when I came up against Freud’s assertion that dreams are basically wish-fulfilments. Well, if that were so, I must be of a peculiarly masochistic disposition.
I have recurring dreams, a phenomenon of which Freud said he had no personal experience. For a lengthy period I had a dream about being back at school. I find myself in a school corridor (I’m not sure if corridor is the right word, rather loggia, these passages being open to the elements and therefore supposedly protective against tuberculosis), late for class, struggling to interpret a copy of my timetable. You know the sort of thing – maths, French, double English… I am in school uniform. As the dream recurred this became more and more bizarre, and certainly contributed part of the general sense of angst. A man in his 40s, in school uniform. This dream visits me less often now (or perhaps it is I who, like a ghost, revisit the old alma mater), but it still occasionally returns, and I wake to wonder, why have I gone back to school? Surely it must be to carry out some task. There is something I should have done when I was here, that I did not do. I have returned to complete unfinished business. What business? What can it be? What challenge did I not face up to?
But this scenario has largely been replaced by something frankly much more disturbing. Now in my dream, I am back at work, as a doctor. Always, the dream takes place in hospital, never in general practice in the community. Again, I am in a corridor, flitting between units, simultaneously grappling in my mind with a particularly difficult and thorny problem of medical diagnosis or management. I stay in the corridor, shirking the problem, avoiding the encounter, full of a sense of skulking guilt at my malingering, and wondering how long I can get away with this lack of activity, before I am found out.
I wake in a cold sweat. What can it possibly mean? Clearly these two recurring scenarios have common themes. They are anxiety dreams. Underlying them is a strong sense of Impostor Syndrome. They don’t seem to serve any useful physiological, psychological or spiritual purpose, nor to exhibit any positive adaptive value. I wonder if they don’t perhaps evince a mild form of post- traumatic stress disorder. I say mild, because I can well imagine that army veterans who have experienced at first hand the horrors of war can, and do, suffer intolerably. I count myself fortunate that when I rise in the morning all the shady apparitions dissolve.
The real world and the dream world are as different as night and day. In the morning, I let it all go. I’m not attracted to researches in the unconscious. I think I incline to the stiff upper lip ethos of the late Duke of Edinburgh, and just get on with it. I have a deep distrust of the medical profession. It isn’t okay to say you’re not okay. I wouldn’t dream of undergoing psychoanalysis. What a can of worms that would open up. A Pandora’s Box. So I just keep smiling. With respect to PTSD, in time of war, Winston advised his officers, if you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep away until you can. He wouldn’t have recognised the term PTSD. He might have recognised shell shock, which is at least better nomenclature than cowardice.
I’m told I smile a lot. I’ve even been reprimanded for it. “Why are you always smiling?” asked Hobsbaum, my Senior Honours English Lang & Lit tutor, a lifetime ago. I said, “It’s a way of telling people you wish them no harm.”
“Humph.”
I even received a one-on-one tutorial from a consultant orthopaedic surgeon – who else? – on how to be intimidating to colleagues, in order to get your way. “And don’t smile!”
What a load of tosh. Didn’t Our Lord tell us to be the light of the world?
Sometimes I adopt a Calvinistic attitude towards my dreams. Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree… They are my version of the grotesque portrait in the attic. Surely I have wasted my substance in wild and riotous living. Yet why should I be tormented by memories of my erstwhile efforts to help people?
Yet I count myself fortunate that, for the most part, these nocturnal disturbances to not extend into the wakeful day. By the time I reach the village shop to collect my newspapers, I am entirely euthymic, and ready to indulge in some light-hearted banter.
“Servus James! Wie geht’s?”
“Prima! Ausgezeichnet! Lebend den Traum!”
jamescalumcampbell 