I had to go to work. I was running late. It was 7pm, or close to it. I was due to start at 7, but I needed to change my clothes before I could leave.
I was in a tiny apartment, where I lived with three other women – my sister, an old schoolmate, and a woman I worked with briefly, a decade ago. We lived in one room. In that room were four single beds, and four people’s clothes, shoes, books, and personal items, strewn all over the floor.
I needed to change my clothes, and the one-roomed apartment had a glass door and window facing onto some kind of busy thoroughfare, so I pulled down the blind. It ricocheted straight up again. I needed to quickly eat dinner – pasta that I’d prepared earlier and put in a tupperware container, but in my hurry, I couldn’t find it. I rummaged in my bag to see if I’d packed it to take to work, and was perplexed to find, no pasta, but gourmet foods in boxes, as if someone had hidden a gift hamper in my bag. There was a box of chocolates, packets of tea, boxes of biscuits, dried fruit and nuts, that sort of thing.
It made no sense. I was confused. I was stressed. I was running late.
When I’m writing, I’m making one conscious decision after another. I’m choosing words, deleting them and replacing them with others – moving them around to build sentences, and put those together until I’m happy with the paragraph that results. Then, I do the same with the paragraphs – until I’m happy with the essay that emerges. It’s mostly a rational, conscious process, but below the conscious layer, the content includes words, thoughts, phrasings and rhythms that bubble up from somewhere deep and instinctive, and just “feel right.”
Even when I’m describing a dream, I’m using a sense of narrative and structure to recreate half-remembered scenes when, actually, most of the detail is lost to my conscious mind moments after I wake.
The tiny, one-room apartment was a very busy place. In addition to housing four beds and four women’s clothes and personal items all over the floor, it was also an office. In a corner, a woman was seated at a desk, with her back to me, working away at a keyboard. She was not one of the women who lived in the room. She had a very officey look – glasses, hair pulled tightly into a bun, tailored suit. I asked her a question. She didn’t stop typing, or look up, but shouted, impatiently, that she didn’t have time to listen, let alone respond to my question. A woman I know, who never carries a handbag, entered the apartment with a handbag over her shoulder. She, too, asked the typing woman a question. She, too, was shouted at and brushed-off.
A cloying smell caught my attention. The room suddenly felt stale and close. It smelled as if fruit had been left rotting in the bottom of a bag. I suddenly felt claustrophobic. I tried to open a window, to let in some air.
Draped over a chair near my bed, was a green leather jacket. I picked it up, and held it out to get a proper look at it. It wasn’t mine, I realised, but one of my room-mates. Then I noticed another jacket, also green, which had been hidden underneath that one. I lifted it and checked it out. It wasn’t mine either. There was, it seemed, a pile of jackets draped on the chair. I checked out each one. All different styles, all different fabrics, all various shades of green, and all belonging to someone else.
When I’m dreaming, my brain uses vastly different methods to when I’m writing, yet it’s still at work constructing stories – or so it seems, when I wake in the morning and apply the logic of my rational, daytime brain to the dislocated, fragmented scenes I manage to recall from the cinema that screened in my mind overnight. When I start piecing them together, there’s usually a narrative of some kind.
Is this just my brain using a different process to essay (essay: to write; to attempt or try) its way through some idea, to try and reach at some answer that’s eluded me in the daytime/conscious hours?
Maybe if I was good at cryptic crosswords, I’d understand what my unconscious mind is trying to tell me. An evolving pile of jackets, all different but all a shade of green? A hamper of tea and biscuits in a handbag? A smell like decomposing fruit? These odd elements feel like clues from my subconscious, but it’s beyond me to decipher them.
Sometimes, though, dreams are obviously, if creatively, replaying real-life events and emotions.
Beds and personal items strewn all over the floor of a one-room apartment sounds like a jumbled re-imagining of my elderly mother’s house. She sleeps (by choice) in an armchair in the lounge (living) room, and keeps all her clothes – clean, or worn – in piles or hanging around the room – basically, living in that room, apart from necessary trips to the kitchen and bathroom. And the other day, my daughter, who works from home four days a week, was stressed out about her job. When I poked my head around the door to ask if I could make her some lunch, she replied, from her desk, irritatedly, that she didn’t know when she’d get time to eat so she couldn’t answer.
Perhaps dreams start with an emotion and work backwards to construct a story that facilitates certain feelings and allows them to be processed at a deeper level. When my daughter directed her annoyance, unfairly, at me, the other day, my feelings were hurt. I felt irritated, but I didn’t say anything, not then, nor later, when she broke our salad bowl while rushing, in her stressed-out work-mode, to empty the dishwasher. In the new, work-from-home world, accidents can happen when workers/family members are stressed by their remote jobs.
Stress is constantly rising and plateauing in my own life at the moment, often related to my mother, although this week it was, in addition to mother-related matters, also related to – yes, you guessed it, work.
Meanwhile, in the dream, nothing was resolved. I still needed to go to work. I still needed to find my pasta. I still needed to change my clothes. It was almost 7pm, or it was just after 7pm. In the dream, time was elastic – as if time had paused at almost, or just after, 7pm.
Work was only a few minutes’ walk away, but I still wasn’t ready to leave. Maybe I could phone my manager to let him know I’d be late, I thought to myself. I felt anxious, although not as anxious as I feel in dreams where I’m about to miss a flight.
In real life, when I worked at this job, I didn’t have the autonomy to phone and advise that I’d be late. The job I was late for was the retail job in a department store that I worked at, in real life, thirty years ago; the job that, after all this time, is most often where I’m working, when I dream about work.
Photo: Moi
Blathering About Nothing 
Blather away!