Last night I had the strangest dream

“Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.”    --  Heraclitus.

Last Night I had the Strangest Dream

9:44

Our dreamworld has been the subject of scientific scrutiny for a very long time. Like many other people, I've always wondered about my own dreams. Especially when they get wild and wooly, as can happen when illness forces me to take drugs that can affect those dreams. That happened this week, and it produced a doozy.

The med is Benzonatate, and my dosage is 100 mg. taken three times a day. Its side

effect of hallucinatory dreams caught me off-guard last night, because I gave only a cursory glance at the label before downing the first pill.

Live and learn, although I'll stick with the prescription this week, because it does what it’s supposed to do: it makes me cough less, thereby allowing me to absorb fewer punches to my rib cage when my current pneumonia hacking flares up.

 I fell asleep quickly, but I was awakened about two hours later after a coughing spell zig-zagged past Big Ben and slammed hard against my ribs.

 I looked across the bed at my slumbering wife and moved out to the couch recliner in the den so she could sleep in silence.  It was 3 a.m., and I fell asleep almost immediately out there.

Then came The Dream:

It was late at night, and I had just arrived in a city that seemed familiar to me. I was with a group, and we had driven here to perform some vague public service job. The adrenaline was flowing as we unpacked our gear and settled into an inner-city hotel. Then we went to bed exhausted but were soon jarred awake by explosions and fires that lit up the streets outside.

Confusion, smoke and havoc were everywhere, and I lost track of the other group members who vanished in the chaos. I guessed everyone just scattered to help with whatever disaster was unfolding.

I was slow in getting started, as everything in the room was moving in slow motion. I groped around for my cell phone but could not find it. I reached around for my clothes and shoes, but no luck. Thankfully, I had worn my jeans to bed.  Those were all I wore when I finally staggered outside alone and onto the crowded street.

Nothing seemed familiar, even though I felt I’d been in this city before. The explosion had changed everything. I had a general sense of which way to go, but I couldn’t seem to make myself understood to others I passed when I asked for specific directions. Then there was this: I couldn’t make my rubbery legs move right. So, I wobbled.

  Out of nowhere, a kindhearted stranger appeared, saw me shivering in the night air, stopped, and gave me his coat. He wished me well, sat me down on a bench, then walked on. 

I remember thinking I needed to call the editor at my newspaper to tell him I could cover this story, once I found out what the story really was. I considered it something important that I must do.

But I was feeling increasingly isolated from the crowd around me, I still didn’t know where I was going or how to get there, and I began fading out, frustrated on many levels, yet oddly welcoming an encroaching restfulness.

Suddenly, I woke up and found myself standing right back in the middle of my den. All three of my dogs were sitting at my feet and staring straight up at me, expectantly.

It was 4 a.m., about an hour after I’d dozed off.  I shook my head and looked around the darkened room.

  “What the hell was that about?” I asked aloud to the dogs.

They didn’t answer. Instead, hearing my voice, they relaxed, curled up and went back to sleep.

Then up pops these curious lyrics in my head from an old Kenny Rogers song called "The Kind of Fool Love Makes":

Anyone can read the signs,

or the writing on the wall;

It's all right there to see,

except someone like me,

who can't see the truth at all.

I decided to dissect what I’d just dreamed, what it was all about, and how I felt about it. I did this while knowing a smarter guy might say, just forget it. A dream is what it is, and it’s probably nothing more than the trash heap of every weird thing that happened that day. Just move on. Get your sleep.

As my wife would tell you though, that’s not me. I seldom meet a situation, idea, person -- or dream -- I don’t want to analyze. Why should I change tonight?

Famed psychologist Carl Jung made a pretty good living doing his analyzing. He believed dreams come from our unconscious. He felt they reveal unique insights that can move us forward, get us unstuck, and help us grow. To him, dreams hold the wisdom of the unconscious mind, and they nudge us nightly toward a wider view of ourselves.

There is a catch, however. The mysterious dream maker lives in our unconscious mind and doesn’t have a straight access to our consciousness. So, since it can’t speak to us directly, it communicates in symbol, image, metaphor, and emotion.  The dreamer must learn the language of the dream, and that skill doesn’t come easy. The dreamer must decode those images and figure out why they seem important.

What matters is what the image means to you.

This dream was affecting me emotionally, so I set my doubts about Jung's method aside to give it a try.

Here’s what I came up with:

The dream city was Oklahoma City, where I grew up and worked as a reporter before transitioning to college teaching. The havoc unleashed in the dream was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and I was trying desperately to do what I actually did do in April of that year: report on the downtown bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and its human impact on Oklahoma.

The confusion displayed in the dream was what we all felt that day on April 19, and the desperation I personally felt was what I really did feel as I covered that attack. I wanted to provide answers to the legitimate questions everyone had. That took more than a month, but clearly the legacy of it is still a part of me, three decades later.

There were elements or images of the dream that didn’t fit, however: I went into action partially naked, with little body control, and unable to interact with those around me before my senses faded out completely. What was all that about?

After all, I wasn’t killed in the bombing. I was 15 miles away when it happened, and I didn’t start reporting from Ground Zero until the next day. The only part that made some sense was not being fully clothed. By 1995, it had been years since I’d been reporting the news fulltime. Was I feeling professionally unclothed? Out of uniform? Did I still have the skills and instinct to do that job?

But why dream this dream at all, and what was my unconscious dream maker trying to tell me?

I developed two interpretations.

First, I was simply identifying with those 168 souls who died in the bombing and its aftermath. The clarity of feelings is nowhere better felt than in dreams. So, for the first time in 31 years, my subconscious took me into what dying might well have been like for these victims as they were losing the grip on their lives and losing contact with the living. Oddly, in my dream that didn’t feel like an altogether horrific experience as the fade-out neared for me. A sense of peace was even present.

My second interpretation was that I was just feeling I was ineffectual as a reporter in helping readers understand fully what it was like in Oklahoma City that April 19, 1995. I tried hard to convey all of it, but words can only go so far.  

I do know I grew as a journalist in covering this nightmare, and there were times I felt the “fire in my hands” that some writers are privileged to feel when their work has touched truth. But I don’t know how well I translated that to the reader.

At the time, I took heart in knowing I broke through to at least one reader who mailed me a short note in the newsroom a few days after the smoke had cleared.

Unsigned, it read, “Thank you, Sir. I lost a loved one in the bombing, and you made me feel like I was there. With her until the end.”

  Whoever that person was, I’ve always regretted not being able to thank them. That's the best kind of compliment a writer can get.

So, sometime around 5 a.m. today, I thought about those two interpretations. I concluded they were both true. First -- because of a severe mid-life crisis, I was facing then, not connected to the bombing -- part of the old me did die with the Oklahoma City bombing.  In covering that disaster, I found new strength to restart my own recovery as I wrote about the strength of these bombing survivors I interviewed.

And second, about the question of being ineffectual in my work, no … I wasn’t. But my effect was probably minimal. I tried, but I could have done a better job.

And, unlike dying, that's something I can live with.

Oh ... one other thing. The dude who gave me his coat that chilly night? I'm still working on that one.

I've got a good lead, though.

Jim Willis is a veteran journalist, author, and professor emeritus of journalism at California's Azusa Pacific University. He has written 22 books over his career. He can be reached at scribblerjim@aol.com