I dreamt I dreamed the day away

My depression deepened through yesterday, Sunday, and, waking with the sun this morning, I found no sign of my mood lifting.

That annoys me. My pride as a self therapist is at stake. I've been working away on my inner life night and day for five years, single-mindedly. Now to be hit with your basic old-fashioned bum mood again and to be back at square one! It's just not fair.

There were also things I wanted to do today. And then to have this thing stop me! Damn, and double damn!

It was 5:40 or 6:00 AM. When had I got to sleep? I could not remember, but probably around 1:00 AM. So not a full night's sleep, I reasoned. Okay. Part of my fatigue might be merely physical. I made a judgment call, declared myself objectively tired, and gave myself permission to return to sleep. I am a retired man. In many ways, I can pretty well do what I like.

When I returned to sleep, I dreamed.

In the dream, I was sleeping and waking fitfully all through a long day. My sleep did not refresh me. That's a sign of serious depression, eh? During fits of confused semi-consciousness, I would check for well-being the way a hibernating bear checks the progress of the season, waking up every couple of weeks to sniff the air. Sniff, sniff. "Is it Spring yet?"

By 11:45 PM, as the dream kept the hours, I did indeed feel much better. My inner weather had mercifully cleared. I was ready to get active. But there were only fifteen minutes left in the day! Presumably at midnight a new pile of problems would emerge and demand attention.

Just fifteen minutes left to the day? I could hardly get everything done that I wanted to do in a mere fifteen minutes. And, questions of accomplishment aside, however you slice it, fifteen minutes of enjoyment was only fifteen minutes, shorter than even the shortest of the Beethoven quartets, just to mention Beethoven quartets.

At this point in the dream I heard my own voice, "Oh, well, don't sweat it too much, Jay. Fortunately, you are only twenty-six years old. You've got lots of life ahead of you yet."

That was too much of a fib for me. Asleep or awake, I knew I wasn't twenty-six. "But is fifty-seven so terribly old?" I asked myself.

Apparently I was waking up by degrees. Where did I get that number from? I left fifty-seven behind some while back. I am in fact sixty-four. It is time for me to apply for various pensions so I can start collecting right when I turn sixty-five in December.

In the clear light of day, my alarm clock said 8:15 AM. Real time. No fooling. There were various tasks I had to do, and I began doing them.

Despite the dream, my depression lingered through the morning, but my attitude to it had shifted, oh, just a little, as these shifts go, but enough to mark it.

I felt like a man recovering from a fever, an old fart wanting to get up from his bed and be up and about with the living despite the advice of his physician or the old woman who cares for him. "Rest is best. Just a couple more days. You don't want a relapse, Henry." That's how his comforters reason.

But Henry doesn't want to wait until he's a hundred percent better. “There will be time enough for lying in when I'm in the grave,” he snorts.

This is a common enough human sentiment, I believe, especially for old farts like me, but for me it is actually new. It means that basically I like being alive so much I don't give a hoot about all the fears packed into my blessed depression. To put it another way, all the fears and sorrows packed into my depression don't add up the way they used to. My psyche has shifted that far away from illness and that much closer to natural good spirits.

But what funny business is going on with those ages in the dream?

Possibly "26" is there to take me back to the age I was during the psychotic (or psychotic-like) episode at the end of my first marriage. And "57" is more or less the age I was when my third wife and I separated, a date loosely connected with the beginning of self therapy.

The dream message could be "Yes, yes, you're feeling ready to come alive, make progress, work on your blessed self. Good for you. But isn't it a bit late? Shouldn't you have been doing that when you really were twenty-six? Or at fifty-seven at the latest? You sure know how to let the grass grow under your feet or what? You wasted wasteful no good son of a...&c" The "&c" is for the expletive inclusive manner with which Mobojobo does his thing. I've caught his style elsewhere on this blog.

But there is nothing quite like a dream for messages hiding other messages--nothing this side of religion anyway. Behind the "Mobojobo" messages here are two other statements.

1) The psychotic episode of 1971 (when I was 26) was a profound attempt to get appropriate help and turn things around. It worked.

2) I in fact made great use of the separation from Wife #3 when I was 57. My allegiance to that marriage (honorable and appropriate as that allegiance had been) had inhibited the kinds of things I had to do for myself.

The dream is in fact celebrating my continuing work towards wellness and realization. (According to Freud, every dream has a wish driving it, a wish it fulfills in itself. In other words, until you've found the happy ending, you haven't finished with the dream.)