Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.31

Return to your sober senses and call yourself back.

As when you have roused yourself from sleep and have perceived that they were only dreams that troubled you, now in your waking hours look at these things around you, as you did look at those dreams.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6 (tr Long)

Ridiculous flights of imagination and contorted trains of thought will often bring me far away from where I need to be. One helpful exercise for me to keep grounded is to picture myself trying to wake up from a deep sleep, and to deliberately focus my attention on a real world over a world of dreams.

Just as I can recognize that the appearances in my unconscious state do not need to frighten or disturb me, so too I can recognize equally that the appearances in my conscious state also do not need to frighten or disturb me. Illusions, whether sleeping or waking, are not the result of things, but of my estimation of things.

I suppose all of us dream in our own way, and while my conscious daydreaming will sometimes involve wonderful and fantastical places, my dreams at night are usually quite unpleasant. I’m hardly qualified to make complete sense of them, but I can certainly discern certain patterns and inclinations. This can assist me in giving order to my thoughts and feelings.

I have one dream that has been recurring now for over thirty years. It still takes place as if I was six years old. It seems a pleasant, sunny day, and all of the children in our class are playing in a field by our school.

Suddenly we all scatter, screaming and running in every direction. I never see what we are frightened of, but I somehow know it is there, right behind my shoulder. I run toward a mound, part of an old aqueduct system that passes through the neighborhood. I grapple to the top, and then run down the other side.

I am faced with a garden fence, very low and hardly an obstacle, yet I find that I do not have the strength within me to climb over it. The only other child who is still with me leaps right over the fence, exerting no effort at all, and disappears into the backyard of a house. I gaze at of the back of the house, each detail exactly as it looked then, my hands still weakly grasping the fence, and somehow knowing this is the end. I begin to turn my head slowly to see whatever is coming for me.

Then I suddenly wake up, often screaming. I still have this dream regularly, many decades after I first had it. What frightens me about it even more is that the actual house in question was bought many years later by someone I knew, someone who had been a source of both great happiness and even greater sadness. I could not possibly have known that at the time, but it is a part of the original dream nonetheless.

Even a first-year psychology student could have a field day with this, on all sorts of levels, but I have come to understand it in my own way.

When I have that dream again, and I am certain that I will, I can find some comfort, as I slowly catch my breath, after having been ripped from a deep sleep. I can know that all of the fear and worry is something I have created for myself. 
 

When I must face grave concerns in life again, and I am certain that I will, I can also find some comfort, as I slowly catch my breath, after having been ripped from something quite like a deep sleep. I can know that all of the fear and worry is something I have created for myself.

Written in 4/2007

IMAGE: Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes: The Dream (1883)

I was always struck by how the three spirits in this dream image are presenting our sleeping wanderer with roses, representing romantic love, a garland, representing fame, and coins, representing wealth, the very illusions that keep many of us diverted.