The other night I dreamed that Bill Belichick sat on my laptop computer and broke the screen. I don’t think it had anything to do with his recent interview with CBS, during which his 24-year old girlfriend, who is the same age as Belichick was in 1976, when he was an assistant special teams coach with the Detroit Lions, could be heard off-camera saying that the happy couple was not going to talk about how they met.
But with the unconscious, do we ever really know?
As it unfolded in my dream, the unfortunate meeting of Bill’s buttocks with my MacBook was more an accident than anything malicious. This in itself is quite surprising, since the legendary coach has spent most of his career treating sportswriters as if they were as welcome as a hemorrhoid. His benign intentions didn’t help repair my screen, however, and then the rest of the dream unspooled into chaos, Belichick having no further involvement as I searched desperately for someone to fix my laptop, or the nearest Apple store. There was no resolution at all, which is what often happens with my dreams. The good news was that when I woke up, I found a computer that was perfectly intact.
Dreams have been around as long as humans, and despite the best efforts of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, among many other deep thinkers, they largely remain an unsolved mystery. Freud believed that “the interpretation of dreams (the title of his groundbreaking book that was published 125 years ago) is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” The book lays out his theory that every human mind has a dynamic unconscious that was shaped in childhood and has a powerful role that lasts a lifetime. Freud, in essence, believed that there was nothing random about the content of dreams – that the details and story lines can be traced to repressed feelings or themes that are percolating in the deepest recesses of our minds. Jung, for his part, believed dreams are the product of unshaped and/or unresolved thoughts and feelings that are transformed into a narrative by an unconscious that is trying to make sense of them.
More recently, neurologists and other dream-focused scientists, powered by brain-scan technology, have come to view dreams as a sort of data dump, a way to sift through all of the day’s mental and sensory activity, to determine what’s important as your brain’s cache is emptied to make room for the next day’s input.
So what to make of Belichick and my laptop? Do I have an unconscious fear of Hoodies? Or authority figures? Or could the deeper meaning be the fragility of our existence . . . at any moment someone could come along and plop down on your laptop or your life and pitch you into a maelstrom of distress? I wish I had clarity to share on this. I do not. Nor do I have any regarding the one recurring dream of my childhood. (I promise I am not making this up).
It featured an octopus walking around the block where I lived in a bright orange life preserver. From Bunkerhill Drive to Beaverhill Lane to Whistler Hill Lane, the octopus kept making loops. Here, too, there was no closure. The octopus didn’t storm into my bedroom or throw a rock through my friend Bruce Beighlie’s kitchen window or stir up any other trouble in the neighborhood. He just sauntered round and round in the dumb life preserver, but what is interesting to me is that, despite the absence of menace in the dream, I experienced it as a nightmare. The octopus terrified me. I woke up alarmed every time I had this dream. Scientists who have studied octopuses (go with octopi for the plural if you prefer) note their high intelligence, resourcefulness and capacity for regeneration. Being almost infinitely adaptable – they can transform the color and shape and even texture of their bodies – some see them as a symbol for the ability to navigate through turbulent times and find a way to adjust to all circumstances. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so scared
.
As for the life preserver, well, I am just as in the dark there. Maybe I have a deep-seated desire to keep my head above water, or I covet safety. I’ll let you know if I find out.
Sleep experts have determined that we do most of our dreaming during the REM, or rapid eye movement, stage of our sleep. That’s when our brains are most active, most prone to stitching together subconscious snippets into a story. But what I don’t get is why this stitching process leads to so many jarring juxtapositions and disconnected threads. For sure, some dreams seem straightforward and easy to figure out, such as those that involve falling off a cliff or being chased by a buffalo, but aren’t many others indecipherable? You are in the upper deck at Shea Stadium with your second-grade teacher and your CPA. All three of you are naked from the waist down. Rachel Maddow, fully clothed, walks out to the mound and announces that the Mets game has been canceled and that Paul Simon will have a concert next door in Corona Park. Yogi Berra will be on drums.
More than a half-century after my last dream about the octopus in the life preserver, I have another semi-recurring dream. The specific sites and details vary, but in every showing I am at a major international sporting event, like the Olympics or the World Cup or Wimbledon, and screwing up royally, completely unprepared to do my job as a journalist. I don’t have a busted laptop; I don’t have a laptop at all, and have to scramble to borrow one. Sometimes I don’t have a pen. Other times I don’t have a notebook. I am never in the right place at the right time. I show up for an interview or a press conference, and nobody else is there. I get on a bus to cover downhill skiing and wind up at the luge track. When it’s time to hammer out a deadline story on a marquee event, like the Women’s World Cup final or the Olympic 100-meter final, I am in a full panic in the press tribune, unable to write a single sentence. All around me are professional journalists from all corners of the world, dutifully writing their game stories. I am alone with my writer’s block.
I’ve been to 12 Olympics as a sports writer (one more as a father), and an assortment of other big-time competitions. I am pleased to report that none of these awful things ever actually happened. I did my job and on the whole, think I did it pretty well.
So Dr. Freud, may I lie down on your couch? What is my unconscious trying to tell me? What repressed feelings are playing out here, and what bogeymen am I fleeing from? Is it that I am an imposter and don’t deserve to have my job? That if the sky doesn’t fall in the next minute, it will in the minute after that? Or is it simply that my incompetence is as deep as the ocean, and let’s hope nobody notices? I know I have insecurities, and often feel that I don’t measure up. Is that what’s going on here? Please interpret my dreams, Siggy, and don’t forget to explain the meaning of Bill Belichick sitting on my laptop.
Oh, Wayne, I feel your pain. I haven't worked as a flight attendant in over 30 years but I still have stressful dreams where everything goes wrong....I don't have enough meals for my passengers (remember when you used to get hot meals in coach??), I can't find the emergency equipment, I've gone to the wrong airport for my flight, the plane flies upside down, that kind of thing. Who knows why the anxiety never fades....
Have you read "The Soul of an Octopus" by Sy Montgomery? Great book. Back to dreams - for me, a recurring theme, has to do with direction - literally, not knowing where the entrance of a building or complex is, or which way to go after getting off a bus. and the neighborhood is dark and empty.... But it;s probably meant figuratively. Thank you, Mr Freud.