I’ve been working at home on the computer the last few days, so I’ve been able to sleep until my body is ready to wake up, as opposed to the alarm jolting me up at some uncivilized hour so I can drive several hours to a job site. One of the benefits of sleeping in is I get to dream. I’ve had two remarkable dreams in the last two days.
A bit of background for the first dream: I used to work with an engineer that I’ll call Bob for this story. I rarely communicate with Bob anymore. Also, I have a ridiculous 4x4 truck project, El Borrego Cimarrón (the Mountain Goat), that is nearing completion.
The first dream: Borrego Cimmarón is finished and in my mechanic’s garage. Bob has put dozens of antenna, like Ham radio or CB antenna, all over the roof of the vehicle. It looks like a porcupine. I wonder why on earth did Bob put all these communication antenna on my truck. I inspect the mounting of one of the antenna and it is half-assed. I hear the phone ring.
I wake up, the phone rings again. I jump out of bed and answer the phone. It’s Bob.
So what’s remarkable about this dream is that while Bob, in Tucson, was directed to communicate with me by his employer, and he went about looking and asking for my contact information, I was dreaming about Bob putting communication antennas on my truck. Woo Woo. Makes me think that Jung’s Collective Unconscious is a real phenomenon, not just a metaphor.
Background for dream number two: My bliss would be to live on a sailboat in the south Pacific making Jacques Cousteau style documentaries for the BBC, yet I’ve spent my adult life pursuing the much more pragmatic and secure career of an electrical engineer.
Dream number two: I am asleep on an inflatable floating mattress in the water. I am covered by another inflatable mattress stacked on top of me. I am vaguely aware that a boat is passing nearby, presumably to check out the floating mattress. Annoyed, I choose to remain asleep. I think it occurred to me that I was naked as well, so staying under the floating mattress kept my nakedness concealed. The boat passed by again, very close. Suddenly the mattress was under tow. I sat up and surveyed the situation. My floating mattress is tied to my sailboat. My sailboat had been at anchor off shore. Apparently while I was asleep, my sailboat had broken free of its anchor and slowly drifted toward shore. The boat that had passed by me twice had lashed on to my sailboat and was towing it away from shore – in effect saving my boat. I jumped onto my sailboat and waved “thank you” to the other boat and indicated that I wanted them to tow me out to my anchor. But as my sailboat arrived at my anchor, I realized that my anchor was still on the bottom and I was alone on my boat. I contemplated my options:
1. Let my sailboat drift, abandoned, while I snorkeled to the bottom to try and recover my anchor. If I recovered the anchor quickly, I could re-anchor my boat in the same spot. If I could not find the anchor quickly, my abandoned boat could drift back into shore and be damaged.
2. Sail away. I was anchorless.
Surprisingly, it took me a while to get this dream. It seems so obvious now, but it needed to percolate in me for half a day. To summarize metaphorically; I’ve had a sailboat (vehicle to my bliss) for a long time, but I anchored it and went to sleep. In the not too distant past, my sailboat broke free of its anchor (This was probably when I left my corporate job to join ProConn), but I continued to sleep. Sleepy me and my sailboat were about to run aground, to become stuck and damaged, but someone (my boss, the entrepreneur) towed me back out into deeper water. And now I am anchorless and I have to figure out whether to try and recover my old anchor, re-anchor myself in the same place, anchor someplace else, sail away without an anchor, … I am awake, I already have a sailboat, I’ve not run aground, I’m in safe depths, and I am anchorless.
This was a good dream.
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