Dream on

A look at the nightmares that bind us

by Kris Frieswick

My father is fascinated with tornadoes. It's not Freudian or anything; he just happened to be in the Worcester area on June 9, 1953, when one of the few F4 tornadoes on record ripped through that city, killing 94 people. That which does not kill you makes you weird, and from that day forward, my dad, like many who lived through it, harbored an insatiable fascination with swirling maelstroms.

But Dad didn't just sit and wait for another tornado to come along. Not my dad. He actively sought them out. Whenever the summer sky turned dark and threatening, my mom headed to the basement (bad experience with lightning as a child), but Dad would pile us kids into our red Chevy station wagon and drive up the hill to Worcester Airport, where we were alternately thrilled and terrified as yet another blinding thunderstorm rolled over us. We were always relieved when we finally headed home after the storm. My dad, though, was always bummed: no tornado. To this day, he speaks fondly of his retirement plans to "sell it all, buy a trailer, and move to Tornado Alley in Oklahoma." For us, like many kids exposed repeatedly to a parent's eccentricities, the memories linger on in unexpected places.

To this day, whenever my life feels particularly out of control, I have dreams about tornadoes appearing on the horizon and heading straight for me. Or I dream that I'm rushing for the storm cellar (which always looks just like the one from The Wizard of Oz) as the black roaring winds bear down on me and my little house. What surprises me about this is how many other people have the same nightmare. I mean, I never saw any other cars at the airport during our little outings, but maybe these people's dads took them somewhere else to wait. Or maybe The Wizard of Oz had more of an impact than we ever knew.

Or maybe my dreams aren't so unique.

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Whenever I talk to my friends about their nightmares, it surprises me how many we share. We're like sit-com writers who can't come up with any original ideas, so we just recycle plots from previous seasons. When we're feeling unprepared or overwhelmed at work, the dream weaver whacks us with the classic "pop quiz that you didn't study for" nightmare, or my personal favorite, the "late for class and can't remember the locker combination" dream.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung would say it is because we share a collective subconscious into which evolution has dumped millions of years' worth of our species' collective memories, or archetypes (which apparently now include elementary school). Jung would say that this is why when we are afraid of something, like a new job or a particularly bad hairstyle, we have dreams that we are being chased.

Was Jung right? Or does our subconscious, like Hollywood, just lack imagination and originality? Are we so uninspired that we all respond the same way, subconsciously speaking, to the same experiences?

Certainly this appears to be the case. Almost everyone I know has the "naked at a party" dream: there you are, in the middle of a huge crowd of raucous revelers, and you're buck-ass naked . . . and, worse yet, no one seems to notice. When does that one sneak up on you? When you're feeling confused, or if you're in the middle of an unfamiliar situation? My friend Paul has this dream a lot . . . but that's probably because he got buck-ass naked at a party last year and no one seemed to notice. Paul's subconscious is very literal.

And what about the "late for the school bus" dream? That one seems to rear up like clockwork whenever I'm feeling deadline pressure at work. (My subconscious is almost as literal as Paul's.) Then, for anyone who has ever been a waiter, there is the "my station is full and I can't remember any orders and people are starting to yell at me" dream, which can still wake me up out of a deep sleep, shaking, sweating, crying, and feeling an uncontrollable need to start marrying ketchup bottles. (Ask a waiter what that means.)

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I often wonder whether these nightmares link not only individuals, but cultures. Do people have the locker-room dream in countries where there are no lockers? My guess is that other cultures have their own, localized versions of the most popular nightmares. Do people from the West Indies, when feeling overwhelmed by life, dream that the village Santería priest goes missing and they have to sub for him at an exorcism? Do people from impoverished African nations all have the same "overslept and missed the UNICEF truck" dream? Do adults from the nearly naked tribes of the Amazon basin dream that they're at a raucous village party fully clothed?

I've never asked anyone from these parts of the world, but I bet they sit around sometimes with their friends and compare dream notes. In many countries, those conversations are much more meaningful and formalized than they are here. In some ancient cultures, dreams are considered signs from the other world about what to do and what paths to take in waking life. Australian aborigines even worship "The Dreaming," their prehistoric creation myth. So, as far as dreams go, Americans are pretty unevolved.

I'm not going to start worshipping my "late for the school bus" dream anytime soon, but in the end I believe these common dreams happen to us all because childhood and puberty are pretty much the scariest, most traumatic period of our lives -- when everything is new, everyone is large, we are small, and we have no control over anything. The highlight reel of childhood horrors starts running whenever some mundane adult stress sets it off. Maybe these dreams are our subconscious's way of reminding us that no matter how bad things get in our adult lives, they really can't stack up to The Wizard of Oz, the scary school-bus driver, the impossible-to-remember locker combination, the pop quiz, or trips to Worcester Airport to look for tornadoes.

After all that, adulthood looks like a summer breeze.

Kris Frieswick can be reached at krisf1@gte.net.