For some years I worked for an international company. Anyone who has experienced business life at the sharp end will know of the stress that it can induce and then magnify. At first I found a degree of pleasure, even a sense of achievement, in my work. Gradually, and then ever more swiftly, these were replaced by frustration, pessimism, and depression. There is little of value to be found in responsibility without status, or in conscientiousness without recognition. Every day brought more insoluble problems; every evening I returned home fiIled with anger and despair. This was when the dreams began. And they visited me every night.

In the dreams I was at work, surrounded by the same people, faced by the same problems. As in life, I was trapped. Nothing was soluble, and behind each crisis loomed others that were even more intractable, even more crushing.

Psychologists recognise a condition called lucid dreaming. In such a state, the subject is aware that he or she dreams, and can shape the dream to a satisfactory conclusion. I knew that I was dreaming but that I could do nothing about it. I was helpless within labyrinthine visions. A copy of reality inhabited my mind at night, only to release me each day into the arms of its original.

These dreams, too, are now part of my past, and their power faded a long time ago. A dream of a ghost is easy to forget; dawn takes the edge off all revenants. But to dream of your own life, repeating itself over and over again during the hours of sleep, is to be drawn into a existential purgatory, into a closed circle from which there is no escape.

The most terrifying dream of all is the one in which you are aware that you are dreaming, and in which you know that, when you wake, things will still be the same.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Well, yes. If that's the message you take from it. If this were my recurring dream, I'd hear it saying "Get out, at any cost." Being trapped even though you're lucid says to me that something's so wrong you may have to gnaw off a leg to escape the trap.

It happened to me. I was trapped for years under an abusive boss, who gave me such bad evaluations I couldn't transfer out; after hearing her, no one would hire me. Under her thumb, I had lucid dreams that were Burns-like: I could change things, but did only the bare minimum to keep me alive in the dream--I felt obliged to suffer "because the dream's teaching me something." So was the job. But are you obliged to learn what abusers want to teach?

My stoic lucid dreams faded only when I saved up and quit, vowing never to return to wage work. Independent starvation was rough... but better.

For one thing, no dreams like this.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams by Nicholas Royle, 1996; p.38-9
DATE: a guess. The earliest book by Burns I've found was published 1990, so the mid-80s seem plausible. But then, I'm biased: those were my nightmare years, too.

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