The dream

The night before last I had the strangest dream. It was really more like a nightmare. It took place in what I envisioned to be the worst section of Racine. Although I've never actually seen the bad part of the town, in my imagination it looked like a smaller version of Cabrini Green. One might wonder how a middle-class white girl knows of Cabrini Green and the explanation is that I followed half-assed directions to get to the museums of Chicago. Even that isn't the whole story. I knew long before that that we were on the wrong route but when traveling with men and since real men will not stop for directions, we were taken to Cabrini Green by the time he took the hint and turned around to go back in the opposite direction. This was before the days of GPS and Mapquest to help guide us on our trips so we listened to an untrustworthy source, a family member who never really gets things right, so it wasn't a smart move on our part.

This dream had some strange elements, there were teenagers walking in small groups of three and four through the courtyard of a burnt out tenement carrying and waving guns. They were as nonchalant as someone handling a cell phone. It was as if it was a natural accessory to their everyday life. Another element of the dream was that I had a co-worker with me. His name is Pat and he is a very large guy. So large that his knees are bad from carrying the extra weight on his frame. He never takes the stairs at work and if we go out for lunch or an after work party he drives there instead of walking like the rest of us.

So Pat and I were stuck in the middle of these kids in this bad neighborhood and we had to get out. The area was very dark where you could hardly see since most lights were blown out from vandalism or just lack of care. We knew we were in trouble and we had to run. Pat and I did run and Pat was keeping up. We could hear the gun-toting kids behind us but we felt like we were getting away. It was a good feeling, one of hope that we would survive without getting shot. Up ahead we could see street lights and we knew we would be much safer near a busy street so the light ahead was another sign of hope.

All of a sudden the roads turned into hills. It was as if everything was dug up and mounds of dirt and gravel were piled as it is wherever you see road construction. But unlike most roads where the mounds are just piled on the side of the road, this was like rows and rows of mounds so we had to run up one and down the other side, run up the next and back down until we cross them all. The problem was that there didn't seem to be an end to the many, many mounds. But we could see the light up ahead and the normal sounds of city traffic and people moving about. This was where Pat started to struggle; his legs couldn't bear the constant climb and descent over the mounds of unsettled dirt. The extra weight he carried made the gravel less stable causing him to often slip. And we could hear the kids gaining on us.

Now I knew I had to make a tough decision. I could stay with Pat and try to get us both to safety or I could leave him behind and take off on my own, saving my own ass. This is the moment I woke up. I sat up remembering every element of the dream as if it were real. It left me feeing confused, wondering how the dream would have ended and what decision I would have made. It made me feel sad that I would have even considered leaving someone else, let alone someone who is a wonderful person behind to save myself.

The dream nagged at me all morning. During the course of the day I went about my usual business, did some laundry, picked up some groceries, prepared for a trip to Jeff's cousin's house for a visit. Jeff's cousin lives in West Bend so the ride was an hour long and we took the motorcycle so it was a relaxing and scenic. When I'm on the back of his bike I become a captive audience which is ok. I can either get lost in the scenery of the ride or get lost in my own thoughts, or sometimes both. On this ride I started thinking about my new job. After the long weekend, I would be starting in a new department with a new group of people and the more I considered the decision I had made the more terrified I became. I don't really know what I was afraid of, failure, lack of acceptance, not liking the work, there were so many considerations. At that moment I remembered the dream. And it was like an epiphany. I feared leaving my old job behind. I had made some wonderful relationships wit co-workers, many whom I would now call friends. There was a connection between leaving Pat behind in the dream and the real-life version of leaving him and all the others I worked with behind.

It was like I had solved some little portion of the mystery of life, and the correlation between the dream and my circumstances had become perfectly clear. The dream was clearly an analogy of the feelings I was having about changing jobs. Now the question has become would I really leave them all behind and move on with a new group of people as if I had never got to know and like them? Would they continue to include me in their social activities? Maybe they won't want to include me after a while, and maybe I won't want to attend and decide to put the last four years behind me. I doubt either of these things will occur and only time will tell how things will turn out. One thing I do know for sure, these were some of the nicest people I have ever had the privilege to work with and I will never forget the time I had spent with them.