...and don't panic! The Know brings you advice during housing
A true friend is always there for you, especially when you're drunk.
Miss Quit regresses to her childhood this week as the prospect of beginning the "University of Life" looms.
Alright, alright, before this turns into one of those trashy but highly addictive novellas one claims to read "only at the beach" (by which one actually means "alone in my room, with Abba/Enya/whichever brand of socially-unacceptable music happens to be one's secret shame playing, and a whole pack of chocolate digestives"), or else a psychologist's fantasy, let me tell it straight: I’ve been experiencing a recurrent dream, well, more of a nightmare really, which has left me wakening short of breath, in tears, or else clawing at my mattress, for about a month now. And I'll be darned if I'll let it lie.
There are three things in my life that nothing and no-one is allowed to mess with: my loved-ones, my signature salad recipe, and my sleep. And that includes my own damn self. So whilst last week dealt with physical health, it is now time to ponder that of the psyche, my fellow thinkers. After all, what is a content body without an equally happy mind? Well, in a word: me. Or at least, me of last week.
Buoyed on by the lack of a decent night's kip and the distressing increase in the vividness of the dark circles under my eyes, I decided to finally address this night-time bastard, head on, with none of my usual proverbial sweeping-of-dirt-under-carpet-and-pretending-everything-was-clean-all-along way of existence. Well, nearly none.
Short of giving up sleeping altogether which, if you've ever seen me after an all-nighter, would verge on unleashing a WMD upon the unsuspecting public, I had to sort this bugger out . Which meant sorting me out, or rather, sorting out something I didn’t even consciously know I needed to sort out with myself until it became evident that I needed to, if you catch my drift. No, I'm not sure I do either, but that's what a lack of shut-eye will do to you. Night terror goes hand in hand with incoherence. Go figure.
Ze solution, mein herr, appeared to be as das: I had to get all Freudian on my own ass and try to figure out what the hell this scene out of the would-be literary-love-child of Edgar Allen Poe and Jackie Collins (just try and figure that one out), was all about. And, more importantly, why, in the name of all that is good and holy, it was haunting me so.
When every urge tells you to run away from something, even mentally, it's hard to charge right at it. But that is what I had to do: chase my dreams so that they would not catch me. A spot of self-help-verbal-visualisation-drivel follows, please bear with me.
OK, so I'm running down the seemingly never-ending string of rickety corridors, which at times morph into one of those totally pointless but inexpressibly fun human conveyor belt things you get at airports between gates, and something is chasing me. That part even a monkey could decode; I am clearly trying to move on from the past to the unknown future, but am not really letting myself move forward without the quickening urge to look back. Hmm, I wonder what that could signify, seeing as life as I know it will cease to exist come July…
Nice work, Miss Shrink. Ah, but alas, I have shamefully been holding out somewhat with the details. (Wow, didn’t realise how personal discussing dreams could be. Am starting to wish I’d thought this week's column through a bit more. Note to self - must quit Miss Quit soon.) For the something, or somethings, that are chasing me I cannot see. But I hear them, and each time they sound different; each dream yields a new chaser, calling to me with the voice of someone I know, be it a family member, a friend, or a foe.
One night it'd be my mum's, the next a tutor's, then an ex-boyfriend or current housemate's. And none of this would be that unsettling if it weren’t for the rest of the dream, the running-for-my-life aspect to it. Having exhausted the plethora of dream interpretation sites floating around on the World Wide Web to no avail, I suspect my own diagnosis is probably the accurate one: I'm actually running from myself, my past and my future. All this is no more than a symptom of the quit of a couple of week's back, of not feeling I have a role right now, and of not knowing what's going to happen soon. And the more I notice it, the more I see it everywhere, not just in my dreams.
In the media it's all doom and gloom about the economy, the political forecast or what might happen if our worst fears are realised. Paranoia and evasion is the current social climate, not that it isn't always so, but for those of us who are coming into our own (and who have never experienced such lean or uncertain times, let alone a world war or natural disaster) it is nightmarishly acute.
Yet, surrounded as we are, it is all too easy to talk ourselves out of confronting our bad dreams by brushing them off as just that. By convincing ourselves that our fears are just unconscious manifestations that bear no concrete relation to reality, we may well be making them all but real. It's the fear of not instantly getting the job we dream of that stops us from applying for it, not the lack of graduate training programmes; it's the terror of increasing debt that stops us from pursuing that masters, not the lack of ability. And it's wrong.
Whilst fear can drive us, it can also chase us away from the things we want, the lives we should be living. All the therapy in the world can't help someone who can't stop running from themselves.
It's about time we started living the dream, not the nightmare, and if that means taking the time, and guts, to stop running down that hallway, to turn around and face the chasing image of our own fears, then let us wake up and realise that. I, for one thing, am all but ready to snap out of it.
The bed bugs of ‘real’ life will bite no matter what I do, but in my dreams at least I can squash them under a no-longer-running foot. If only for a night or two.
I absolutely love your columns...
"It's the fear of not instantly getting the job we dream of that stops us from applying for it, not the lack of graduate programmes.."
I did this with my essays for the whole of my final year - left them till the very last minute because I couldn't face starting them and maybe finding they were not as good as I thought they could be. And obviously that's a self-fulfilling prophesy, as nothing written in two days can be as good as you want it to be. A year on, I'm still doing it with job applications, just as you said.
If they make you leave the yorker when you graduate you should totally get a blog and carry on doing this...
You must log in to submit a comment.
Report