Tag: mental health

Dreamwork

This morning I had a vivid work anxiety dream about a profession I left nearly four years ago. In the dream I was a high school teacher working at a new school in a complicated building–it’s a dream setting I’ve been in several times and in which I’ve had similar experiences over the years. Despite leaving teaching completely I still have these sorts of dreams regularly. Class has started, I’m unable to find the lounge where my laptop and schedule and keys are, the corridors are confusing. When I finally find my classroom the students are unsure about the project they’ve been assigned, there are administrators in the room asking questions, the technology is not functioning. It’s type of dream I’ve had since I was a student; can’t find my locker, the locker combination doesn’t work when I do find it, I don’t know where my classroom is and I’m late. Other variations? Trying to board a flight but my ticket/passport/luggage is missing.

There’s a bunch of science about dreams being the brain’s way of processing the days’ events into memories. My dreams are almost NEVER related to daily events, however. They’ve always felt weighty and full of almost-realized profundity. Even basic anxiety dreams are trying to tell me something about myself.

Inner Work by Robert A Johnson is a practial guide to approaching and interacting with dreams and dream materials. Johnson is a Jungian and they are the analytic school I find most interesting when I think about my dreams. As a young teen I often had dreams where different selves would argue, different personalities with completely different wants and points of view. And I’d wake up with their dialogues and discussions still ringing in my head. At times the voices were like a mutiny and I genuinely wondered if I were going mad.

I first read a lot of Freud, and finding his work very interesting but unsatisfactory I moved on to Jung and his school. Jung’s assertion that there are completely autonomous elements of the Unconscious which need to be approached and integrated felt right and made logical sense given the content of many dreams, which I carefully recorded in journals over the decades.

So why would I have an increase in teacher anxiety dreams AFTER leaving teaching? Because teaching, as onerous as I found the job, pushed me to the maximum in many ways. I was by necessity at my creative, innovative, and intellectual peak. I had to navigate so many relationships and so many roles, and was for over 20 years completely outside my comfort zone. Every time I thought “I’m getting the hang of this” some new leadership role or challenging group of students or suddenly having to teach online during COVID would happen. Leaving teaching and opening a small business in France has of course been challenging and rewarding, but I am not being pushed in the same ways. There is some part of my unconscious which is dis-satisfied with this state of affairs and is trying to force me to feed its needs for intellectual and creative rigor. Gardening, lumberjacking, speaking French, and running a tourist lodging business are apparently not enough!

I’m considering using Johnson’s method for a bit to see if I can pin down what is going on internally. He’s actually got two methods in the book–one for interpreting and doing dream work, and another for using Jung’s Active Imagination.

Another feature of my dreams is that I often am left upon waking with a song stuck in my head on repeat for days on end. I’ll wake from a dream hearing the song and then can’t shake it. Recently it’s been “Vienna” by Billy Joel. I decided to look up the lyrics, which I’d never really thought about:

Slow down, you crazy child
You’re so ambitious for a juvenile
But then if you’re so smart
Tell me why are you still so afraid? Mm
Where’s the fire, what’s the hurry about?
You’d better cool it off before you burn it out
You’ve got so much to do
And only so many hours in a day, hey

[Chorus]
But you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want or you can just get old
You’re gonna kick off before you even get halfway through, ooh
When will you realize Vienna waits for you?

I’ve noticed of late a tendency to always be thinking of the things I need to get done instead of just doing what I’m doing. I’ll be petting one of our animals and thinking “oh shit I have to finish splitting the firewood” or “that pipe in the Loft apartment is not going to replace itself” or “am I ever going to finish reading that William Gaddis novel?”

My unconscious is sending me this song on repeat for a reason. I don’t know that I ever really heard the lyrics outside of the chorus until now. So part of the dream is telling me I need a more intellectual, more creative outlet, while another part is telling me to relax:

Too bad, but it’s the life you lead
You’re so ahead of yourself, that you forgot what you need
Though you can see when you’re wrong
You know you can’t always see when you’re right
You’re right

Take a chill pill, man. You’re doing fine!

Passings

The reverse of this tiny sepia-toned photograph reads “Paul Godfrey Easter 1949 Stewartstown, PA.” It was originally written in pencil but was later partially fleshed out in ink. The handwriting I immediately recognize as that of Mary Godfrey, my paternal grandmother. I’ve no recollection of how I came into possession of this photograph, but after moving to France it fell out of a book as I was unboxing and shelving stuff we’d had shipped from the USA. It’s possible Paul himself sent it. He used to mail me strange messages including Garfield or Far Side clippings from the newspaper and hand-scrawled notes on old receipts. Once he sent me a Polaroid of a woman he was then involved with–she was nude and far younger than he. He’d scrawled “daily vitamin pill” on the photo. I don’t know the name of the young woman but I heard later that she took Paul’s ATM card and emptied his bank account. A bit later Paul became unhoused.

On June 1st at 8:45 pm Paul Godfrey died in hospice care in Gettysburg PA, the town where I was born in 1969. He’d had a stroke a few weeks earlier which left him a bit weak on the left side. He was institutionalized to undergo rehab but refused to participate, refused food and water, and went into a rapid decline. Eventually staff gave up trying to engage him and instead medicated him against the pain of starvation. He was 80.

Paul Benjamin Godfrey was my biological father. Your inclination might be to offer sympathy in this circumstance; that’s kind and considerate but wholly unnecessary. We weren’t close, and were in fact estranged from one another for decades. I think we spoke a half-dozen times in 35 years. My younger sister heroically assisted him his last few years and had visited him in hospice without getting much response. I, on the other hand, had almost entirely excised him from my life quite some time ago. Due to the staid dictum don’t speak ill of the dead, I’ll refrain from cataloging the reasons here. I’ll simply state that my mother gathered our belongings into a few trash bags and left his house after calling the police one night in the 1970s, my sister and I in tow. She wanted the police there as she fled in case Paul showed up. He worked night shift and we escaped to shelter in a good samaritan’s house for a couple weeks before moving into the home of my maternal grandparents. Later, there was a brief attempt at reconciliation which failed and divorce procedings were engaged. I was 7 years old, my sister 5.

My sister asked if I’d write an obituary. I could barely come up with 500 words. It says something that a man of 56 years could know so little about his father’s life that minimal details were tough to scrape together into a brief narrative. But such was our relationship, or lack of.

There will come a time when I have more to write about Paul Godfrey. For now, however I’ll remain silent and allow that photo from 1949 to be my memory of him. It was taken 20 years before my birth, and it’s a very cute and charming photo of a presumably loveable little chap. May the conditions and torments which caused that young child to become the man I knew be laid to rest.