What a Nightmare
© The Author, 2005
The sky filled my eyes as I floated on the calm surface of Lake Michigan. My ears were submerged, hearing only the gurgle of the water and the whispers of fish. So at peace, it came as a big, happy surprise to me when my brothers dumped a pail of water onto my belly from my step-dads white and rainbow striped speedboat, which must have quietly been driven over to me while I was resting from my swim.
Laughing, I splashed water at their sweetly pimpled, smiling teenage faces. They hit me with another wall of water from their pail. My step-dad Tony emerged from the boat floor, laughing in mock madman mode and jumped into the drivers side seat. My brothers threw an inner tube out to me and I grabbed hold. Soon the transmutable water became a plane of hard glass beneath me as Tony began to cruise fast around the lake. As always when tubing, I couldn’t stop laughing—I was smiling so hard my face hurt. Thumbs up! Faster! Faster!
As we came to a halt on Chicago’s far north shore and I had the sudden realization that my brothers and step dad didn’t live here with me. I encouraged them to hurry up and go back to Michigan—I had the strange, sudden feeling that something horrible was about to happen. The sky over the city was becoming dark and the acrid taste of soot seemed to stick to the back of my throat.
I trudged through the water back to the beach. I dusted the sand off my bike and began to ride south through the city. I was worried. Something was defiantly wrong—too many people were out on the streets. At first they just seemed to be hanging out, getting in my way as I tried to reach the Art Institute to retrieve my partner from work before the trouble hit. My intuition assured me that the trouble would be coming from the north, so I was sure I could get to him before anything catastrophic happened. He could hop on my bike and we would pedal to Indiana and take a train or flight out from there, since I was sure that the city would be too heinous to exit safely.
As I reached the Gold Coast, pure pandemonium reined the streets. People were frantically moving north, screaming—absolutely terrified. I ditched my bike and tried to push against the frightened hordes. I was sure I needed to go south—I was sure the big bad would be coming from the north. Silly people, I thought, you are all walking into a trap!
Shortly after, I had finally pushed my way past the crowd. Instead of a clear path to run to my partner on, I was met with a wall of fire, a tsunami of flames. The fire towered above me—and in slow motion—it came crashing down on me and I knew I was wrong. I had done everything wrong.
The bulk of my nightmares usually follow some variation the following theme: Truly Saves the Day. Although they are now teenagers, in many of these types of dreams my brothers are still small boys; Anthony is still six and Julian is still three. Their ages make me 13 again. I wake from sleep to find a ferocious fire raging in our childhood home. I race to my brother’s bedroom to rescue them. I lift them out of bed, but my skinny arms struggle to carry both of them as we try to evacuate unharmed. I am usually able to save them if I do not wake up sweaty and screaming first.
Other nightmares follow this heroic theme with a varied plotline. In one recurring nightmare, I am driving on a deserted highway with a group of friends and family. Suddenly a tornado as large as small city appears on the horizon. It is up to me to deliver everyone to safety. The land around us is flat and I know that the tornado will devour our car, as it is the tallest thing around. To everyone’s horror, I park the car and order everyone to get out of it and lie with me, as flat as they possibly can, in the roadside ditch. I know that this is the only way we will be saved, but the other passengers just want to try to outrun it—no one wants to budge from the car. I am pulling them out, fighting them to come. Sometimes they do, or sometimes my partner wakes me before the dream finishes, citing my sleep talking and difficulty breathing as ample reason.
While I always know how it can be done, I never enjoy saving the day in my dreams. It is horrible trying to get everyone to cooperate with me, and it is really scary because I know that if I can’t convince the people I love most to do as I say, then they will die. The nightmare I had last night was the first nightmare I have ever had that I was completely wrong about how to save the day. While it was less frustrating than my usual nightmares, I can’t shake the feeling that it means something—that it is a message about the direction I have decided to take my life. What if I am completely wrong?
Yesterday, in my waking hours, I did something that was a huge deal for me. This next protion might seem like a red herring, but it will all make sense soon enough. I aplogize, dear reader, that I have yet to master the transition beween the subconcious world of my dreams and the realities of my day, but please bear with me.
Writing has always been my true love. But like a singleton who is too afraid of commitment to marry, I needed to dabble in any artistic venture that waggled its tail at me. I became engrossed in theater, music, drawing, painting, collage, sculpting, filmmaking, and photography. I tried to keep my adoration of writing to myself—indulging only in avid journal writing and very private fiction writing, but my obsession with words always bleed through in my other work. I would weave words into my visual art, I found myself jumping at the chance to write scripts rather than act them, and for a time I was in a band, composing very bad music to my hearts content.
When it came time to go to college, I eventually settled on a screenwriting major. Film and video seemed to me to be a place where many different facuts of the arts converged to create a single product, so it appealed to me at a time when I still was not ready to admit that writing was my one true love. During the latter part of my undergraduate studies—after many soul-draining internships—I realized, too late to change my major that I didn’t want to work in television or in film. My skin is not thick enough for these industries. Plus, I enjoy my family, friends, sanity, and community too much to slave 70 hours a week for a medium that has so much potential but is constantly wasted in order to sell advertisements and fuel our capitalist machine. Why didn’t I see it sooner? I don’t know—I’m a fool. But I think being a fool in your late teens, early twenties is pretty standard. I could have done a lot worse.
I graduated with a degree called Television Writing and Producing last May—loving the art and hating the industry—and was ready to start anew. Aside from participating in shitty studio and television station internships, I spent some worthwhile time in college doing a lot of community work with a local youth center. I loved helping the kids with their art projects. I had also been tutoring English composition at my college as an undergraduate, and I found that to be much more fufilling than any of my media internships. With both ventures I found that I did my best writing when I was helping others to do their best. I loved the interpersonal interaction and I was overjoyed to be working with organizations that I shared values with.
Since graduation, I have continued my volunteer work at the community center and I feel like I get more out of it that I am able to give—the teenagers are amazing and funny and interesting people. I mentor a girl there who is surely destined for greatness. I mention my involvment in the community center in this essay, because, as you will see later, it helped me have strength in a career defining descision I made yesterday afternoon–a decision that has been haunting me since my creepy dream last night. Anyways–as much I love volunteering, I can’t spend all my time doing it. After all, I’m a college grad now and I’ve got some enourmous bills to pay (namly that gastly student loan). It takes working a few jobs to have enough to pay them.
I’ll start with my jobs that occur during the regular workweek. Two days a week, I have the privilege of working as a writing consultant, which is basically a slightly higher-paid version of what I did as a composition tutor during my undergraduate years. (And the students are on Spring Break this week—woo hoo for two days off for me!) The other three days of my workweek are spent at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where I work as a marketing assistant. Here, I write marketing copy for newsletters, plan special events, do boring data entry, schedule meetings, file shit, and wear dress pants with a crease ironed into them.
In the summers, I teach weekend workshops to “at risk” (god I hate that term—these words belong to the company I work for—they are not my own) high school students who want to “change for the better” and apply to college. In my workshops, we leave all that propaganda at the door and I just help them write personal statements that will communicate effectively and personally, who they are to anyone who has the privilege of reading their work—be it a college admissions worker or not.
For the most part, I love all of these jobs, but I have yet another job that I hate.
After graduating with a degree in the media arts, I felt like it would be wasteful to not invest in some production equipment and utilize the film and video skills I had acquired during college to earn a bit of money. Actually, it was less a matter of feeling that it would be wasteful and more a matter of feeling guilty and pathetic that I had chosen the wrong degree.
Anyhow, although I have always loved writing the scripts more than doing the production work involved in the video, it wasn’t until after I graduated—and I was finally able to admit that writing was my true drive—that I came to absolutely hate doing video production work and editing. I think I always loathed shooting and editing, but now it is just soul draining and aggravating. I really, honestly, hate it. I can do it decently enough, but I just hate doing it. Lucky for me, yesterday afternoon I decided—and made public—that I never will do any of it again.
Until yesterday afternoon, the fourth job that I held was as an Independent Video Producer. An independent producer is a fancy name for a freelance video production person. It’s anyone who can script, shoot, and edit video and charges for it. Recently, the museum hired me to do a video to accompany an exhibition series that we have in our education center lobby right now entitled, Artists and Their Kids.
I was flattered by the invitation to do the video and I was happy for the extra bit of money. However, just like all the projects I did as an Independent Producer before it, I absolutely hated every minute of it. I put on a happy face, and completed the project. The museum director and the education staff were all thrilled with the video. Everyone was excited about it but me. I was drained and dreading the invitation to do the next one.
A good boss is able to see her employees not only as resources in terms of what they can bring to the company, but also in terms of what they can do to ensure that whatever skills the employee can bring to the table are able to flourish.
Fortunately, I have a really great boss at the museum. She was kind, supportive, and inquisitive when I told her that I wanted to focus more on my writing and my teaching. I politely told her that my plate was just too full to accept any more video projects, and that my other projects were just to important to me to sacrifice them for the video work.
It wasn’t just because I was saying “no” to my boss that I was nervous about this admission. It was the first time that I had admitted to anyone other than my husband and myself that I wanted to write, and to write at my best, I needed to work creatively with others, not for others. The very discovery that lead to the admission was new to me, and I have been strangely afraid to articulate it until yesterday. It was a big step for junior, here. And I couldn’t be more grateful that I have a boss that was able to support me—nurture me in a way, even—and make it a good experience.
My boss never knew that I was a writer. She is a writer too, and wrote many articles at one point in her life. Who knows—perhaps she will see my writing as a resource now, and I will get more writing assignments than data entry. If not, finally being able to connect in a real way with someone in that office is enough to make my heart sing.
So, after these big career-defining events transpired yesterday, I was happy and at peace with my decisions going to sleep. Which made my horrible nightmare about the wall of fire even more traumatic, the message even heftier—what if I am wrong about all of this? What if I’m wrong yet again?
What do you dream?
