Maybe you can help me with this recurring dream.

[Tobin S.]

The content of my recurring dream is always different, but the theme is always the same. I just had it again last night and I have been having this type of dream maybe twice a year for several years now. I'll relate to you my dream last night and then draw out the theme.

I am a truck driver in my waking life and in this dream I'm driving a truck. I miss my exit off an interstate, and I keep missing places where I can turn around. I keep traveling down the road the wrong way and can't double back. Whenever I try to, my brakes don't want to work right and I can't slow down in time to make the turn around. It's as if I'm being forced down a road I don't want to go down like I have no choice in the matter. All I can do is guide the rig down the road.

Then I start seeing road signs that I recognize and realize that I have just gone around in a big circle and I'm back where I started. But I have this urgent feeling that I'm running behind, and I'm trying to hurry, but things just keep going wrong. I have that feeling throughout the dream.

The dream shifts and now I am on an airplane. I am in a hurry to get off the plane and I have a small carry-on suitcase with me. I have this little suitcase in real life and I use it for my job. I'm in such a hurry that I forget the suitcase as I get off the plane. I don't realize it until I'm away from the plane a good deal and I can't go back and retrieve it. I ask someone if the the bag will be where the luggage comes out on those conveyors (I forget what those are called...the baggage claim, I think) and he tells me yes and that it will be in the basement.

I go down into a basement that's rather small and more like a utility storage area and then realize it's the wrong basement. I then find an elevator to take me to the basement. There is a professor on the elevator and he is teaching a female student. I get down to the basement and, thankfully, finally run across my bag (remember all this time being in a huge hurry like I'm already running behind), but I open the bag and things are missing. But there is a computer chip like an SD card that is in the bag and this seems to be the thing that is most important to me. My wife is suddenly there and tells me that at least I have that. I put some things in the bag and that's the end of the dream.

The theme to these kinds of dreams is that I'm always in a hurry like I'm running behind and things keep happening to me that keep making me later and later...like I'm trying my best to catch up, but through either a mistake of my own or some other setback beyond my control I just can't catch up and get to where I urgently think I need to be. The mood of the dream is one of frustration and bordering on panic.

[Phoenix61]

1. It sounds like you want to make a

change in your life. You have times when you think you are moving in the right direction but then realize nothing has really changed. The suitcase is the things that are important to you, stuff, ideas, people, habits etc. You let go of/lose some but the ones important to you you have managed to keep.

[Tobin S.]

2. Thanks, Phoenix.

That makes good sense, especially the part about the suitcase. And it just occurred to me that the SD card is a memory card which could be symbolic of my own memories.

The part about change makes sense as well, but these aren't external changes that I'm seeking. That's about the internal life, the spiritual life. I've run across a guy recently who I think is further down the path than I am and I have asked him to be my teacher of sorts. The professor in the elevator could have something to do with that.

[Tobin S.]

3. Also, now that I've written out my thoughts...

...the last paragraph of my OP seems very telling to me now on my spiritual journey. I'm trying to get some place internally and it seems like I absolutely have to be there. This might be preventing me from fully appreciating the here and now...being fully present in each moment of my life.

[enough]

5. There's some resonance with this in the idea of finding yourself back where you started. NT

[cyclonefence]

4. They sound like anxiety dreams,

which Freud said were, strangely enough, actually reassurances. They're related to the dreams college students, or even people who left college long ago, have about missing an entire semester of a class and suddenly having to take a test in it.

Has anything like this ever really happened to you? If it's a classic reassuring anxiety dream, you would never, ever find yourself in these situations. These dreams demonstrate how conscientious you are, how responsible in doing things correctly. The fact that the dreams are distressing while you're having them shows that you would never let these things happen to you.

The dreams about the basement ("that's rather small&quot and the elevator are, again per Freud, sex dreams. He says that anything where you move up or down, and any time you fit into a small space, you're dreaming about sex. And I would point to "My wife is suddenly there" in support of this idea. It's an "SD" card.

All of this is old-school psychoanalysis and would probably not be accepted today, but I find it very interesting ...

[Tobin S.]

6. Thank you for your interpretation.

The first two paragraphs you have there make sense and could be another component to the dream. It could be a multi-layered kind of thing. I'm not sure about the sexual aspect. When I dream about sex it's usually pretty straight forward. My wife and I have a healthy sexual life. There are no hang-ups there that I would be sublimating.

[rock]

7. This sounds like the very common theme of Sisyphus

Who rolls a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down which is then repeated endlessly. It's the most common theme that I experience in my dreams. If it bothers you too much try some melatonin, a natural sleep-aid (non-prescriptive).

[Tobin S.]

8. It could be an archetypal thing like that.

I don't have any trouble sleeping, and I place a high value on my dreams so I like to remember them. My dreams don't usually cause me much distress. They might perplex me sometimes, but that's okay.

[rock]

9. That's great

I'm an old guy and have my share of sleep problems. Anyways, good for you!

[Tobin S.]

10. Thank you all. You have helped me get this one sorted out I think.

I thought of these two dreams as one dream and they ran together like that in my memory, but I think they are actually about two different areas of my life and what is happening to me right now both internally and externally.

One thing that has been on my mind in a major way lately is that I don't seem to be able to effect any change as far as my livelihood goes. I've went back to school and finished my degree in recent years, but I still can't manage to find anything that will replace the income adequately that I get from trucking. And we aren't talking about a ton of money here. I'd need to make around 50k a year, but I just can't swing it anywhere else. It's not just a career change, either. I recently thought I had another job lined up that would have been an improvement over what I currently have albeit still in trucking. They made me an offer, I took it, and gave my notice at my current job. A week later I call them up and they tell me they aren't going to hire me now. They said they didn't think they had enough work to keep me busy. It seems like they could have determined that before they even placed an ad let alone make someone an offer. I can't find anything locally that would be an improvement over what I currently have and I've been looking for three and a half years.

The fact that I can't stop in the first dream is telling. I can't stop being a trucker, and it seems to be something that's beyond my control. I had another dream recently about trucking and not being able to stop or slow down my rig.

In the dream I go in a big circle and come back to where I started. That could be an allusion to my current job and how it seems to be my destiny. I've been doing a round trip run for nearly two years with them and that's the only kind of work they've got.

The anxiety inherent in both the dreams is sort of the way I feel now about these two areas of my life, but the feeling is very exaggerated in the dreams. I've made my peace with the idea that I might be a trucker for the rest of my life, or until I retire. It's just perplexing to me that I can't even make something different happen no matter how hard I try. I've been kicking around ideas about free will and predetermination lately because of this. As I was thinking on this while I was driving down the road the other day, a car passed me with a vanity plate that read "AGE." A little synchronicity there, and that might be a part of the answer to my problem. I'm 45.

I don't think the second dream is totally related to the first one. Like I said these are just two things that take up a lot of my conscious thought now days. The second is about spirituality. In that dream it appears that I am in a hurry to get to my destination, but I trip myself up due to my haste and it costs me more time that it would have if I had just slowed down to make sure I was doing everything right. Forgetting the bag and the trip down into the wrong basement are examples of pursuing a course that takes one to a dead end or ends up just being a big run-around. But the journey down into the correct basement in the elevator seems to be telling me that I've righted myself and I'm back on course.

The lower level in the dream seems to me to be an allusion to a pictograph I saw recently in an essay I read about transpersonal psychology. It showed various stages of psychological development the beginning stages at the top and the more advanced stages descending downward. I meet my wife in the basement at the same time I discover a memory card in my suitcase which seems to be telling me to keep her in mind as I pursue my spiritual interests. The idea that I discover that I'm missing some things from my suitcase after I recover it in the basement seems to be telling me that I'm going to get where I need to be, but it might cost me something.