Though, some dreams, we hope, will never fit that category.


Recently, some of my co-workers and I were discussing the kind of dreams that everyone seems to have, but nobody wants to see manifest in real life.


And you all know what I’m talking about the minute I say the words “Naked Dream.”


As in, the dream where you are walking down the street naked. Or, at the very least, in your underwear.


And you break into a cold sweat, because you know you’re exposed, but, weirdly, nobody else seems to notice — although the cruel joke of this dream is that you think somebody’s going to notice at any second. Like that nun who taught you in second grade. Or your boss.


Speaking of bosses, it’s pretty much a given that if you are dreaming about your job, it’s time for a vacation.

Which means I am way, way overdue.


In the past few weeks, I have dreamed that 1) There’s a big empty space on a newspaper page I am supposed to fill and I can’t remember what story I’m supposed to file and we’re going to press within the hour and, 2) I am supposed to come up with a clever headline in two minutes and my whole job depends on it and I can’t think of a thing.


These are the types of dreams that literally have me awakening in panic attacks. It’s like the punchline to that old joke about being half Catholic and half Jewish: “I wake up both guilty and anxious” (I have had both Catholics and Jews in my family, so I’m allowed to be politically incorrect here).


This type of dream is right up there with the “I’m in school and I can’t find my schedule/class and an exam is pending,” also known as the “I’m back in school 20 years later and somebody has told me that I never really graduated and I have to take a certain course in order to really graduate but I don’t know what course that would be” dream.


Surely, the actual, physical realization of those twin nightmares are what await Very, Very Bad People in Hell; and one can only hope that Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin are living them each and every day, for all eternity. Enough said.


For me, personally, the worst bad dream is the “I can’t find my way home” scenario.


I am either driving on some rural road (the scarier variation, as I am not a country person) or I’m on some gigantic freeway with endless exits that lead to more off-ramps and I just want to go home.


Worse, I see familiar towns or streets, but they don’t look anything like those designated towns or streets, and I wind up just as lost.


An even more pathetic version is dreaming about being stranded on some open road without any kind of vehicle and I have to walk to the home that I cannot locate.


How ironic that the title of a very pleasant song from “The King and I” is “I Have Dreamed.”


But there is but one small comfort in such mental torment.

As an occasional sufferer of insomnia, I can at least wake up with the knowledge that, if my mind were engaged in such havoc, I must have been, indeed, asleep.


If not restfully.




Stephen Kopfinger is a Sunday News staff writer. Contact him at skopfinger@lnpnews.com or at 291-8799. blog comments powered by Disqus