The Dragon in my Dreams

I’ve had a hell of a past few weeks. One of my coworkers has given up her full time position. The third one in under a year. It’s caused upheaval at work again causing horrible behavior amongst my clients. They don’t really understand why she’s leaving. They think it has something to do with them, which in some ways I suppose it does. It’s hard work that we do. But it’s not them. And while I should be thinking about how this is affecting them and how wonderful it is for her, I can’t help thinking about myself.

She started in full time after I did and she’s left us already. Moved on. And I find myself so insanely jealous I can think of nothing else.  I know it doesn’t make any sense. Her situation and mine are not the same. I can’t compare what’s going on in my life to what’s going on in hers. But I can’t help but wish it was me.

I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to wake up in three days and have to go back there. Every day I go to work thinking I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this. But I’m not doing anything about it. Not really. I tell people I’m looking for a job. I go on the internet and I spend a night going through sites looking for jobs to apply for, but it doesn’t go much beyond that. Nothing ever seems to go much beyond that. Not my job search. Not my social life. Not my writing. And that, my writing, is the only thing that I know I want to do.

The other night I had a dream. I know this seems random, but bare with me. I don’t usually remember my dreams. I don’t know if I don’t care or if I haven’t conditioned my mind to remember, I just don’t know. But this one I remembered. I was a teenager again, spending time with my best friend at a sporting event. We were in the stands watching, I don’t even know what sport was being played at the time, when a Dragon came and began to torch the stadium. People were screaming. Fire was raining down. Everyone was trying to escape.

Somehow, my best friend and I managed to get under the seating where the changing rooms were just before the fountain of fire coming from the dragon was going to consume us. I don’t remember the entire conversation that happened in that room. I know my best friend and I were discussing different ways of escaping with the other people who had taken refuge there. All the while the dragon was focusing its attention on that room. Every breath had it releasing a torrent of fire aimed at that door, melting the metal and causing the water pipes to burst. I don’t know when in the dream I figured it out, but I knew, somehow, I knew, that that dragon was after me. For whatever reason, this dragon, this terrifying, fire breathing dragon was after me. And me in the dream, I wasn’t scared. Not of the dragon. The fire yes, but not the dragon. I just knew that someday I was going to have to face it. My companions and I had just managed to take advantage of a short breach in the fire breathing to escape when the dream shifted gears. And then I’m watching these men, these men I knew came from a long line of knights, who were prepared and waiting for this day. This day when the dragon would return, climbing this hill in the middle of this field, and they were talking about needing to find the king. Needing to set up a base for him, knowing he would come. The prophesy said he would find his way to the castle and when he did he would defeat the dragon and he would rule over the new land. And I knew that I was that king. I just didn’t know it yet.

I don’t know much about dreams. I’ve never really studied the art of cataloging dreams. I covered it briefly in one class while in school, which got me interested enough to buy a Dream Dictionary, thinking it might come in handy some day with my writing. I’ve paged through it a few times, never extensively.

I pulled it out after that dream though. I don’t know if I give much store to this. I guess I sort of look at it the same way one might look at Horoscopes or Tarot readings. As long as the description is vague enough you can easily apply it to something going on in your life.  Besides that, every human brain thinks completely different then every other brain on the planet. How could anyone generalize images in any way and have them mean the same thing for every person?

But after reading the descriptions behind some of the biggest images in the dream, I can’t help but feel that maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

There was a long paragraph about the dragon, apparently it doesn’t symbolize only one thing. From a western view point it is meant to represent some tyrannical ‘thing’ in your life, possibly a boss or even yourself. But the part that struck me was near the end where the book said that dragons were also said to guard treasure so my “unconscious could have highlighted a desire to undergo a dynamic process of inner renewal. The fire breathing dragon in your dream may in fact be a symbol of great inner strength and vision the dreamer can draw upon to overcome doubt.”

I’ve had a great deal of doubt as of late. I’m told by a very close family friend, who also writes, that it’s something we all go through. Most especially the writer. Her theory is that so much of what we do is in solitary. We write alone. We think alone. We sink in self-doubt alone, that we forget how to reach out to people to help us. What I found interesting about the above description paired with my dream was the idea that the dragon in my dream was after me. It was going to get me. And even though I was running away from it, someday, I knew, I was going to have to face it.

Talk about your subconscious trying to slap you in the face. I’ve been running away from my wants and my desires for too long. I keep telling myself that as soon as I get out of debt I’ll be able to do what I want. The market isn’t right now for job hunting, I’ll never find anything. I keep finding reasons to put it off.

To further my interpretation the description of the knight has as its negative aspect, “the night can fall into a pattern of saving others but ignoring his own needs. Such dreams may be urging you to find a balance between self-sacrifice and self-neglect.”

There it is again. Self-neglect. I’ve been so focused on doing the responsible thing that it’s hindered everything else. I was asked again today what it is that I want to do with the rest of my life and the only thing I can ever think to answer is “Write.” But I never want to tell people that. It feels too frivolous. Too impractical. How can I tell someone who has been working so hard their entire life, that all I want to do is write?

Tonight I was having dinner with my family and my mother asked me that question, again. I didn’t want to answer. I paused. And my brother answered for me. He rolled his eyes and said. “She wants to write.”  As if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Which I suppose it is. And then my mother goes in on how she knew that but what am I going to do in the mean time. How am I going to support myself for real? And I wonder if it’s that question, asked so many times over, if that is the root of my self-doubt? Most especially when it’s asked by the woman who all my life told me I could do whatever I wanted to do and be whatever I wanted to be.

It’s food for thought.

I’ve come to no resolutions tonight on the matter. No one can change overnight after all. But now that this idea is in my head… Now that the thought is there, that subconsciously a dragon is struggling to burst forth, I can’t stop thinking about it. So tonight, after I send this out in the world, I’ll devote the next two to three hours to my writing. And tomorrow, when I wake up, I’ll spend my day off searching for jobs. And I WILL send out one resume at the very least. And then I will write some more. And I will try to fight back my self-doubt. That stupid voice in the back of my brain that tells me I can’t do it. That I’m not good enough. And maybe I’ll buy a dragon of some sort. A visual reminder that there’s a dragon waiting deep down inside, and I can’t keep running from it.