There Ya Go
We all have a little corner room in our brain that is occupied by our subconscious. It’s defined as the part of the mind that holds memories, emotions and automatic processes not in current focal awareness — AI’s words, not mine.
In more watered-down parlance, our subconscious is always there and never there at the same time. And in some ways, it only comes out at night.
That’s when we dream. And have nightmares. The difference between the two are, in a dream, you typically wake up in a decent mood, although sometimes confused. With nightmares, you wake up confused as well, but you’re also scared and angry, and sometimes even have a bead of sweat on your forehead. And if it’s really bad, your shirt is a little damp.
My subconscious was extremely busy last Wednesday night, or maybe it was Thursday morning — sometime during my five hours of sleep. Dreams/ nightmares — let’s call them dreammares for the purpose of this column — I think, usually are born from something that happened to you that day, or a day earlier. And they usually star someone who you had recently come in contact with. For me, 80% of the time, it’s about work. And 100% of that 80%, it’s more nightmare than dream.
And the funny thing is, these nightmares have nothing to do with the Headlight — the plot always includes my former employee, the Marshall Independent.
Last week’s subconscious spectacular had me as an editor, freaking out about a deadline. That’s typical for me — my newspaper dreammare always center around a deadline that I end up missing.
On this particular night, I had two pages to finish. It was 9:30 p.m. — one-half hour before deadline. In real life, no problem. I can lay out a page faster than I can make a sandwich. I’ve been doing since I was 18, I should be good at it — like, second-nature good. But not in my dreammare.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t find where the pages were. And when I got some assistance, I couldn’t locate where the stories were. I was totally inept. And I was scared. My managing editor — some faceless businessman who I didn’t even know — was ticked off at me. My former boss in real life, Dana Yost, was there, too, but was no help. The sports guy — another person whom I worked with years ago — came in from his apartment where he laid out his pages remotely. And one of my colleagues, Michael Kelly, a former sports editor at the Indy, was mad at me because sports beat us that night, and that very rarely happened in real life. Here I was, unable to do something in my dreammare that in real life I’m really good at.
Our IT guy came over to help me with my computer. It was a high school senior, whom I had shared a conversation with earlier Wednesday when I went over to the VMC to take a photo of the baseball players. Weird. Wow, my subconscious was really working overtime that night.
The nightmare ended with me still trying to figure out how to do a job I had been doing at an award-winning level for years but no longer could for some reason, and I woke up scared and frustrated before realizing it was just a dream. I mean, nightmare. I mean, dreammare.
Another non-perfect paper …
The next school year in Tracy starts on Sept. 1 — not Sept. 9 as I mistakenly wrote in last week’s paper — and it was on the front page no less. That’s a pretty noteworthy blunder, and I’m kicking myself over it. Just another reminder that we might never put out a perfect paper!
