The road ahead

When I was a young adult, I had a recurring dream where my car windscreen would mist up and I couldn’t see the road ahead.

The complication was that I was the driver, and the mist would often descend when I was driving along a highway or through a complex series of narrow winding pot-holed streets. I’m not sure which was worse, they each involved me trying to get off the road safely without melting into utter panic.

Variations included not being able to open my eyes while driving, or only being able to see the road ahead through a tiny pinpoint in the windscreen.

This is a common dream theme for many people.

The general gist, as I’m sure you can see from these short dream summaries, is that these dreams came up whenever I felt (or feared) that I couldn’t see where I was going in my life (forget cars, think life in general).

The pandemic reminded us that we can’t always see ahead clearly, and sometimes we must pull over and wait until clarity, or a new vision, emerges. We might then see a new direction, or – according to one of the pandemic’s most overused words in my opinion – pivot. What would that be in a car dream, a three-point turn, hiring a chauffeur, the car sprouting wings and flying to the top of a mountain?

There are other clues in my young adulthood dream. The mist might have been grief (we talk about being misty eyed), the tiny pinpoint in the windscreen might have symbolised narrow vision, overly focussed on one small point, blindness to the bigger picture. Not being able to open my eyes might have symbolised trying to become more conscious or recognising an unwillingness to see that I needed to break through.

This recurring dream predates my professional life as a dream analyst, and I no longer remember enough details of the individual dreams to be able to interpret them accurately, to uncover my underlying mindset at the time, and use that insight to gain the clarity I much needed, or to chill, point my life in the direction I wanted to go, and accept uncertainty.

This old dream theme presented itself when I sat down to write this blog.

I didn’t know what I was going to write: you could say that I sat myself in the driving seat and faced a misty windscreen, or a blinking cursor and blank page on my computer screen, but the road ahead revealed itself and I’m discovering each new paragraph as I type.

At some level, memory of this old dream theme was prompted by yet another visit to my ophthalmologist. I say ‘yet another’ because regular eye checks have been a theme of my life since the age of five when I received my first pair of glasses from the NHS (the National Health Service in the UK offered free prescriptions and frames). They were pink coated wire frames with lovely long bendy bits that hooked over my ears, lovely because I could take my glasses off and chew them, bend them, play with them, much to my parents’ distress.

Last week, I stood and looked at frame options for my latest prescription. I’m old enough to have been through most of the fashion waves several times over: chunky, cat-eye, diamante, John Lennon, aviator, oversized, undersized, octagonal, hexagonal, rectangular, round, oval, wayfarer, rimless, asymmetrical, designer. Plus a couple of bouts of dedicated contact lens wearing.

Beyond the frames, I’ve lived through and worn various lenses: tinted, photochromic, and, beyond middle age, graduated (multifocal). And both hard and soft contacts. I have glasses for everyday wear and glasses with a different prescription for working at my computer, including being on Zoom. And prescription sunglasses.

I don’t know whether new glasses make me look different – an overly focussed consideration when faced with all the choices – but they make my world a little clearer, frame by frame, as my prescriptions catch up with the tiny changes in my vision.

Much the same as dream interpretation really, a process that makes your world a little clearer, dream by dream, as those dreams reflect the changes in the way you see and experience the world and how these colour your projected road ahead.

 

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