I have always had vivid dreams (at least as long as I can remember), and while some are fun and entertaining, others are disturbing and unsettling. I started dabbling in dream symbolism several years ago to try to identify recurring themes and symbols – I don’t believe that they are prophetic, rather that they are my subconscious trying to process things. I take the Jungian approach, where the people and situations are representative of different parts of me. The trick is figuring out what they mean.

It has resulted in some really helpful insights. For example, I have recurring dreams of tornados. I still remember the one where the tornado chased me down the street, and I made a hard left turn to run between two houses to escape, and the tornado made the turn and followed me. That was not fun. But after looking at the dreams, I discovered that tornados tend to represent chaos in my waking life that is threatening to overwhelm me. After I realized this, the next time I had a dream about a tornado, I let it approach me, then I reached my hand out into the vortex with my palm up. The tornado dissolved, leaving a tangled ball of string in my hand. It helped me feel in control and I realized that I could do something about it instead of just running away. I still dream of tornados, but now they tend to swirl around me in the distance instead of threatening me personally.

Unfortunately, the tornado has been replaced by a new disturbing trend over the past year or two – Screwed Up Travel. Whether it’s missing a flight, not being able to find my gate at the airport, suddenly realizing that my flight leaves in ten minutes and I’ll never get to the airport on time, changing travel plans in the middle of a trip and then having to scramble and make new plans to get home, not being able to reach a travel agent… all accompanied by a sense of anxiety and confusion and frustration. And it’s not just planes – driving, trains, and cruise ships have also been featured. It’s also not just missing connections – the dream where I was in a plane crash was extremely disturbing.

I did a basic search on the symbolism of travel, and while a lot of what I found didn’t seem applicable, a couple of things did. Namely travel symbolizing the path being taken to accomplish life goals. When I saw that, it was like a lightbulb went on. My workplace has always been a bit fluid – organizational changes, management changes, departmental goal changes – but it’s gotten worse over the past few years. Between being acquired by a larger corporation and the company (and world) dealing with COVID-19, things have been very unsettled at my company. I’ve started wondering if I just want to retire from Corporate America and do something else that will be more fulfilling, or sell the house and move somewhere else while keeping my current job, or go into business for myself and find something that I could do remotely while traveling the country.

With that in mind, suddenly it made sense that my uncertainty about “what do I want to be when I grow up and how do I get there” was showing up in my dreams. So now when those dreams occur, they are less unsettling for me. Work is still chaotic, and I have yet another new manager as of a couple weeks ago, but I’m trying to be better about going with the flow instead of letting my frustration stress me out so much. And the next time I have a Screwed Up Travel dream, hopefully I can focus less on feeling freaked out and more on what I can do to resolve the problem. Maybe that will help me figure out my path in my waking life, as well.