is a journalist and web editor at Philonomist. After working as a reporter for Ouest-France, she now collaborates with various publications.
Dear reader,
The other night, I dreamed of a colleague. I came across her in a bar and we started chatting. Sternly, she told me that I should avoid talking so much about my personal life at the office. Clearly missing her point, I then launched into a long-winded explanation of why my life was so complicated that I couldn’t stop talking about it… I didn’t remember any of this when I woke up, but when I greeted the said colleague at her desk, the dream suddenly flashed back to me. Embarrassed, I avoided her gaze and shunned any form of interaction. But where does this uneasiness come from that gripped me every time I met her that day? After all, it was just a dream, right?
Clearly, it’s not the content of her reproach that touched me, since I’m telling my dream to a crowd of unknown readers, including my colleagues, who won’t fail to nag me until I tell them which one of them is concerned! And one might find in my reluctance to tell them a first explanation for my uneasiness: for our minds fed on the pop psychoanalysis, to admit to having dreamed of someone is to raise the prospect that the dream might involve some sexual attraction, conscious or not – which is more than enough to fuel the office gossip. But in this case, believe me or not, I don’t think I have any repressed fantasy for this colleague. So I have to look for answers elsewhere than in my Freudian guidebook.
When I met my colleague that morning, the memory of her stern double collided with the image of the person now greeting me kindly. And it’s in this confusion between dream and reality that I find my second element of answer: for a moment, I no longer knew where reality lay. “The most treacherous dreams, those which the mind finds itself most liable to confuse with reality, are the briefest and most innocuous,” writes French philosopher Roger Caillois in his essay The Uncertainty that Comes from Dreams (1956). Did this conversation with my colleague really take place? It just felt like a memory. But “is it a memory of reality or a memory of a dream? We no longer know the nature of the data whose ephemeral existence the dream prolongs,” Caillois adds.
“Dreams are extremely intimate: to encounter our work life there is to suffer the invasion of the professional at the very heart of our personal life”
But doubt was quickly discarded: I easily realised that this interaction never took place in the real world. And yet the discomfort remains and even grows as I reflect on the question. Because dreams are extremely intimate: to encounter our work life there is to suffer the invasion of the professional at the very heart of our personal life. An unpleasant mix of genres against which we’re powerless: while we can report a manager who calls us on a Sunday afternoon, it’s difficult to complain to HR about the content of our dreams. Not to mention that vague feeling of shame that arises: is my life so empty that I’m now dreaming about my job?
The thing is, we don’t choose what we dream of. Dreams aren’t docile little things. At night, these wild epics impose themselves on us without our consent when we’re lacking the means to dismiss them. The sleepy mind “undergoes the invasion of the swarm of dreams, which suddenly imposes on it a universe that it is now powerless to refuse.” When we go to bed, we know we’re exposing ourselves to such abuse; but it’s less common to be bothered by dreams when we’re awake. And this is a fourth element of explanation: I allowed myself to be caught off guard by this irruption of the dream into reality, when I was not ready to encounter it there. This was a forced incursion into my privacy, right there in the middle of the open plan office.
But the final element of my discomfort, and perhaps the most important, is a little trickier to grasp. “It does not seem that man succeeds immediately and without difficulty in fully grasping the nature of this image which he represents to himself in a dream and which he believes to be himself,” writes Caillois. The me of my dream is not me, but a double of me, an image that I find difficult to apprehend. My dream colleague is no more than a double either. In the real world, sitting quietly in front of her computer, she knows nothing about her adventures in my dream life – and this asymmetry makes me uncomfortable. Maybe because it reminds me that I too have no control over other people’s dreams? Could it be that my colleague also dreams of me? Where will my dreamlike double wander when I’m not watching? In what fanciful, absurd, scary situation does it find itself? In the minds of my colleagues, my friends, my neighbours, my baker? I guess I’d rather not know – and that it’s better, for the peace of the office, that I keep the identity of my colleague to myself.
Mariette Thom
Picture © Kajetan Sumila / Unsplash
