In the nineties, I worked for a large international bank and for a period was flying to Europe monthly to negotiate the firm’s technology strategy. The car service would take me to the airport for an early evening flight. This was before 9/11 and the bank paid for me to fly business class, so I could get to the airport, through security and onto an international flight quite quickly. They had an option for a quick dinner which I would eat, have a couple glasses of wine, and then settle in for the flight.

The airlines provided sleeping masks and earplugs which I would use, and drift off to sleep over the hum of the jet engines. Several hours later, as we were approaching the airport, a flight steward would awaken me. I would fill out the necessary forms and prepare to disembark.

Most of my flights were to Zurich. We would land in the morning, and I would take the tram to the hotel, where I would check in, deposit my luggage and then head to the office. I would be a little groggy, but I found that it was the easiest way to adapt to the new time zone. By the end of the day, I would be dragging, so after going out to dinner with coworkers, I would head straight back to my hotel and go to sleep. The next morning, I would awake, pretty well settled into the routine.

The corporate politics were complicated. The organization was matrix managed, and this was compounded by the international element. I managed to survive this fairly well, but as I became more deeply involved, the politics became more complicated. On the advice of a coworker, I recruited the help of an organizational consultant. She had a Ph.D in applying Freudian psychoanalysis to organizations. The basic idea was that just as individuals had healthy or neurotic reactions to stress, so do organizations.

I was fascinated by the idea and besides availing myself of her recommendations on navigating the complex matrix managed international bank, I took the opportunity to study as much of the underlying work as possible. This led me to a topic where people in an organization shared their dreams. They reacted to one another’s dreams, not by trying to analyze the dreams themselves, but by exploring the groups associations and reactions to the dreams.

I’ve been to various meetings where people explored this and it changed my whole approach to dreams. Yet still, I don’t remember my dreams as often as I would like. That said, there is one dream that often comes back to me in various formats. Typically, I have returned to college, but I’ve somehow gotten distracted and not made it to various classes. Often, I can’t remember which classes I have and when they meet, let alone my assignments or the material I was supposed to have learned. To make things more complicated, the courses are not ones that I’ve normally been interested in.

Rarely, do I end up actually going to a class in these dreams, instead it is a sense of dread of the incomplete. I’ve often wondered what these dreams are about. Are they attempts to work through unfinished aspects of my real college experience? Are they some variation of the dreams that others have about not being prepared for an exam in school? Do they reflect some aspect of being concerned about not being about to please some authority figure? Is it because of some general aspects of having things unfinished?

The office where I write is littered with piles of clutter. How much of this clutter is the result of unfinished projects? Are there other symbols of unfinished projects? Does it reflect some truth about myself, about how I approach things. I’ve often identified myself as an innovator or early adopter of technology. I like to explore something new and exciting. Finishing up things seems boring.

I haven’t had a dream about unfinished college work for quite a while, but just recently, the dream came back. Is it related to working on National Novel Writing Month, and some anxiety of whether I’ll be able to finish it this year.

I’ve also been curious about other dreams in the household. I awoke in the middle of the night to hear Kim whimpering. I figured she was having a bad dream and I stroked her back for a little while and the whimpering ended. There have been other times when she has clearly been having a really bad dream. Not only would she be crying out in her sleep, but she would be having goose bumps. There are times that Fiona also has bad dreams. Often they are early in the morning, and she comes into our bedroom and crawls into the bed next to Kim and I. I don’t often hear details of her dreams, but at times she will become scared during dinner or at some other time, and it will be because something reminded her of a scary dream she had had.

I got me thinking, I rarely have scary dreams. Why is this, when my wife and daughter both have scary dreams? One idea I’ve floated is that it has to do with television. As a general rule, I don’t watch television. I read blogs, social media and the news online and spend time writing online, but I watch very little television.

In the evening, I often hear the television in the background. I can rarely hear enough of it to make out any dialog, and it is in a different room, so I don’t see the images, but I hear the music, and the general tenor of the sound. It often sounds like there are scary sections and I wonder how the media affects each one of us.

This applies not only to television, but to all media. What sort of impact does reading a wide variety of blogs have on me? What sort of impact does the stream of social media have on me, or the news as it is presented after going through various online filters? Does the more interactive nature of my media consumption have a different effect than the broadcast nature of so much of media?

All of these thoughts come to me as I try to write. This weekend, we set the clocks back. That gave me an extra hour of sleep. However, it means that I’m writing later in the evening than I normally do. This comes after having gotten up early for a work event, something I must do again tomorrow.

Perhaps my words are rambling, like they may have during less coherent hours of my European trips. Perhaps, I’m just writing, to avoid that fearful dream of not being able to finish what I set out to do. Yet even with that, I am slipping further behind.