Dream with Wife

Last night I had a detailed, layered dream, and it took me a while to realize it had been a dream.

It all started at work. I was working at Some Company, as the manager of Some Department, and a young woman came in for a job interview. Wife also worked for the same company, and may have been there to sit in on the interview as well. Anyway, we started normally enough, but after a couple of questions we were interrupted by something else that wasn't a disaster but nonetheless distracted us from the job at hand—very much in the normal way of dreams. But the interruption still involved all the same people. So in the process of the disturbance, I got to see the young woman in action: what kind of a person she was, how she reacted to others, and so on. After this had gone on for a few minutes, I pulled Wife aside and told her that I wanted to hire the young woman. Wife agreed.

Not long thereafter, I woke up from that dream to find myself lying in bed next to Wife. Of course she had been in the dream that just ended, so I began discussing it with her as if that were the most natural thing to do. First, I confirmed that it had been a dream, and that she had been there with me. "Yes." "And we both worked at the same place?" "Yes." Then I asked her, "At that job, did you work for me or did I work for you?" She thought about it for a while as if really trying to remember, before finally saying that she thought I worked for her. (And while I hadn't been able to remember myself, that sounded right to me once she said it.) We talked some more, and agreed that the girl in the dream would have made a fine employee. So I said that if I went back into that dream again, I'd hire her.

Then, reflecting on it all, I said that it seemed like it had been not "just a dream" but some kind of alternate reality or parallel possibility—nothing we could ever reach from here, but somewhere we might have been able to get to if we backed up thirty or forty years, if we had made different decisions and if chance events had gone other than they did. I specifically pointed to two things that would have had to be different: one was her health, which precluded any corporate management role for her; and the other was our respective career arcs, since even when Wife was working (before her health got too bad) there was no way we would ever have ended up at the same company. As I was saying these things, I thought to myself that there was a third factor which would have had to be different, but which I wasn't going to mention aloud: viz., her mental illness, which I took in a broad enough sense that I included with it all the dysfunctional and alienating parts of her personality. Again, I didn't mention that one aloud. But Wife agreed with the two factors that I had spoken of.

A little while after that discussion, I slowly awoke into reality, or perhaps I had better call it this reality here and now. I realized that there was no one else in bed with me, talking. I was lying in my single bed, in my bachelor apartment, all alone. And yet in a way I had the same sense I had had before, in the second (or "outer") dream, with respect to the first (or "inner") dream. In other words, it did feel like there was something true about the possibility. It could never transpire in this reality, not here and not now. It would have required significantly different branching many years ago. But it felt—and still feels, I guess—like the scene where I could lie quietly, rationally discussing with Wife some dream we had both shared and then woken from could have been a possibility along some alternate timeline; and indeed that the scene where Wife and I worked at the same company and I was hiring the young woman in the first dream could have been another. When I woke into this timeline, I did feel awfully alone.

Just as a memo, here's what I did when I woke. It was still dark. I don't know what time it was. First I went into the bathroom to pee. Then I got some paper and a pen—and my glasses, which I now need for anything close up. I avoided looking at a clock, or turning on any artificial light; but I lit a candle, and wrote down as much of the dream as I could remember by candlelight. After that, I blew out the candle and lay back down. In time, I fell back asleep.