A couple of months ago, my subconscious decided that regular anxiety wasn’t pulling its weight, so it built an international maritime crisis around a therapy appointment.
The dream started in Phoenix at about 6:30 in the evening. It was already dark, which felt normal in the dream despite Phoenix usually clinging to daylight like it has a personal grudge against the moon. I had a therapy appointment at exactly 7:00 p.m., and getting there felt like the single most important thing I had ever been asked to do. Not arriving on time would’ve been catastrophic, although I had no idea why. Maybe the therapist had the final answer to what the hell is wrong with me. Maybe there was a door prize. Maybe my subconscious simply understands that nothing creates urgency quite like the possibility of paying a cancellation fee.
Whatever the reason, I had to be there.
I was walking, which tells me I was probably young in the dream. Under twenty, certainly, and probably under eighteen. I didn’t have a car, a phone, a map, or any of the basic tools a functioning adult might use to navigate a city. To be fair, even with those things I’ve been known to get lost leaving a restaurant bathroom, so perhaps the dream was simply removing the illusion of competence.
I knew approximately where I needed to go, but not well enough to actually get there. That’s an important distinction.
I walked through Phoenix for what felt like hours. Streets stretched endlessly in front of me. Buildings appeared familiar without being recognizable. Every turn carried the vague promise that I was almost there, followed by the immediate realization that I had no idea where there was.
Throughout the dream, I kept checking clocks. They were everywhere, storefront clocks, wall clocks, digital displays, perhaps watches, though I don’t remember wearing one. Each time I looked, only a few minutes had passed.
This should’ve been comforting. It wasn’t.
Time wasn’t moving normally. It was crawling, but not in a generous way. It wasn’t giving me extra time to reach my appointment. It was stretching the panic, pulling each minute thin enough to trap me inside it. I could walk for what felt like an hour, glance at a clock, and discover that three minutes had passed.
Somewhere along the way, the flat desert geography of Phoenix apparently grew bored with itself and produced a massive bridge.
There is no bridge like this in Phoenix. There also isn’t an ocean, a harbor, an island, or any reasonable means of accidentally walking to Australia, but my sleeping brain wasn’t concerned with municipal accuracy.
The bridge was enormous, the kind that raises in the center so large ships can pass underneath. Naturally, it began lifting while I was trying to cross it. I didn’t turn around, because that would’ve been sensible, and sensible people don’t end up clinging to freight ships in their underwear or whatever I was wearing in this nightmare.
Instead, I started climbing.
The bridge rose higher, the roadway tilting into an impossible slope beneath me. I scrambled upward, gripping whatever I could reach and trying not to slide backward into the darkness below. Somehow, I barely made it across before the bridge became completely impassable.
On the other side, I found myself on an island.
Clock check, approximately 6:45 p.m.
Fifteen minutes until therapy. Still plenty of time, assuming my therapist’s office had recently relocated to whatever mysterious island had formed off the coast of Arizona.
I found a massive harbor and went inside to ask for directions. This was when I learned that I was no longer in Phoenix. I was in Tasmania, Australia.
I had somehow walked from Phoenix to an island more than eight thousand miles away in about fifteen dream minutes, but the therapy appointment remained my primary concern. I wasn’t impressed by the teleportation. I wasn’t worried about being on the wrong side of the planet. I didn’t ask how I’d crossed the Pacific Ocean without noticing. I just needed directions.
The people at the harbor explained that the only way back to Phoenix was to take a massive freight ship to the Australian mainland. Geography had fully left the building by this point.
The ships were full, but they were accepting what the harbor workers called “hangers-on.” That sounded vaguely hopeful until they explained what it meant.
Hangers-on weren’t allowed to ride aboard the ships. Instead, they had to get into the ocean, grab one of the tow ropes dragging behind the vessel, and hold on while the ship traveled to the mainland. No seat, no life jacket, no safety briefing, just a rope, an ocean, and the implied expectation that my upper body strength was about to accomplish something it has never once demonstrated an interest in doing.
Naturally, I agreed.
In waking life, I wouldn’t get into deep water behind a moving freight ship. I don’t like getting water in my face during a shower. I can swim, technically, but so can a squirrel under the right circumstances. That doesn’t mean either of us should be trusted in open water.
Dream me, however, climbed straight into the ocean.
The rope I grabbed was wider than my forearm. I wrapped myself around it and held on as the ship pulled away from the harbor. It turns out that a moving freight ship creates a significant amount of turbulence behind it, and my dream rendered the experience with unnecessary enthusiasm.
The water churned around us, dragging us beneath the surface and slamming us through the wake. I fought to keep my grip while the ocean tried to peel me from the rope one finger at a time. There were other people hanging on around me, and at some point, one of the men lost his grip.
He vanished into the wake, and without hesitation, I let go enough to swim toward him.
This was the most realistic part of the dream. Not because I’m brave, because I’m not. I once made someone else investigate a suspicious noise that turned out to be an ice cube shifting in a glass. But I do have a strong instinct to help someone else in trouble, especially when doing so will make my own situation significantly worse.
I reached the man and helped him get hold of a rope. He was safe, but I wasn’t. My rope had drifted too far away.
I tried to reach it, but the ship kept moving. The ropes dragged onward through the dark water, growing smaller as I watched. The vessel disappeared into the distance, taking my only route back to Phoenix with it.
I was alone in the ocean with Tasmania behind me, apparently, and there was nothing else to do, so I turned around and started swimming.
I paddled for what felt like forever. The island barely seemed to get closer. Every movement exhausted me, but I kept going until I finally reached land. I had made it back to Tasmania, but I was several miles from the harbor.
Clock check, 6:53 p.m.
Seven minutes until therapy.
At this point, I’d crossed a rising bridge, accidentally walked to Australia, been dragged behind a freight ship, rescued a drowning man, lost my transportation, and swum back to shore. I was still convinced I could make the appointment.
Honestly, that might be the most disturbing thing about the entire dream. Those damned clocks.
I entered the jungle and started walking toward the harbor. The jungle was dense, dark, and full of movement. Massive creatures followed me through the trees. I never saw them clearly, but post-dream me could tell. They were massive. Branches shifted behind me. Leaves trembled. Heavy shapes moved just beyond my vision.
Dream-me was completely oblivious to them. They were stalking me, and I didn’t care. I had seven minutes to get to therapy, and whatever enormous prehistoric Tasmanian nightmare beast wanted to eat me would simply have to wait until after my appointment.
Eventually, I could see the harbor in the distance. It was still far away, but visible through the trees. Lights glowed between the branches. Ships towered against the dark horizon. The place I needed to reach was right there, close enough to see and too far away to touch.
I woke up before I made it.
That’s the dream. Now comes the dangerous part, pretending I’m qualified to interpret it.
The most obvious theme is anxiety about being late. I don’t like being late, particularly when someone else is waiting for me. Being late feels like failure wearing a wristwatch. It suggests poor planning, disrespect, irresponsibility, and all the other qualities my inner critic keeps organized in a labeled filing cabinet.
But the dream didn’t just make me late. It made the journey impossible. Every solution created another problem. Every path carried me farther from the destination. I kept moving, but progress didn’t mean getting closer. A bridge led to an island. The island led to a harbor. The harbor led to a ship. The ship threw me back into the ocean. The ocean returned me to the island, but miles from where I started. I was working constantly and accomplishing almost nothing.
That feeling is familiar. There are periods in life when effort and progress stop resembling each other. You keep moving because standing still feels worse, but every step seems to create two additional steps. You answer one email and receive four more. You fix one problem and discover it has relatives. You finally make a therapy appointment and your brain relocates the therapist to another hemisphere.
The clocks are what stayed with me most. Time barely moved, but I never felt as though I had enough of it.
That contradiction feels painfully accurate. Anxiety can turn ten minutes into an endless corridor while simultaneously convincing you that you’re already too late. It doesn’t matter how much time is actually available. The failure has already occurred somewhere in your mind. You’re just rushing to catch up with it.
Then there’s the man in the water.
I could’ve kept holding the rope. I could’ve reached the mainland, wherever the dream believed that was, and continued trying to get my wayward ass back to Phoenix. Instead, I risked my own safety to help someone else.
That sounds noble until you recognize the less flattering possibility. Sometimes helping other people is easier than continuing toward your own destination. Someone else’s emergency is clear. It gives you instructions. They’re drowning, so you grab them. They’re hurt, so you comfort them. They need something, so you provide it.
Your own needs are messier. You might not know the route. You might not know what to ask for. You might be afraid that reaching the destination will require you to finally talk about why you were trying so desperately to get there.
Therapy was the goal, but the dream made certain I never arrived. Maybe that was the point. I wanted help, but the journey toward it became so complicated that I never had to experience the actual appointment. I could remain the person who was trying, the person who had every intention of arriving, the person defeated by geography, maritime law, predatory wildlife, and the unfortunate lack of an international light rail system.
There’s comfort in an impossible obstacle because it protects you from finding out what happens when the obstacle is gone.
The creatures in the jungle are another matter. They were huge, dangerous, and following me, but I didn’t care because I was too focused on the clock. That part feels less symbolic and more like my brain filing a formal complaint. There are threats we recognize because they’re loud and immediate, then there are the quiet things following us through the trees while we obsess over something easier to measure. Seven minutes late is measurable. A creature in the dark isn’t.
Neither is fear, grief, exhaustion, shame, loneliness, or the slow realization that you may have spent years running toward a version of safety that doesn’t exist. You can look at a clock and know exactly how late you are. You can’t glance at one and discover how long you’ve been avoiding yourself.
The dream ended with the harbor visible in the distance, and that feels important too.
I wasn’t completely lost. I could see where I needed to go. The destination existed. The route was uncertain, the jungle was full of enormous hungry bastards, and I was wet, exhausted, and presumably still somewhere near Australia, but I could see the lights. I just didn’t reach them before waking.
Maybe that’s hopeful. Or maybe my subconscious has a mean sense of humor and wanted me to spend the morning wondering whether my dream therapist charged me for the missed appointment.
Either way, I’m left with the image of that harbor glowing through the trees, close enough to promise relief and far enough to remain unreachable.
I think that’s what the nightmare was really about. Not being lost, not being late, and not even being hunted. It was about knowing exactly where I needed to go and discovering that wanting to reach it wasn’t enough. Familiar?