The purple dragon of decision-making. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm in a darkened bar with blue accent lighting. I work here in some kind of management/ownership position. A small, flying purple dragon who is a regular customer of mine is drunk, and he flies behind the bar. A cat jumps up and eats it. I don't want to lose that regular income the dragon provides, so I try to get it out. 

I can't. I worry that I just haven't tried enough things. I heard from one of Louis C.K.'s interviews that if you put alcohol into a dog's mouth, it will make them throw up. But I really don't want to harm the cat. What if alcohol hurts cats and not dogs? What if I use the wrong type of alcohol? What if it hurts the dragon?

Fortunately, just by reaching into the cat's mouth, I can eventually pull the dragon out. It's not harmed. I think to myself, If this wasn't a dream, he'd have suffocated in the cat's stomach.

I go to another part of the bar with my parents--an outdoor area. I'm just showing them around when I see an impression start to wriggle upwards from the soil. Snakes pop out of the soft dirt floor. I analyze at them and declare them harmless. I put them in containers. I put one in a container with water. I say it's a Mississippi mud snake. But I doubt myself because something about his face looks like a gila monster, and those are desert animals. I categorize the other snakes as a garter snake, and a corn snake. 

Then I hear a rattle. One is a rattlesnake! I missed it! How could I have done that! Now it has my dad cornered and it's heading towards him. I tell my dad to run and he does, barely missing getting bitten. 

I survived that, but don't know what to do now about the snakes in my restaurant. The bar is packed with customers. 

Then I see on the TV that the wife of famous evangelist, Billy Graham, has killed herself. Some people were trying to break into her seven houses before she died. There's a TV special about the theives' lives. They were doing a lot of social engineering, but were also searching dumped databases to try to get to her assets. 

I'm high in the catwalk of a stage. I look down on some white horses with numbers on their flanks. We're still following the lives of this small team of crooks. The thieves have inside knowledge about how fast the horses need to be in order to win a contest with them. The trainer calls me down and asks me to help. 

He thinks that if we all speed our clicking noises and chewing, these horses will move through their marks faster. I look around, and all the girls handling the horses are chewing. We try it, all six or so of us and have a good laugh, but I agree that the trainer is on to something.

INTERPRETATION

This dream seems to be wrestling with the challenges of managing problems. I felt pretty relieved when the horse trainer came up with a solution to a problem instead of me. It was a different kind of stress at the very least to try to follow someone else's directions versus coming up with my own.

I often feel what I felt when I was trying to get the little dragon out of the cat. I often think I can't think fast enough because I haven't tried a wide enough variety of things, or that I'm going to harm someone or something, or that I'll ruin things through inaction because I'm too lazy. 

For example, I just had a flat tire, and I had no idea what to do. My initial thought was to tow the car to a tire shop, but then my stepfather told me I should use an air pump to inflate the tire, and if it's a slow leak, I can just drive it to the shop. Then my neighbor told me I should put my spare tire on, and he described how to do it. That didn't work out, because I bought my car used, and someone swiped the spare tire. Then my friend said I need to call roadside assistance. I tried that, but it wasn't on my insurance plan. I gave up and called a tow truck, which did work, but my therapist said I spent a lot of money I didn't need to, because the tire place upsold me four new tires and a warranty plan, when I could have just taken off the wheel and had someone drive me to the tire store. 

I bought the roadside assistance plan and added it to my insurance, so hopefully in the future, I can just get it towed for the $7 a month that the plan costs me, but sometimes, problems like this make my head spin. 

I'm also having challenges with thinking about getting a job that will downgrade my insurance. Will it end up being worth it? If it doesn't work out, it will set me back for who knows how long. This is one of the biggest problems with not having universal healthcare: you're tied to certain systems and it stifles innovation and entrepreneurship. 

I'm also attempting a certificate program right now that involves a lot of problem solving, not the least of which is how to structure my progress within the program. It's not as well-structured or as gameified as a college class. So it's not so much the actual coursework that gets to me as the life-management issues. I guess the emotional impact of problem-solving bookwork is a lot less severe, because you know that no matter what you do, it's not going to restrict your future lifestyle. 

I have other big life decisions I need to make. I don't like having to make these types of decisions. I guess part of my problem is that I keep thinking about what it would have been like had I done things another way when life is just going to unfold the way it unfolds. 

I don't know what I can learn from this. Maybe that living in the future (can I do better?) or the past (I should have done ___) instead of the present can really make you miserable.