Why I have nightmares

The dream is always the same

Normally I sleep like a baby - out by 10, up at 6, can’t wait for that first cup of coffee. Scant evidence of anything that went down the past 8 hours except the occasional puddle of drool

But if life isn’t right in my waking world, my dream self lets me know with a vengeance. It’s awful and it’s recurring.

The summer before I left for college, Risky Business came out. Tom Cruise’s breakout movie. Tom plays Joel who, like me at the time was 18 - in his senior year of high school trying to get into college.

Ray-bans askew, cigarette dangling, Joel deadpans in the opening scene “The dream is always the same.”

Joel is late for his college boards, he won’t get into an Ivy League college, his life is ruined.

In my dream I’m also late. Late for a customer meeting, late for my flight, late to a distant office. I’m traveling in a strange city just trying to get home and increasingly awful things keep happening.

When I was getting ready to put our house on the market, dream Andrew cooked up a doozy - I was lost in a catacomb of tunnels under an old city. It was an endless maze of stairs and tunnels and subways. They were dark, cold and smelled bad. No matter where I turned, which train I got on, what tunnel I went down … I couldn’t find my way.

After my dad died I had a version where I’d finally wound my way to the front of the security line at the airport and then couldn’t find my ID. I kept pulling folders and wallets out of my bag desperately looking through them but none of them had my ID. They were all full of my dad’s papers - his ID, his healthcare card, his death certificate, his bank. Points for creativity. A friend told me it meant my dad is going on a trip and I like that. Another friend told me it meant I was asleep.

Last week it happened again. I booked some flights to Canada, guess that triggered travel PTSD. My brother-in-law was the guest star this time. I lost my phone so he called me an Uber from his. It never showed and he disappeared. I couldn’t find my luggage and when I finally did, it was stuffed with soaking wet clothes. Then I couldn't find my passport. On and on.

Someone told me dreams last just a few seconds but my mini-nightmares are strung together - one awful travel scenario plays out just to tee up another until I wake up sweaty.

Look up recurring dream on the internet, you'll swear you're mental. Don’t do that. Don’t ever look for medical advice on the internet.

I was a road warrior for 30 years, traveling around once a month mostly for business. That’s three or four hundred trips - double or triple that if you break out each leg.

I don't think I'm mental - I think I traveled too much. So much to go wrong. Work adds on - logistics and stress of customer meetings, workshops, presentations. Say 80% of my trips went off without a hitch - the 20% that went sideways makes 70 trips worth of nightmare fuel.

I started to jot down travel memories for this story - just the bad ones mind you. I filled a page before I knew it. Honestly, it was cathartic. I had a friend who died on a flight - he never woke up on the other end of a long leg to Asia for a customer conference.

For the most part, my sideways trips are amusing … in retrospect.

Time change always messes with me - daylight savings time confuses me, never mind shifts across multiple time zones. Europe always sucked with an 8 hour shift; you lose a third of a day. Last week I mentioned a two day workshop in London that I took a redeye for. I’m dealing with no sleep, time shifted forward 8 hours all while stuck in a windowless conference room fighting to keep up with a sea of slides and whiteboards. That’s why you drink on business trips.

Once I was doing a two day workshop with a customer in Germany. It was November 2016. US Presidential Election. The first day of the workshop I got grilled on how we could even let Trump run. I assured my German friends it was ok - he wouldn't get elected. That night, to my horror, he did get elected and so on the second day of the workshop I showed up to a room of incredulous Germans demanding an explanation. Still don’t have one.

The best time eff up was when I was teaching a class in Hyderabad India. It's 12.5 hours later in India - day and night are flipped. The flights are long - around 20 hours - so between the two you leave one day and get there another. I planned to come a day early to catch up on sleep and prepare. I get to the hotel around 4AM, drop on the bed exhausted and check my phone when I realize my screwup. It’s not Sunday morning! It’s Monday and the class starts in a few hours 😱

Running frantically through a strange airport to catch your connection is so much fun. Houston gets the prize. Running down the concourse I could see the last person boarding at my gate. I got there gasping for breath just as they closed the jetway door. No amount of pleading with the gate agent will help. I watch hopelessly as the plane slowly creeps away from the gate while my day unravels 😱

So much time kicking around aimlessly in airports. I got stuck overnight in Miami and the airline put me in a room right above a disco that raged all night. I thought about joining the dance party; I should have.

In the summer of 2013 I was flying back from London when a Boeing 777 from Korea to San Francisco stalled on approach. It clipped the seawall before the runway which broke the tail of the plane off. The force was so great that flight attendants - still strapped in their seats were thrown out of the plane onto the runway.

My flight diverted to a small airport in Idaho where we baked on the tarmac while the captain talked his way into getting into SFO before they shut the entire airport down. Jennifer was a behind me on a different flight (she came to join me post businessy stuff) and she wasn't so lucky. She ended up in a Seattle suburb for four days while I scrambled to find her a flight home to Oakland 😱

My entitled customers. Once I flew all the way to Germany just to say sorry to one. Another apology tour - this time an emergency in New York City. Took the redeye and went straight from JFK to the office. Grabbed Starbucks and got to the office at 6AM. Spent the rest of the day running a workshop in a conference room conveniently located across from the brightest neon sign in all of Manhattan constantly flashing. In my eyes. All day in my eyes 😱

Can’t stop. The time I landed late in Chicago for a team meeting only to find the toll road gates opened when you threw quarters in the booth basket. Did I have quarters? Of course I didn’t.

Won’t stop. The time in France when I had no Euros to pay the shuttle driver. The time my uber driver watched a youtube video on his phone the entire way to SFO in a beater car that stunk of cigarettes.

So many bad hotels - my first trip to NYC I let the corporate travel portal pick my room and it was a cockroach infested closet 😱

Must stop. My last international trip right before COVID was down to Brazil. I severely underestimated how far away Sao Paulo is and I got sick down there made worse by a day trip from Sao Paulo to Rio. I took all the cold drugs Brazil pharmacies would offer but still was a roiling coughing snot ball the entire flight back - pulling into my driveway 24 hours later sick as a dog. Working conspiracy theory was I got COVID before we knew COVID. Oh and the time I got food poisoning so bad in India I thought I would die. Do not question why I cannot eat Indian food to this day 😱😵

The end. My final business trip ever coming back from my retirement party. An intimate affair thanks to an odd post COVID grey area where maybe, just maybe it was safe to travel again. On my way back home, I left my wallet in the rental car. The panic when I did the pocket pat and it wasn’t there. I had just gotten on the bus to the terminal and I pled with the driver to let me out before he rounded the corner off the lot to the point of no return.

I was in Seattle’s massive 5-story deep car rental garage a few miles from the airport. A beast of a building that swallows returning cars and spits out people. There is no accommodation for fools who leave their wallet in the car. Like a desperate salmon swimming upstream I ran down 3 escalators sprinting across the lot dragging my luggage behind me searching for my nondescript rental car before it disappeared into the bowels of the garage forever 😱😱😱

We're getting ready to send People to Mars fer chrissake - can we just make travel on Earth easier??

One transporter please. Unfortunately Star Trek’s transporter was not borne out of science but lack of special effects budget. Seems viable enough to me though - pretty much every cell in your body regenerates over the course of a year anyway. I’m down to re-assemble cells into a semblance of me in Canada if I can skip the airport security line. It’s a Sci-Fi staple, let’s get motivated people! Remember Stargate from last week? Sure would be nice.

The future is kind of sucking on this one. Best we can hope for are drones you can fly about which will be fun and perhaps we get to the airport faster but probably not. Supersonic passenger flights may happen (again) so we’ll get places overseas a bit quicker but it won’t take away any of the hassle.

No Ragrets - that’s my credo. Went cool places, met cool people, ate yummy stuff. I could have done without the food poisoning.

However, right now I’m uninterested in going any place far away. North America will do - it’s a big continent with several lovely countries. That’ll do donkey, that’ll do.

In time, will I change my mind? Depends on my dreams. Africa would be cool - cradle of civilization. The only Africa pin in our family travel map is JFran’s from a college trip to Morocco. Patagonia - even farther than Brazil down at the very bottom of South America - would be amazing to hike through.

Scotty, sure could use that transporter 😭

best, Andrew

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