I have had my share of stressful situations going back to late high school, through college, and on into marriage and fatherhood. We all have, either serially or stresses piling up at a point in time. You do the best you can and all things do pass. That’s not to say such situations don’t leave their mark. They have with me and I certainly won’t forget many of them.

It’s how my subconscious deals with stress that I find interesting, especially when I sleep. Dreaming does take place, but it’s what you remember that you try to decipher when you wake up. Over time I’ve come to place my stress dreams into two categories, the school stress dream and the travel stress dream.

The school stress dream goes back to when I was in school. The dream was generally pretty much the same; I’m going to a class I haven’t attended the entire semester and it’s the final exam. Or I have to turn in a project (I’m an engineer by training and profession). I’d get those types of dreams at the end of every semester I was in school, especially in college. I really had final papers and final projects and final exams to take, which was the source of the stress. I did well, but the imp in the back of my mind loved to torment me in my sleep with imaginary courses I was surely going to fail. To make it even more interesting, my dream schools were unknown to me, as were the professors and any other individuals in my dreams.

That stress dream evolved into the you’re-still-in-school stress dream. Long after my children had gone off to college, I would get those dreams where I was still attending classes, I’d never married, had a family, or gotten a job. In fact (horror of horrors) I was still an undergraduate. Once or twice I literally had to fight my way back into wakefulness, telling myself who I really was and what I had accomplished. Those dreams disappeared a few years before I retired, and my sleep has been reasonably peaceful. Or if I’ve had them they haven’t been vivid enough for me to remember after waking.

Recently I’ve had several of what I now call travel stress dreams. In those dreams I’m still employed and I’m still traveling. The dream has me at an unknown airport with a lot of luggage. That large amount of luggage is interesting as I traveled light, just one checked bag and my carry-on, even if traveling overseas. At some point in the dream I literally turn around and all of my luggage has disappeared. That’s when my dream panic sets in. What happened to all my luggage and all my possessions in that luggage? So I spend an unknown amount of time looking for my luggage, until I realize I’m home in bed and I wake up.

I have no clue what any of that means. The last time I actually traveled on business was in June 2016, and that was to Kansas City, Kansas. Every single trip I made, either within the continental US or overseas to Japan and South Korea, were totally without incident. I went, I worked, and then I came home. Wait a bit, then repeat. And in all that time I never remembered travel related stress dreams where I lost my luggage.

Although I’m certainly concerned about current US and world events, and the COVID pandemic has certainly applied a lot of pressure, I have no idea what is triggering these new stress dreams, or why they’ve waited until recently to manifest themselves. I was stress dream free as it were from before my retirement until recently.

I don’t believe I’ll ever figure out the triggers for these travel stress dreams, or what they mean. I never did figure out the school stress dreams except to believe they were stress related and my subconscious mind expressed that stress with what my conscious mind knew was vitally important at a particular point in my life. Perhaps it’s a safety valve of sorts. I don’t know. But they are interesting when I remember them.