Getting it Backwards: A Dream with PE-EFT Analysis

Entry for 13-14 September 2006:

This morning I had a disturbing dream shortly before I woke up. In it, I woke up and suddenly realized that I had made a terrible mistake last night when I told Elke to get tickets for us to see a mid-December concert of early and contemporary choral music of the season at Barony Hall, a converted church near to Glasgow Cathedral, which is now owned by U of Strathclyde. The problem is, instead of flying back to Ohio 2 days after the concert, I now realized, we would be flying back from Ohio to Glasgow 2 days after it. In other words, I realized that I had exactly flipped our time away vs. here in my mind, and now she was going to have tickets we couldn’t use. I felt very embarrassed by this. It seems that we are doing many things like this lately, such as mis-scheduling airplane flights, forgetting doctor’s appointments, and so on. I figured I’d better give her a call early enough his morning that she wouldn’t have been able to go out and buy the tickets yet.

Then I woke up, and immediately realized that it was actually the dream that had gotten our schedule exactly backwards, not the plans we had made last night. Of course I felt relieved to discover this, but I recognized the feeling (emotion scheme) of confused/overwhelmed embarassment as a very familiar mode of being for us these days. I myself have days in which I feel so over-stimulated by all the newness that it is difficult to get anything done at work. The feeling over having gotten it exactly backwards comes close to capturing what it often feel like for us here.

Emotion Scheme Analysis of Getting it Backwards Dream:
-Emotion scheme nucleus (felt emotion):
-Dream: confused/overwhelmed embarrassment
-Perceptual-memory elements (intentionality; associations):
-Sensations: disorientation, gestalt flip, dizziness
-Current life situation: dealing with constant strangeness, disorientation in our life here; frequent misunderstandings in communication with other people
-Bodily/expressive elements: [hard to determine:
-likely facial expression: surprise, then pulling back and in, maybe some disgust, self-directed anger
-sinking feeling in my stomach
-Cognitive/symbolic elements (e.g., metaphors, propositions, identities)
-“Oh, not again! What is the matter with you? Is this senility setting in?”
-Image of myself as incompetent, bumbling, never getting it right
-Action tendency/wish (also lessons, directions for action):
-BodilyAction: Stop short and back away from whatever direction I was going
-Wish to repair the situation immediately, fix the error, move past it, leave it behind, get it out of the way
-Wish to master the situation by understanding it, to prevent future misunderstandings