How To End a Nightmare

It wasn’t long after I started waiting tables in my early twenties that I began having restaurant dreams. They were essentially the same. I was working, and my section would begin to fill up. The customers would come in all at once, and I could only get to one or two of them, and there was always a problem. I couldn’t get their order right, or I couldn’t ring the order in, or I couldn’t find the coffee maker. Meanwhile, all the customers who weren’t getting their food were staring at me, growing impatient and disappointed.

They were nightmares of sorts. I would awaken from them as if I hadn’t slept, full of the worst part of the stress of that job. I had them frequently enough that I eventually learned to pull myself from sleep, to snap out of it, though sometimes I would lay in my bed, uneasily awake, still arranging how I could get the bread to table 23 and the cocktails to table 27. These dreams continued until the day I clocked out for the last time.

And then they returned. The new dreams would begin the same way, with me starting a shift and thinking, “Hold on. I thought I quit this job. I could have sworn I was a fulltime writer now.” Then the there would be the usual problems, and all the customers I couldn’t get to, and the orders I couldn’t fill. When I pulled myself awake from these, I’d feel a little miffed. Why was I still having them? What was I hanging onto? What hadn’t I left behind?

I had another one the other night. It began as all the others, with me wondering why I was still in the restaurant, but as I was getting ready for my shift, and as I put my hand on a coworker’s shoulder to slip by him, I thought, “It’s good to be around all these people. I like the energy of it, joking and working as a team. It’s fun.” I’d never recognized the pleasure of that comradery in my dreams before.

My first table was sat and I took their order. All five wanted pina coladas. Easy enough. As I turned from them to head to the bar, an older gentleman sitting at another table that was behind and above me leaned over a railing and extended his hand. He was dapperly attired in an expensive-looking shirt with cuff links instead of buttons, and his hair was combed with gel as if from another era. “How do you do,” he said. “I am Alfonso Del Toro. It is nice to meet you.”

He was very formal about it, as if this were a script he had written for himself long ago. The formality seemed unnecessary to me, the sort of thing I would have made fun of when I was much younger. But I sensed he was teaching something about success, about how he found it for himself, that this way of greeting another person is how make your way in the world.

And as I looked at him and his lovely shirt and gelled hair, I thought it would be easy to believe he had always been successful; that he was simply born this way. But he knew the truth. He knew that once, when he was younger, he didn’t know what the future held for him. He didn’t know how he would find his way in the world, and no matter how far he got, he could always remember that younger self, remember the uncertainty, and then the lessons he learned that brought him to where he was today.

It's true for every one of us, I thought. How beautiful. How interesting. I couldn’t stop thinking about this, and I wondered how I might teach it, might share it with others. It was then I noticed that the other customers had disappeared, and the walls booths and chairs had disappeared, and even the finely dressed gentleman was gone, and I wasn’t in the restaurant anymore, and the dream was over.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
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