OCTOBER 29, 2006

"I never have dreams." From time to time I have heard that statement from people. In fact, at one time I used to make it myself. But education late in life corrected that misperception for me. We all have dreams, it is a necessary part of our sleep cycle, called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. It is the deepest and most necessary component of our regeneration, physical and psychological. No matter how many clock hours of sleep we have, without the REM/dream sleep, we would constantly be tired and eventually psychotic. (And we even get an extra hour of sleep this weekend.)

More accurately, some people do not remember dreaming when they awake, which is usually the case with me. Since I rarely go to sleep before midnight, and typically awake daily by 6:30 AM, my sleep cycle is short, but quite intense, and I rarely remember what I dream about. But last night was an exception. I do not know if it was the bucket of Rocky's II wings that I ate at 11 PM when I finally got around to supper, or the howling winds that prevailed throughout the night making my rest restless, or the predawn phone call that jolted me awake, but I distinctly remember today dreaming about working on a construction site, and then leaving there to begin celebrating a Mass without changing clothes.

No deep Freudian interpretation is needed to see why these events got linked in my unconscious. I celebrate Mass daily, sometimes several times a day. It is such a routine that I am even doing it in my sleep! And as for the construction part, I just received my report from the Social Security Administration listing my contribution history. I made note of the fact that my last summer in construction, 1972, I made a higher salary per month than I currently do 34 years later as a priest. Consequently, my SS benefits, when I become eligible for them when I turn 66 ( I am a Baby Boomer and therefore have to wait a year longer) are not very substantial. They would have been much higher had I kept pace with the earnings from construction. So perhaps my days as a Millwright bubbled up during my sleep.

There is one other thing that applies which limits my surprise at my dream. Yesterday, October 28, was the feast of SS. Simon and Jude. Ever since my birth, my mother has had a devotion to St. Jude, the Patron of hopeless causes. After originally refusing to allow me to be ordained with my classmates the previous March, the then bishop of Pittsburgh, Vincent Leonard, finally relented, and on Oct. 28, 1972, I was ordained to the deaconate. This meant that I was finally and forever a clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church, and therefore would not have to work in construction or anything else again, for as long as I lived.

On this my anniversary, more than three decades later, I firmly believe it was worth the reduced SS benefits, presuming I live long enough to retire and collect them. With this thought, I can sleep easy, dreams or not.