Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark

By Evette Gardner

I had a dream once. I had just finished up some business in the town square and was beginning to feel restless and ready to leave so I started walking to my car so I could go home. There was a hill at the edge of the square; if I walked up its street and around the corner it should have been an easy five minute walk to get to my car. I say, "should have been", because as soon as I stepped outside of the square and began to make my trek up the incline something odd began to happen. Every step I took away from the square was met with more and more darkness.

It was freaky. I went from full daylight, back at the square, to pitch black, couldn't-see-a-thing-around-me darkness in a matter of a few strides. Yet despite my new blindness I still felt like I knew exactly where I was and how to find my way to where I wanted to be, but not having the ability to verify my inner feeling with external visible evidence I began to doubt myself. And the more dismissive I chose to be of my initial affirming inner sense the more intense my doubts grew until finally I reached the point of a full blown panic.

I couldn't bring myself to take another step. I was so afraid of getting lost in the darkness, of taking a wrong turn or wandering so far into the void that I wouldn't be able to find my way back even if I wanted to, that it didn't matter that even amid my fear I nonetheless still dreaded the thought of having to pass one more second in the square I'd just left. It didn't matter because at that moment, the square was where the light was. It was a place where everything was so familiar to me it had become stale. There was no way I could get lost there, I became convinced, and at the time that sounded like a rather comforting situation to be in. Being in the throws of a panic-attack as I was, mind numbing boredom didn't seem like such a horrible trade-off in place of wet-my-pants fear.

I turned around and started back down the hill, back into the square, back into the daylight, back into the tedium of yet another Groundhog Day (see Bill Murray) in the town square and as soon as the darkness was lifted and I found myself being able to not only feel but clearly see my surroundings, I immediately went from feeling scared to feeling defeated.

I realized then that all I'd managed to do, by coming back to this place, was to surround myself with everything I desperately wanted to leave behind. I blasted myself for being such a coward. Why had I let the darkness intimidate me so when I knew (because something in me was telling me, indeed screaming at me) that I still had the ability to find my way even in the dark? And what good was having the ability to see everything if all I was seeing just reminded me of those things I wished I could be rid of?

The metaphor of this dream wasn't at all hard for me to figure out. Though the situation of it was somewhat on the other-worldly side, as many dream scenarios tend to be, the feelings I experienced in this dream were very much in sympathy with the emotional experience I was used to having regarding my career direction in my "waking life" experience at that time. I could see now that I had been allowing my fear of uncertainty in this area of my life to discourage me from taking chances outside of the perimeter of my comfort zone and I was paying dearly for this decision with a severe case of restlessness.

My dream was just trying to get me to see this choice I was making about my career direction in a different context. And in this, this dream taught me something very much to the point of fear in general, not just as it pertained to my career choices.

Next Page - How to survive in the dark -->