【英语生活】你会梦见同事吗？

I am sitting at my desk in the office, typing. I am quite alone. There are no other people here and no other desks. The space is like an aircraft hanger and I am stuck out at one end of it.

Presently, across the vast expanse of grubby carpet tiles, comes a colleague. I am pleased to see him. I turn to talk, but can't help noticing that on his head is a pile of grated cheese. It looks like cheddar to me, the same stuff I grate over my children's pasta. Fat strands of yellow nestle in the tight frizz of his hair.

I point out he has cheese in his hair. He laughs and shakes his head. Some, though not all, falls off.

And then – as they say in the most annoying of story-books – I woke up. But what an odd dream it was: banal and yet curiously disturbing.

Office life visits me in my dreams quite often. Maybe this isn't surprising. I spend so much of my life working that my sub-conscious naturally returns to romp through the office while I sleep.

To find out how normal this is, I spent much of last week asking friends and colleagues to tell me about their office dreams. About a third looked at me weirdly and said they never dreamt about work. Another third looked at me even more weirdly and told me to mind my own business – their office dreams were unrepeatable. The rest, like me, admitted to the intermittent existence of a nocturnal world featuring a peculiar and distorted office.

The difficulty with this dreamworld is the way it rubs up against the real one. In our dreams we meet colleagues in all sorts of odd situations, covered in cheese or doing other unmentionable things.

The difficulty comes a few hours later when we see them for real, minus the cheese. As far as they are concerned nothing has happened, but in the dreamer's mind the memory lingers.

Sometimes I find my dreams leave me feeling so odd that I have to confess all to the colleague in question the next day. This confession doesn't always go as planned.

A couple of weeks ago I dreamt that a page editor asked me to do some humdrum subbing as he was too busy. I got wildly angry and started shouting that it wasn't my job and that I was bending under the weight of work as it was. I woke feeling half resentful and half guilty. The next day I told him the dream and expected him to say: “How silly! You work so hard!” Only he didn't. He simply smiled, which did little to dispel my uneasy feeling about it all.

Even more difficult to square with normal life are erotic dreams. The odd thing about these is that they often concern people you are not remotely attracted to in real life. The next day you turn up to work and see them looking as unattractive as ever, only now you can't quite meet their eye.

One friend says she dreamt she was having such a passionate affair with a colleague she decided to leave her husband for him. In true life she hardly knew him, and didn't much like him either. Seeing him the next day was quite horrible.

Another dreamt her aged and unappealing CEO leant over during a coach trip and started stroking her calf. She particularly resented the dream's implication that she found power seductive – something which, in waking hours anyway, she would have vigorously denied.

There is a more satisfactory category of office dreams that involve an element of wish fulfilment. One colleague reports having punched a boss in a dream. This not only made him feel much better, it also took the edge off the desire to do that in real life.

Less prosaically, another colleague had a dream about a tiresome former FT journalist who has now become maddeningly successful. In this
dream he was wearing a tight red satin shirt in which he looked ludicrous and was surrounded by women playing the ukulele. This seemed a delightfully undignified fate for him, and I rather wish I had had this dream myself.

But what does it all mean? In search of explanation I have turned to an automatic dream analyser on Freakydreams.com. I typed my cheese dream at some length and clicked on “interpret”. In an indecently short time the interpretation came back. “Office”, it said, stands for workplace and “hair” implies attraction or sensuality. I can't quibble with the first, but as for the second I'm a bit dubious. In any case I suspect that the cheese may cancel it out.

In hope of more satisfactory help I telephoned Delia Cushway, a dream expert and a professor of clinical psychology at Coventry university. She listened to my dream patiently and said that the meaning depended entirely on the context and the associations. The dream was trying to focus my attention on something I wasn't aware of, she said.

What does cheese mean to you? she asked. I could think of nothing. It was just cheap yellow food, I said, not terribly appetising. And what does this man's hair mean to you? I couldn't think of anything much. Maybe I wasn't trying hard enough. Maybe I didn't want to try. Either way I had got as far as I was going to go with cheese-in-hair.

Not all workplace dreams need an explanation. A banker acquaintance at Merrill Lynch recently had a dream in which a big red slide was set up from the roof of the building, but only the most senior people were allowed to slide down. You don't need to be a professor of psychology to work that one out.

In the end, I only have one big beef with office dreams and that is why we have to have them at all. Given how much of the day we spend at work it would be nice if at night we could go somewhere else.

我坐在办公桌旁，打着字。我很孤独。屋里没有其他人，也没有其它办公桌。整个办公室就像是一个飞机库，我在其中一端。不久，穿过肮脏地毯铺就的宽阔地面，走过来一位同事。我很高兴见到他，开始和他攀谈，但免不了注意到他头上有一堆碎奶酪。我觉得那像是切达干酪，与我撒在孩子们面条上的东西一样。一条条的黄色粘在他紧密的卷发里。

我指出他头发上有奶酪。他笑了一下，晃了晃头。一些奶酪掉了下来，尽管不是全部。

然后——就像最烦人的故事书所讲述的那样——我醒了。但这是个多么奇怪的梦啊：陈腐但又奇怪地令人不安。

办公室生活常常出现在我的梦中。这也许不足为奇。我生活中那么多时间都放在工作上，在我睡觉时，我的潜意识自然也会回到办公室。

为了查明这种情况有多么正常，我上周大多数时间都在让朋友和同事讲述他们的办公室梦。大约有三分之一的人用奇怪的眼神看着我，说他们从未梦到过工作。另有三分之一的人用更奇怪的眼神看着我，让我别多管闲事——他们的办公室梦是“说不出口”的。其他人则和我一样，承认夜里偶尔会梦到一个奇异的、被扭曲的办公室场景。

这个梦世界的恼人之处在于它与现实世界的摩擦。在梦中，我们会在各种奇怪的场合遇到同事，头上粘着奶酪，或做着其它一些令人难以启齿的事情。

几小时以后，当我们看到真实的、没有奶酪的他们时，难题就来了。就他们而言，什么事都没有发生，但在做梦者的脑海里，梦中的记忆犹存。

有时，我发现梦会让我感觉非常奇怪，我不得不在第二天向相关同事悉数坦白。这种坦白并非总是按计划进行。

几周前，我梦到一位版面编辑要求我替他做一些单调的工作，因为他太忙。我怒火中烧，朝他大声嚷嚷：那不是我的工作，我已经被工作压得直不起腰了。醒来后，我感觉半是怨愤，半是惭愧。第二天，我把这个梦告诉了他，希望他说：“多蠢哪！你工作那么辛苦！”不过，他没有这么说。他只是笑了笑，这丝毫未能消除我的不安情绪。

更难与日常生活相吻合的是“桃花梦”。奇怪的是，这些梦通常都与现实生活中对你没有丝毫吸引力的人有关。第二天，你回到工作中，看到他们还是和以前一样没有吸引力，只不过现在你有些不敢直视他们的眼睛。

一位朋友说，她梦到与一位同事产生了这亲密关系，决定离开自己的丈夫和他在一起。在现实生活中，她几乎不认识他，也不太喜欢他。第二天再看见他，确实是一件可怕的事。

另一位朋友则梦到，在一次乘车旅行中，那位年纪老迈、毫无吸引力的首席执行官弯下身，开始抚摸她的小腿。她尤其厌恶这个梦的含义：权力对她有吸引力——在清醒时，她会坚决否认这一点。

也有一类办公室梦更为令人满意，其中包含着梦想成真的元素。一位同事说他曾在梦里揍过老板。这不仅让他感觉更好，还消除了他在现实生活中这样做的渴望。

有些不同寻常的是，另一位同事梦到了英国《金融时报》一位烦人的前记者，他现在非常成功。在梦中，他穿着一件紧身红色绸缎衬衣，看上去很滑稽，周围是一群弹奏着夏威夷四弦琴的女人。对他而言，这似乎是一件有失尊严但令人愉悦的事情，我宁愿自己也能做这个梦。

然而，这一切意味着什么？为了寻找答案，我求助于Freakydreams.com的自动解梦师。我详细地把我的奶酪梦输入电脑，并点击“解梦”。在极短的时间内，解释就出来了。它的解释是，“办公室”代表工作环境，“头发”暗示着吸引力或色情。对第一种解释，我无可辩驳，至于第二个，我则有些怀疑。无论如何，我认为奶酪可能会抵消这一解释。

为了得到更令人满意的解释，我打电话给迪莉娅•库什维(Delia Cushway)。她是一位解梦专家，也是考文垂大学(Coventry university)临床心理学教授。她耐心地听完我的梦，然后说，梦的含义完全取决于背景和联系。她表示，梦境试图将我的注意力集中在我没有意识到的事情上。

她问，奶酪对你意味着什么？我什么都想不出来。我说，它只是廉价的黄色食品，不是非常让人有食欲。这个男人的头发对你又意味着什么？我也想不出什么来。也许我想得不够努力。也许我就不愿去想。不管怎样，我已经尽力去理解头发中的奶酪这回事。

并非所有的办公室梦都需要解释。在美林(Merrill Lynch)工作的一位银行家朋友最近做了一个梦，梦到办公楼顶建起了一个巨大的红色滑梯，但只允许职位最高的人从上边滑下来。你无需成为一位心理学教授就能解释其中的含义。

最后，我对办公室梦仅有一个巨大的不满，那就是我们为何非要做这种梦。考虑到我们一天有多少时间要花在工作上，如果夜里能梦到其它什么地方就好了。

译者/梁艳梅