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February 15th

ONLY BAD DREAMS

“Clear your mind and get a hold on yourself and, as when

awakened from sleep and realizing it was only a bad dream

upsetting you, wake up and see that what’s there is just like those

dreams.”

—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 6.31

he author Raymond Chandler was describing most of us when he wrote
in a letter to his publisher, “I never looked back, although I had many
uneasy periods looking forward.” Thomas Jefferson once joked in a letter to
John Adams, “How much pain have cost us the evils which have never
happened!” And Seneca would put it best: “There is nothing so certain in
our fears that’s not yet more certain in the fact that most of what we dread
comes to nothing.”
Many of the things that upset us, the Stoics believed, are a product of
the imagination, not reality. Like dreams, they are vivid and realistic at the
time but preposterous once we come out of it. In a dream, we never stop to
think and say: “Does this make any sense?” No, we go along with it. The
same goes with our flights of anger or fear or other extreme emotions.
Getting upset is like continuing the dream while you’re awake. The
thing that provoked you wasn’t real—but your reaction was. And so from
the fake comes real consequences. Which is why you need to wake up right
now instead of creating a nightmare.